Comparing stakeholders' objectives for oil spill response: A Q study of Buzzards Bay and San Francisco Bay.

摘要

This paper reports the results of a study about the relative importance of objectives to stakeholders in two regions for which marine oil spill response is a critical issue. This study has been performed as part of a larger research project whose goal was to better understand the role of performance metrics in oil spill response planning and to propose a process by which oil spill response planning can integrate views about response objectives and performance metrics from multiple stakeholders. As part of the empirical component of our research project we addressed a series of questions: 1) What do people think ought to be the objectives that guide marine oil spill response. 2) What are the relative priorities given to those objectives by different people. 3) What performance metrics do people think should be used to evaluate oil spill response. A report describing our findings about the first and third questions has been prepared and is available (Tuler et al. 2006a, 2006b). Our findings regarding the second question are presented in this paper. We studied the diversity of views about objectives for marine oil spill response and their relative priority in two regions: Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts and San Francisco Bay, California. We begin this paper with a discussion of the research method used in the study, Q method. Then, the results from the two regions are discussed separately. We conclude with a brief comparison of the findings from both regions.