Harmonizing Science, Policy and Politics

At MIT, we are training Science Impact Coordinators (SICs) willing to put themselves in the middle between experts, advocates and regulators. Unless someone is able to manage these difficult interactions, we will miss crucial opportunities to protect dwindling natural resources. What does a graduate student with an undergraduate science degree, a passion for environmental improvement and an interest in managing constructive dialogue in politically-stressed situations need to know to facilitate such interactions? That's what we are trying to determine.

Six years ago, at the invitation of the United States Geological Survey (one of America's premiere science agencies), our MIT team put together a set of courses and a field-based training program to place apprentice SICs in the middle of resource management controversies all over the United States. Through an action-research program, more than 25 graduates of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning have worked on environmental restoration in Mississippi, desalination of the Colorado River, climate change impacts in the Everglades and on the Chesapeake Bay, strategies for maintaining the near-shore fishery in the Gulf of Maine, ways of ensuring that local knowledge is taken seriously in managing the Sonoran desert; dealing with storm water run-off in Somerville, Massachusetts and Aurora, Colorado; helping coastal cities in Massachusetts adapt to climate change risks, protecting endangered habitats in the Rocky Mountains, and coping with water shortages in Eastern Washington. We work under the banner of MUSIC -- the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative and our tag line is "Harmonizing Science, Policy and Politics." (See scienceimpact.mit.edu).

You'd think by now that the science and engineering establishment would realize that conventional approach to injecting "science" and technical analysis into politically-charged policy-making situations isn't working. Most scientists and engineers still think that all they need to do is put their studies "out there" and the world will use the information appropriately. They are convinced that they don't have to talk to non-experts or get involved in the hurly-burly of actual decision-making. We also encounter regulators at every level who think that holding a hearing is the best way to engage concerned citizens and stakeholders in resource management decisions. The fact that nothing gets decided in such setting and that no one has responsibility of reconciling what they are saying with what anyone else is saying, doesn't seem to bother them. Finally, we see no sign that environmental and health advocates realize how important it is for them to engage in joint fact finding and collaborative decision-making with the companies and agencies they are fighting.

Getting the Right Parties to the Table

The first step in resolving any science-intensive policy dispute is getting the right parties to the table. This is best handled by calling on trained mediators (i.e. professional neutrals) to interview all the relevant groups and organizations - on a confidential and not-for-attribution basis - to scope the agenda, identify who should be involved, lay out a work plan, and engage the relevant stakeholders in specifying the ground rules that will govern their interactions. The details of how to do this are now well-known (see Susskind and Cruikshank, Breaking Robert's Rules, Oxford University Press, 2006). Students in the MUSIC program help prepare these assessments as assistants to professionals working for the Consensus Building Institute (www.cbuilding.org).

Joint Fact Finding

Once all the parties are at the table, including the relevant regulators, the group can initiate scientific or technical investigations required to understand the current situation as well as possible ways of proceeding given the likely impacts of alternative decisions. Often this requires developing models or forecasts. Sometimes it requires gathering new data. Inevitably, it involves interacting with a range of experts (with conflicting disciplinary and technical opinions about what ought to be done or how a problem should be approached).

Building Consensus

Eventually, the group needs to decide what it wants to recommend based on the homework it has done and the concerns of all the stakeholder groups involved. Unlike a hearing where each person sounds off and then sits down; the collaborative processes MUSIC students are learning to facilitate aims to produce informed consensus -- even in the face of scientific uncertainty and intense technical disagreements. What's interesting is how often it is possible to reach agreement in such situations when the parties are given the information and help they need. Books like Susskind et. al, The Consensus Building Handbook (Sage, 1999) offer numerous "worked examples" to show that this is possible.

Linking Informally Negotiated Agreements to Enforceable Decisions

When groups are invited to participate in collaborative resource management, that doesn't mean that government agencies are turning over to them the power to make final decisions. The product of such deliberations almost always takes the form of a recommendation. Agencies have legal responsibility for making policy choices. Most of the time, though, if all the relevant parties engage in a good-faith effort to produce an informed agreement, the regulators are likely to move in that direction. They take the informally negotiated agreement and translate it into terms and conditions imposed as part of a permit or license. This makes the policy enforceable.

What SICs in Training Need to Learn

We expect SICs to invest two years in intensive graduate study. About 1/4 of their time is devoted to field-based apprenticeships. The rest is spent taking courses dealing with the techniques of policy analysis, tools for forecasting and modeling change in socio-ecological systems, environmental ethics, environmental leadership, strategies for promoting sustainable development, and consensus building strategies. Their field-based assignments are guided by federal agency staff and MIT faculty advisors. They have to fulfill a contract each semester that requires them to produce work products that meet the needs of the communities and agencies with which they are working, and contribute to theory-building. In their final semester, they are required to produce a thesis. In early November 2009, we will publish The Best of MUSIC, highlighting some of the most important theory-building contributions of the MUSIC interns.

We are pushing hard to get the U.S. Department of the Interior to make a formal commitment to hire Science Impact Coordinators at of its headquarters and regional offices. We hope that NOAA, EPA, DOE, Army Corps of Engineers and make similar commitments. It's time to adopt a new approach to harmonizing science, policy and politics.

The Life and Death of Democracy

I'm trying to make my way through John Keane's massive book, The Life and Death of Democracy (Norton, 2009). He reviews three "epochs" in the evolution of democracy: Assembly Democracy, Representative Democracy and what he calls Monitory Democracy. He then tries to make sense of where we are headed next by jumping forward and looking back at our current situation (Memories from the Future). He's not optimistic (although the book was written before President Obama was elected and America's foreign policies and international engagements shifted radically). The failure of political parties, the use of mass media to control political communications, the "cross-border squeeze on democratic institutions," resurgent nationalism triggered by "the powerlessness of joined-up global government and market forces;" terrorism, uncivil wars and nuclear anarchy; the failure of the "law of democratic peace" (that assumed democracies would not go to war with each other), America's failed efforts to "promote" a global transformation to democracy," the rise of new enemies of democracy, including hypocrisy, fatalism and ignorance; and the return of bipolarity (US-China tensions) are all to blame.

He then cites Richard Rorty to make the point that while there is no "ultimate justification" for democracy, it is certainly something to be valued. (Persuasion rather than force, compromise and reform rather than bloody revolution, free and open encounters rather than bullying and bossing, a hopeful, experimental frame of mind...) Keane argues for humility (rather than talk of pragmatic superiority), continued re-invention (or novelty), the "rule of nobody," and the importance of equality -- or the equalization of all citizen's life chances as reasons for hope. He offers seven new democratic rules --although they are aimed more at theorists than practitioners: (1) treat the remembrance of things past as vital for democracy's present and future; (2) always regard the languages, characters, events, institutions and effects of democracy as thoroughly historical; (3) pay close attention to the ways in which the narration of the past by historians, leaders and others is unavoidably an historical act, (4) the methods that are most suited to writing about the past, present and future of democracy are those that straightforwardly draw attention to the peculiarity of their own rules of interpretation; (5) acknowledge that, until quite recently, most details of the history of democracy have been recorded by its critics, or by its outright opponents; (6) the negative tone of most previous histories of democracy confirms the rule that tales of its past told by historians, politicians and others often harbor the prejudices of the powerful; and (7) admit that the task of coming to terms with the past, present and future of democracy is by definition an unending journey.

After almost 900 far more erudite pages than I could ever muster, I conclude: democracy is what you make of it. How should we "do" democracy? When Assembly Democracy morphed into Representative Democracy no one seemed to notice. When Representative Democracy gave way to Monitory Democracy (publicly monitoring and controlling the exercise of power -- "through sideways and downwards" involvement of the whole political order), it seemed perfectly normal (at that time, to the people involved). What comes next is what we say should come next. In my view, that's collaborative decision-making at multiple scales assisted by a new class of professional neutrals. Is this a shift of "epochal importance?" Yes, I think it is. It is an evolutionary step beyond Monitory Democracy that will restore the legitimacy of democratic institutions by assuming that that everyone needs to be involved, not just in discussions and criticism of what is going on, but in the co-production of everything that follows. It's not Assembly (or direct) Democracy, because there is no voting. The burden is on each citizen (and each community and each state) to come up with a way of meeting their/its own interests while also meeting the interests of others. The logistics of collaborative problem- solving are new, but the commitment to broadening and deepening basic democratic ideals keeps us on track.

What should you do when the other person is lying (in a public context)??

There's a lot of confusion about the best way to respond to a lie spoken in a public context. One strategy is to ignore it and act as if the statement was never made. I guess folks who take this tack hope they'll avoid giving a false statement any traction. A second response is to suggest that the person making the statement probably didn't realize what he or she was saying. This approach presumes that its always best to give someone the benefit of the doubt and presume there's just a misunderstanding on their part. I don't think so. From my standpoint, the most effective response to a lie is to name it, frame it, and claim it.

If I think someone is lying -- that is, deliberating making a statement they know to be false, I'll say that out loud: "That's a lie." Or, "Wow, another whopper." Yes, I'm giving visibility to the statement, but, from my standpoint, I'd rather the statement be labeled as a lie than allowed to stand unchallenged.

That's not enough. It is important to say why I think the statement is a lie and to suggest what the motive of the liar might be. I call this framing. Motive is important. If I can't think of any reason the person making the statement might have for misrepresenting the truth, then I might chalk their statement up to ignorance or reckless disregard for the truth. So, for me to call something I lie, I have to believe that the person making the statement has a motive for misrepresenting the truth. I link my characterization of their motive with the evidence that ought to convince any neutral observer that their statement is untrue. "That's a lie. That's not what it says on page 1014. They are obviously are trying to make the President look bad." Or, "No, that's not what happened on that date. They obviously would rather have us believe something that casts them in a better light. Here's reliable information to the contrary."

Finally, I think it is important to "own" my claim that their statement is a lie. That means, I need to be confrontable. If I'm going to call someone a lier, I ought to do it in a very public way -- to their face, if possible. I'm certainly not going to do it anonymously. The credibility of my characterization of their motive hinges, in part, on my willingness to stand behind my charge. "That's a lie. She is just trying to gain publicity for herself and play to her constituency. The bill doesn't say that at all. In fact, here's what it says. I'd love a chance to meet with her and have her show me exactly where it says what she claims."

Name it as a lie. Frame it by postulating the lier's motive and offering evidence to the contrary (that any neutral observer would accept). And, claim responsibility for your counter-charge.

If someone else has a different view of how to respond to a lie, I'd love to hear it.