Prescriptive Group Decision Processes for Risk Management

尽管在过去十年中，作为管理环境和健康风险的努力的一部分，利益攸关方群体的使用显著增加，但对将改善群体决策过程的研究却很少给予关注。该奖项通过两项相互关联的研究努力解决了这一差距。首先，研究人员将研究群体决策过程的理论，以帮助参与风险或环境管理争议的利益相关者为行动和政策的设计提供有用的意见。其次，他们将通过建立衡量“更好”决策的标准，并设计实验来测试和比较群体决策的各种方法，来测试这些建议的有效性。研究的这两个方面要解决的问题既是根本性的，也是具有挑战性的：公民参与风险管理的目的是什么？我们如何衡量它的成功？多大程度的参与才算足够？政策制定者如何知道利益相关者的观点已经被忠实地纳入其中？如何才能最好地将利益相关者的见解呈现给决策者？这项研究的好处之一将是设计更好的技术，帮助健康和环境风险管理人员纳入利益攸关方的目标，以及从业者和政策制定者之间就促进和评估公众参与进程所使用的步骤进行更好的对话。

Despite a remarkable increase over the past decade in the use of stakeholder groups as part of efforts to manage environmental and health risks, little attention has been given to research that will improve group decision processes. This award addresses this gap through two interrelated research efforts. First, investigators will examine the theory of group decision processes, in order to assist stakeholders participating in risk or environmental management controversies to provide useful input to the design of actions and policies. Second, they will test the effectiveness of these recommendations by establishing criteria for measurement of a `better` decision and designing experiments to test and compare various approaches to group decisionmaking. The questions to be addressed by these two facets of the research are both fundamental and challenging: What is citizen involvement in risk management intended to achieve? How can we measure its success? How much involvement is enough? How does a policy maker know that stakeholder perspectives have been incorporated faithfully? How can the insights of stakeholders best be presented to decision makers? Among the benefits of this research will be the design of better techniques for helping health and environmental risk managers to incorporate stakeholder objectives, as well as a better dialogue across practitioners and policy makers regarding the steps to be used in facilitating and assessing public involvement processes.