Ecological Boundary-Setting in Mental and Geophysical Models

当机构和公众关注环境“问题”时，他们通过将问题与他们认为产生问题的系统和一组动态联系起来，在空间和时间上明确或隐含地约束该问题。这些设定边界的决策对问题的形成至关重要--这是分析决策的最困难的方面--它们还决定了将部署哪些数据和哪些科学理论来理解系统和对系统进行建模。过去的研究表明，来自不同利益集团的利益相关者往往根据他们的利益以不同的方式对系统进行“建模”，因此有约束力的决定变得有争议，阻碍了对问题性质的一致意见，并使有效行动变得不可能。研究小组将在两种截然不同的环境中处理边界设定活动和选择。首先，该团队将开发和使用访谈、文件话语分析和揭示偏好评估，结合地理信息系统建模和心理建模技术，来检查和展示公民和参与者如何将他们所关心的系统“绑定”。其次，我们将研究地球物理建模人员--尤其是那些构建对公共决策有用的模型的人--如何设置其定量模型的时空界限。利用社会科学方法和地球物理建模技术的结合，该团队将探索社会价值观在边界设定中的作用。从历史上看，该小组将利用20世纪70年代和80年代切萨皮克湾地区的发展--机构和公众决心必须将切萨皮克湾的环境问题理解为分水岭规模的问题--作为在不断变化的政策边界的背景下成功融合科学的典范。研究将在三个快速变化的大都市地区现有工作的基础上，研究一系列环境问题：亚特兰大、芝加哥和圣路易斯。每个城市都面临严重的问题，需要重新考虑如何界定和解决环境和社会问题。将研究两类价值观：(A)地点价值观--居民将其与其所在地联系在一起的价值观--和(B)股权问题的空间层面，因为私人和公共决定可能在实际和政治边界内和之外造成生活质量的差异。这项研究的学术价值来自于严格开发和应用创新的经验方法来阐述紧迫的环境问题，提高了我们对与一些最复杂的社会问题相关的空间动力学模型的理解。

When agencies and the public attend to an environmental "problem," they explicitly or implicitly bound that problem in space and time by associating it with a system and a set of dynamics that they think generates the problem. These boundary- setting decisions are crucial to problem formulation-the most difficult aspect of analyzing decisions-and they also determine which data, and which scientific theories, will be deployed to understand and model the systems. Past research has suggested that stakeholders from different interest groups often "model" the system differently, depending on their interests, so bounding decisions become controversial, blocking agreement on the nature of the problem and making effective action impossible. The research team will address boundary-setting activities and choices in two very different settings. First, the team will develop and use interviews, discourse analysis of documents, and revealed preference valuation, in conjunction with GIS modeling and mental modeling techniques, to examine and represent how citizens and participants "bound" the system they care about. Second, we will examine how geo-physical modelers-especially those who build models intended to be useful in public decision making-set the spatio-temporal bounds of their quantitative models. Using this combination of social scientific methods and geophysical modeling techniques, the team will explore the role of social values in boundary-setting. Historically, the group will use developments in the Chesapeake Bay region in the 1970s and 1980s--and the determination of agencies and the public that environmental problems in Chesapeake Bay must be understood as a watershed-scaled problem--as an exemplar of a successful confluence of science working in a context of shifting policy boundaries.The research will examine a series of environmental problems by building upon existing work in three rapidly changing metropolitan areas: Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis. Each city faces serious issues requiring reconsideration of how environmental and social problems are bounded and addressed. Two types of values will be studied: (a) sense of place values--values that residents associate with their locality--and (b) spatial dimensions of equity issues, as private and public decisions may create differentials in the quality of life within and across physical and political boundaries. The intellectual merit of the study derives from rigorously developing and applying innovative empirical methods to the formulation of pressing environmental problems, improving our understanding of the modeling of spatial dynamics associated with some of society's most complex problems.