Department of Natural Resources, New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA.
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Quantitative Fisheries Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48842, USA.
Environ Manage. 2019 May;63(5):565-573. doi: 10.1007/s00267-019-01141-2. Epub 2019 Feb 9.
The last 25 years have witnessed growing recognition that natural resource management decisions depend as much on understanding humans and their social interactions as on understanding the interactions between non-human organisms and their environment. Decision science provides a framework for integrating ecological and social factors into a decision, but challenges to integration remain. The decision-analytic framework elicits values and preferences to help articulate objectives, and then evaluates the outcomes of alternative management actions to achieve these objectives. Integrating social science into these steps can be hindered by failing to include social scientists as more than stakeholder-process facilitators, assuming that specific decision-analytic skills are commonplace for social scientists, misperceptions of social data as inherently qualitative, timescale mismatches for iterating through decision analysis and collecting relevant social data, difficulties in predicting human behavior, and failures of institutions to recognize the importance of this integration. We engage these challenges, and suggest solutions to them, helping move forward the integration of social and biological/ecological knowledge and considerations in decision-making.
在过去的 25 年中，人们越来越认识到，自然资源管理决策不仅取决于对非人类生物及其环境之间相互作用的理解，还取决于对人类及其社会互动的理解。决策科学为将生态和社会因素整合到决策中提供了一个框架，但整合仍然存在挑战。决策分析框架引出价值观和偏好，以帮助阐明目标，然后评估替代管理行动的结果，以实现这些目标。将社会科学纳入这些步骤可能会受到阻碍，因为未能将社会科学家不仅仅视为利益相关者流程的促进者，假设社会科学家普遍具有特定的决策分析技能，将社会数据误解为固有定性，迭代决策分析和收集相关社会数据的时间尺度不匹配，预测人类行为的困难以及机构未能认识到这种整合的重要性。我们应对这些挑战，并提出解决方案，帮助推动社会和生物/生态知识和考虑因素在决策中的整合。
