After having sketchily introduced my two bioregional assessments, I shall now try to undertake a twofold endeavour: first, I shall look into the empirical question as to if and to what extent science–policy assessments serve as forums for the creation of policy-relevant knowledge. Parallel to that, I shall try to develop and substantiate an expanded conceptual framework for the analysis of science–
policy consultation processes.
Direct impact of assessments
Science–policy assessments are not designed to produce new, cutting-edge knowledge but they primarily serve the development of concrete solutions for practice. Assessments generate and/or collect individual research efforts to answer policy-relevant questions and otherwise provide technical advice for decision makers (Farrellet al., 2001). So when evaluating a specific assessment process the central question is whether and to what extent the assessment has led to changes in the way public and private policies are formulated, i.e. what policy impact it had.
One of the main reasons why the bioregional assessments in the Sierra Nevada and the southern Appalachians had been commissioned was that the management plans in most of the national forests in the regions were awaiting revision. SNEP and SAA were,inter alia, intended to provide specific information
for the US Forest Service on those upcoming forest planning activities. Now, what impact did the assessments actually have?
After the assessments were finished, the Forest Service drew heavily upon the assessment reports. In one of my interviews a Forest Service officer named SAA as ‘a springboard for forest plans in the region’. And the Regional Forester stated in a news release that ‘[t]he new plans directly descend from the success of the Southern Appalachian Assessment’. Similarly, the Sierra Nevada Framework for Conservation and Collaboration, which in the Forest Service’s own definition is an effort to better integrate the latest science into national forest management, strongly referenced the SNEP report.
Although the new forest plans have undoubtedly built on some of the data and analyses generated in the assessments, the overly positive picture presented above must also be seen as part of strategic rhetoric. One has to keep in mind that at that time, i.e. in the early 1990s, the Forest Service had come under heavy critique, especially from the environmental community. By making rheto- rical references to comprehensive assessment processes that were perceived as highly credible and legitimate by most actor groups, the Forest Service hoped to get the new forest plans out of the firing line. At least in the first years, this strategy proved quite successful.
With the 2001 change in the presidential administration from Clinton to Bush, forest policy has gone in a more conservative direction. Likewise, the legiti- mizing function of the assessments has worn off and the Forest Service has come under critique again. This example shows that scientific closure, as mediated by the assessments, can under certain conditions actually contribute to political closure, as evidenced by forest planning activities in the Clinton years. But, in the end, momentous changes in the political environment can easily break this link again.
The legitimizing function of bioregional assessments seemingly depends, at least in part, on the constellation of interests in the larger political arena. The Clinton years were characterized by a hegemonic consensus on more conservation- oriented land-use policies, ensuring (too) easy reception of scientific claims that appeared to support these policies. Under the Bush administration, resource extraction and conservation interests have been sharply divided again and scien- tific claims have been subject to increased scrutiny by advocates from rival camps. This constellation very much resembles the prevailing destiny of science for policy: ‘Far from promoting consensus, knowledge fed into such a process risks being fractured along existing lines of discord’ (Jasanoff, 1990, p. 8).
How does the picture look when going beyond the immediate addressee of the assessments, i.e. the US Forest Service, and when asking about their impact in the broader political arena? An ad hoc appraisal also shows poor results here.
For the Sierra Nevada an inside analyst has come to the conclusion that ‘[a]s yet, there has been no fundamental shift of national, state, or local policy or signifi- cant change in operations, because of the SNEP report’ (Machida, 1999, p. 332) A critical appraisal of SAA would probably come to similar conclusions.
At first sight, these results would suggest that science–policy assessments remain without impact or that, at least, their influence is confined to situations where scientific findings resonate with the prevailing political climate and that in
situations where political support is missing science remains without effect. Does this mean that science–policy assessments can easily be dismissed as nothing but l’art pour l’artexercises?
My in-depth, micro-level investigations produced some counter-evidence to such a flatly negative evaluation. One possibly comes to less sobering conclu- sions when taking a longer-term perspective and when not only looking at the macro level of interest-group politics and governmental power but also at the micro level of knowledge diffusion and policy learning. I found a great deal of evidence for SNEP and SAA results influencing policies, though often in very indirect and tortuous ways. In line with the guiding hypothesis formulated above, the oft-noted moderate effectiveness of science–policy assessments could, at least in part, be the result of a too restrictive, output-oriented view, in which scientific advice is conceptualized as the simple transmission of ready-made scientific results.
Assessments as communication processes
To come to a more realistic – and probably also more positive – picture of how bioregional assessments influence policy, a broader frame of evaluation is needed. Assessments have often been viewed as documents that convey infor- mation from scientists to policymakers; that means they have been reduced to the reports they produce. This kind of conceptualization overlooks the fact, however, that interactions between science and practice take place on different levels, make use of different media and occur in different phases of a research and/or policy process. With that, assessments are better viewed as broad communicative processes within and among particular scientific and political communities (Milleret al., 1997).
Also the two bioregional assessments may be analysed most productively by taking a process-oriented view. During the preparation and formulation of the assessments but also during their utilization, information was communicated amongst a wide array of experts, policymakers and laypersons. The assessment processes themselves already took 1½ and 3 years, respectively. But, even before their formal start, there were lengthy discussions and intensive negotiations on how they should be designed and carried out (Erman, 1999; van Sickle, 2001).
Beyond that, SNEP and SAA were only two of multiple channels through which knowledge about the two bioregions was communicated among various scientific disciplines and policy actors. At the same time, land management agencies were involved in comprehensive land-use planning activities and parallel assessments were carried out, some completely independently from SNEP and SAA (either deliberately or incidentally), others in coordination with the two assessments (Ruth, 2000). If I had just looked at the two assessment pro- cesses themselves I would have missed a lot of contextual information and would have come to wrong conclusions as regards the degree of interconnectedness of the problems at hand.
Research on the policy impact of environmental assessments shows that short causal chains between assessments and policy or behaviour change are the
exception (Mitchellet al., 2004). It is not uncommon for 5 to 10 years to elapse between the release of an assessment report and the spin-offs that finally begin to be cited by decision makers as exerting a substantial influence on the policy process. Although both bioregional assessment projects were formally finished almost a decade ago, processes of ‘disseminating’ and ‘using’ the outcomes are still going on today. In the following, I shall give some examples of how assess- ments can alter policies in indirect and long-term ways.
Framing of policy issues
A helpful analytical perspective is to see assessments as exercises of framing.
Following Rein and Schön (1991), framing is an activity of selection, organi- zation and interpretation of a complex reality, ‘so as to provide guideposts for knowing, analysing, persuading and acting. A frame is a perspective from which an amorphous, ill-defined situation can be made sense of and acted upon’
(Rein and Schön, 1991, p. 263). Framing can play a crucial role in whether an assessment disrupts the existing equilibrium of goals, options and knowledge by convincing participants that current policies and behaviours no longer represent the best ways to achieve their goals (Clarket al., 2002).
A first example of how the two assessments helped stabilize the framing of issues in public discourse is the reorientation of planning activities towards a more ‘regionalized’ approach. Before the assessments, each national forest – of which there are 11 in the Sierra Nevada and five in the southern Appalachians – independently prepared its forest plan. Years of intensive research, communica- tion and negotiation as part of the assessment processes eventually led to greater visibility and strengthened perception of the Sierra Nevada and the southern Appalachians as distinct bioregions. With the introduction of a novel ontological entity, namely the entity of ‘bioregions’, land managers seemingly recognized that for many of the problems a range-wide, multi-forest planning approach was needed. In the end, bioregional issues found themselves embedded in emerging political and administrative frameworks. The new generation of forest plans is based on a more ‘bioregional look’.
A second example of how assessments can frame – or reframe – natural resource issues for research and policy is the ‘discovery’ of water issues in and through SNEP. Before the assessment, forestry and timber-related topics very much dominated the discourse in the region. Forestry and wood products indus- tries were seen as the major pillars of the local economy and job market. An eco- nomic analysis carried out under SNEP, however, showed that:
[f]rom the perspective of the natural resources, water is the basis for most of the economic value. Timber, animal forage, other agricultural crops, and a range of recreational and residential services directly dependent of the ecosystem comprise the rest of the natural resource value. At the Sierra-wide level, a majority of the economic benefits from the use of the natural resource accrue to beneficiaries outside the region.
(Stewart, 1996, p. 1054)
This economic analysis led to a definite paradigm shift in the way the Sierra Nevada was seen, both by its inhabitants and from the outside. Up to that time, the Forest Service as the main land user had been defining, from a resource point of view, what the value of the Sierra Nevada is. The comparatively low resource value of timber as calculated in the economic study clearly delegitimized many of the Forest Service’s timber-related arguments.
The study also gave evidence for a striking gap between the resource value and the reinvestment value of water: only small portions of the economic bene- fits of water use have been flowing back into the region. This insight provided strong arguments for the predominantly rural Sierran counties vis-à-vis urban agglomerations, which are the main beneficiaries of water-based products and services.
Those two examples show how a rather simple economic calculus can intro- duce and stabilize new frames in public discourse, frames that can legitimize one line of argument while delegitimizing another and, in the end, leading to the empowerment of one set of actors and the concurrent disempowerment of another set of actors.
Linear models of knowledge transfer typically proceed from the assumption that what policymakers want is just what researchers are best qualified to supply, namely detailed data and findings. The sociological literature, however, shows that in many instances knowledge utilization is not deliberate, direct and tar- geted, but a result of long-term percolation of scientific concepts, theories and findings into the climate of informed opinion (Weiss, 1977).
The above-mentioned experiences of bioregional assessments clearly indi- cate that the less tangible outcomes associated with such assessments are at least as important as the more tangible outcomes, including written reports. The prin- cipal measurement of success is not whether a political counselling process has amassed an impressive collection of scientific reports, but rather whether it has contributed to improved mental models of the problem (Cortner et al., 1999;
Keating and Farrell, 1999). Frameworks, more than data, are the key to success- ful science–policy consultation (Johnson and Herring, 1999). The generative ideas of ‘bioregions’ and of water as an ‘identity-giving resource’ are just two cases in point.
Building of actor networks
What is true for ‘ideas’, namely a slow build-up of scattered impacts, also applies in an analogous way to the build-up of relations between actors. Miller et al.
(1997) emphasize that ongoing assessment activities often help extend and con- nect actor communities, either by identifying the relevance of communities that had previously not widely participated or by enabling new communities to form.
In both case studies, the initiation of a large-scale bioregional assessment stirred up the environmental NGO community and soon led to the formation of region-wide NGO alliances: the Sierra Nevada Alliance is a regional coalition of some 50 grass-roots and regional environmental groups that was set up in the run-up to SNEP. The Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition is an alliance of
some 20 conservation groups, which was mainly established to provide grass- roots networking and other support systems and to develop or maintain involve- ment with the assessment initiatives.
The NGO community also maintained a high level of activity after the assessments were formally finished. They gained especially large momentum by providing a kind of ‘translation service’ for the assessment results. They pub- lished citizens’ guides, i.e. small booklets summarizing the assessment results and providing perspectives on alternative views. They also created new GIS resources and easy-to-understand maps in order to facilitate work with grass-roots groups and local communities. With these citizens’ guides, GIS maps and local work- shops, NGOs made assessment results accessible to and understandable for a broader public.
NGOs not only helped to disseminate information but also used the assess- ments for their own activities and interests. Environmental groups used SNEP and SAA results in their formulation of bioregional strategies for the two moun- tain ranges, in their evaluation and critique of Forest Service planning docu- ments and in their effort to increase public awareness of biodiversity issues on private lands. Private conservation funds used the assessments in identifying conservation and heritage resources and in setting conservation priorities, which eventually determined decisions of land purchases and easements.
These examples show that assessments can provide new policy actors with the resources and opportunity to interact and develop common ground with respect to policy choices. While policies had been dominated by resource-extraction inter- ests for decades, the more comprehensive, bird’s-eye view that comes with the idea of bioregionalism provided the environmental community with strong argu- ments for more resource protection. So, in the end, the assessments, to some extent, altered the prevailing power structures in the two regions.
Building of scientific communities
Assessments, as processes that unfold over prolonged periods of time, can play important roles in the emergence and growth of research and assessment com- munities. Ongoing assessment activities can be instrumental in bringing together diverse experts and enabling them to transcend geographical, political and disci- plinary boundaries. The interaction of experts during assessments can stimulate the formation of entirely new ‘knowledge communities’, i.e. networks of scien- tists, assessors, policymakers, interest groups and citizens who interact around particular issues and often use assessments as part of their communicative processes (Milleret al., 1997).
Both SNEP and SAA helped to build up extended networks of experts who learned to work with one another across disciplinary and institutional bound- aries. Unlike academic peer networks, these assessment networks show a high degree of heterogeneity as regards the institutional backgrounds of their mem- bers. Academic scientists cooperate with scientists working in the research branches of federal agencies, with technical specialists whose job is to advise line managers in agencies on science-intensive questions, with non-university scientists
in private research stations and with NGO science consultants. By their variety alone, such networks can mobilize different bodies of knowledge.
When SNEP and SAA were formally finished in 1996, expert communities didn’t discontinue their policy-related activities. In the follow-up, a number of further assessments were initiated and carried through. I shall give here just two examples from the southern Appalachians. When SAA was in its final stages, the Southern Appalachian Mountains Initiative (SAMI) was started. SAMI provided a forum to develop regional air quality solutions and to resolve differences among institutional priorities of eight different states and dozens of different state and non-state institutions. The productive cooperation of so many actors would not have been possible if most of them hadn’t already been brought together in SAA and experienced the benefits of collaborative interaction. The Southern Forest Resource Assessment (SFRA), a multi-agency effort led by the Forest Service, was commissioned in 1999 to document and analyse the factors impacting the forests of the south-eastern USA. SFRA built on the Southern Appalachian Assessment mainly in procedural respects. Especially public participation – with its wide array of opportunities for people to take part in the process – was very much modelled after SAA.
Finally, SNEP and SAA also left their marks in the institutional landscape as they helped to build scientific capacities. In the southern Appalachians, for example, a Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (SA-CESU) was set up in 1999.
SA-CESU is a network of federal agencies and universities engaging in coopera- tive research to provide research, technical assistance and education for resource and environmental managers. In the Sierra Nevada, there were lengthy discus- sions on the foundation of a similar unit that would coordinate research and application of scientific knowledge in the region. In the end, it took almost a decade before the Sierra Nevada Research Institute (SNRI) was installed at the newly opened university campus of University of California at Merced.
The last example impressively proves that real-world impacts often take a long time to materialize and that it is almost impossible to trace the exact roots of an event or achievement. But, while it is, of course, difficult to accurately describe the paths of interaction – let alone the causal links – between historical processes and contemporary circumstances, it is probably safe to say that the two bioregional assessments helped extend, enhance and connect various knowledge communities.
Conclusions
The chapter started out with the introduction of two alternative conceptual frame- works that describe the interaction between science and politics in general and the functioning and the effectiveness of science–policy consultation processes in particular.
The knowledge transfer model conceptualizes scientific advice as the simple transmission of ready-made scientific results from scientists to policymakers.
This linear model is based on the notion of a direct, cascade-like ‘scientification