Decision analysis for managing public natural resources

Abstract

Examples like the Grand Canyon story are becoming more common—agencies and stakeholders are increasingly using decision tools to help navigate complex decisions regarding natural resources. Several books and many papers have made the case for the use of decision analysis in natural resource management settings and have described the tools available (Conroy and Peterson 2013; Gregory et al. 2012; Williams et al. 2002), but only a few applications have been described. Thus, many agencies understand why decision analysis is valuable, but wonder how to implement it. The primary purpose of this book is to show what decision analysis looks like in practice for natural resource management, as a means to guide decision makers in adopting these practices to improve the achievement of their objectives. To this end, the collected case studies in this book, all real natural resource management decisions, were chosen with three objectives in mind: (1) to demonstrate how structuring decisions can render them more tractable; (2) to illustrate the diversity of decision analysis tools useful at various stages of the structuring process; and (3) to provide guidance on how decision analysis processes can be carried out in public environmental institutions.