Person: Cash, David
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Cash, David
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Publication Report of the workshop on boundary organizations in environmental policy and science(Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, 2000-04) Guston, David; Clark, William; Keating, Terry; Cash, David; Moser, Susanne; Miller, Clark; Powers, CharlesBoundary organizations are institutions that straddle the shifting divide between politics and science. They draw their incentives from and produce outputs for principals in both domains and thus, it is hypothesized, facilitate the transfer of useful knowledge between science and policy. This paper brings ideas from the social studies of science pertaining to boundary organizations to bear on the study of institutions in environmental policy and science. It summarizes a set of five case studies on candidate boundary organizations in both the domestic U.S. and international context: 1) the Health Effects Institute, jointly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the automobile industry to support and review research relevant to air pollution regulation; 2) agricultural extension, which mediates between the needs and interests of local farmers on one hand, and the work of researchers on the other; 3) the Sea Grant program, which provides extension services for mediating between coastal interests and researchers; 4) the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, which is attempting to create from large climate models information more usable by populations vulnerable to climate change; and 5) the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, which is a forum for negotiating scientific aspects of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The cases, with additional commentary, conclude that the concept of boundary organizations is a useful one for understanding the relationship between environmental policy and science.Publication Knowledge systems for sustainable development(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003) Cash, David; Clark, William; Alcock, F.; Dickson, Nancy; Eckley, N.; Guston, D. H.; Jager, J.; Mitchell, R. B.The challenge of meeting human development needs while protecting the earth's life support systems confronts scientists, technologists, policy makers, and communities from local to global levels. Many believe that science and technology (S&T) must play a more central role in sustainable development, yet little systematic scholarship exists on how to create institutions that effectively harness S&T for sustainability. This study suggests that efforts to mobilize S&T for sustainability are more likely to be effective when they manage boundaries between knowledge and action in ways that simultaneously enhance the salience, credibility, and legitimacy of the information they produce. Effective systems apply a variety of institutional mechanisms that facilitate communication, translation and mediation across boundaries.Publication From Science to Policy: Assessing the Assessment ProcessCash, David; Clark, WilliamGlobal environmental change is increasingly understood to have causes, consequences, and responses which span multiple levels, from the local to the global. The multi-level nature of such problems has required a radical shift in the relationship between knowledge and action. This working paper illustrates that in an era of global change which is inexorably linked with local ecosystems and communities, successful efforts of regional assessments which address large-scale environmental change can be characterized as distributed research, assessment, and decision support systems. Such systems share a number of characteristics. They: 1) integrate research, assessment, and decision-making across multiple levels; 2) are structured to assess and address global change in the context of local consequences; 3) identify, assess, and respond to the interactions between society and environment which cross levels; and 4) structure the relationship between decision-makers and researchers as a two-way, dynamic, and iterated process (not a "pipeline" from science to decision-maker).Publication Information as Influence: How Institutions Mediate the Impact of Scientific Assessments on Global Environmental Affairs(John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University., 2002) Clark, William; Mitchell, Ronald; Cash, David; Alcock, FrankThe recognition that information matters in world affairs raises a number of questions as to when, how, and under what conditions it influences the behavior of policy actors. Despite the vast and growing array of institutions involved in collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information potentially relevant to global governance generally, and global environmental change specifically, our understanding of the role that these "information institutions" play in world affairs remains limited. This paper examines how institutions mediate the impact of scientific assessments on global environmental affairs and highlights the pathways through which information has influence on the policy and politics of environmental issues. We identify salience, credibility and legitimacy as the critical attributions that different audiences make about an assessment that determine whether they will change their thoughts, decisions, and behavior in response to it. We also outline how institutional rules regarding participation, framing, and scope and content allow knowledge systems to reach needed thresholds of salience, credibility, and legitimacy and to balance the tradeoffs and tensions among them.Publication Salience, Credibility, Legitimacy and Boundaries: Linking Research, Assessment and Decision Making(2003) Cash, David; Clark, William; Alcock, Frank; Dickson, Nancy; Eckley, Noelle; Jäger, JillThe boundary between science and policy is only one of several boundaries that hinder the linking of scientific and technical information to decision making. Managing boundaries between disciplines, across scales of geography and jurisdiction, and between different forms of knowledge is also often critical to transferring information. The research presented in this paper finds that information requires three (not mutually exclusive) attributes - salience, credibility, and legitimacy - and that what makes boundary crossing difficult is that actors on different sides of a boundary perceive and value salience, credibility, and legitimacy differently. Presenting research on water management regimes in the United States, international agricultural research systems, El Nino forecasting systems in the Pacific and southern Africa, and fisheries in the North Atlantic, this paper explores: 1) how effective boundary work involves creating salient, credible, and legitimate information simultaneously for multiple audiences; 2) the thresholds, complementarities and tradeoffs between salience, credibility, and legitimacy when crossing boundaries; and 3) propositions for institutional mechanisms in boundary organizations which effectively balance tradeoffs, take advantage on complementarities, and reach thresholds of salience, credibility, and legitimacy.Publication Assessing vulnerability to global environmental risks(Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, 2000-09) Clark, William; Jager, Jill; Corell, Robert; Kasperson, Roger; Mccarthy, James; Cash, David; Cohen, Stewart J.; Desanker, Paul; Dickson, Nancy; Epstein, Paul; Guston, David; Hall, J. Michael; Jaeger, Carlo; Janetos, Anthony; Leary, Neil; Levy, Marc; Luers, Amy; MacCracken, Michael; Melillo, Jerry; Moss, Richard; Nigg, Joanne M.; Parry, Martin L.; Parson, Edward; Ribot, Jesse C.; Schellnhuber, Hans-Joachim; Schrag, Daniel; Seielstad, George A.; Shea, Eileen; Vogel, Coleen; Wilbanks, ThomasThe last several years have witnessed a significant evolution in what society wants to know about global environmental risks such as climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, while devoting relatively little attention to the ecosystems and societies the changes might endanger. Recently, however, questions about the vulnerability of social and ecological systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. Meeting the growing demand for a deeper and more useful understanding of vulnerability to global change will require a dual strategy in which initiatives targeted on immediate assessment needs and research opportunities complement and feed into a longer term program for enhancing relevant knowledge bases, assessment practices, and institutional capacities. This paper makes recommendations for the design of such a strategy that emerged from an ongoing conversation between communities of decision-oriented vulnerability assessors for global environmental change issues, research-oriented vulnerability scholars generally focusing on regional scale human-environment interactions, and those conducting vulnerability assessments that assist in targeting improved intervention and mitigation strategies. It sketches an integrated framework for vulnerability-based assessments of climate and other global changes. By virtue of both concept and design this framework has the potential to improve significantly the production of policy-relevant insights into the social and environmental implications of global environmental change. This paper was prepared as a brief summary of the Workshop on Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change: Challenges for Research, Assessment and Decision Making, held on May 22-25, 2000 at Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.