Improving the contribution of experts in policy and politics

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado considers the key challenges at the interface of advice and decision making

In recent weeks we have seen a range of conflicts between scientific experts and governments. In the United Kingdom the dismissal of David Nutt, chair of the UK Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), for making statements perceived to undercut government drug policies has received considerable criticism from the scientific community. In Australia, the government's primary research organization intervened in the peer review process to attempt to stop the publication of an economic analysis critical of emissions trading programs, which the Rudd Government is currently championing. And in the United States the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to limit what two of its experts can say as private citizens about their professional experience when being critical of U.S. climate policies.

What is going on here?

Conflicts at the interface of advice and decision making are present in governments of all political and ideological orientations, with more of such conflicts occurring today for at least three reasons. The first is that many of today's issues have a scientific or technical component to them, making reliance on experts a necessary part of the policy process. A second reason is that the scientific community has become more political in an effort to show its "relevance" and thus justify the large public investments in the scientific enterprise. A third reason is that policy makers are more than happy to hide their political judgments behind the fig leaf of science, thereby avoiding accountability for making tough decisions.

The interaction between experts and decision makers is complicated. The relationship of experts and decision making (and avoiding conflicts) depends upon setting up advisory institutions fit for context. Here I illustrate the challenge via a simple analogy.

Imagine that you would like to go on a trip. How would you go about gathering information needed to decide where to go?

A first strategy could involve consulting the advertisements in the Sunday travel section of your newspaper. These advertisements seek to draw your attention to what they are offering. Barbados! Spain! Florida! Such ads are advocating a particular course of action for you to take, and are presenting information deemed appropriate and effective in convincing you to narrow your decision making to what is on offer – what I call "issue advocacy." There is no shortage of issue advocacy in political debates, which is one reason that governments look to expert advisory committees to cut through noise and hype.

A second strategy that you might take is to consult a professional travel agent who can be very useful in answering specific questions that you might have, such as "When is the least expensive time to go to Paris?" or "What is the average weather in Prague in March?" Here the travel agent seeks to be an arbiter of information, and answers specific fact-based questions provided by the decision maker. More generally, I call this "science arbitration. "

A third strategy can be found in the online travel websites . These sites are characterized by their ability to present you a full range of choices available according to some criteria that you provide. So if you want to go on a ski trip to Switzerland, these sites can tell you the dates and times for travel, where you can depart from and arrive at, and the cost. Efforts to expand or clarify the scope of available choice to the decision maker earn the label "honest brokering." Here advisors provide options, and decision makers make decisions.

The fourth strategy would be for you to consult the peer-reviewed scientific literature to gather information that might be related to your trip. You could, for example, look at studies on the performance of various aircraft, the geological formations in a region of interest, or the health effects of jet lag. The distinctive feature in this case is that the information is provided without consideration of the decision being made, which I call "pure science."

A key for decision makers is to decide what kind of advice they want from their advisors and structure the advisory process accordingly. For instance, the ACMD confusingly shares characteristics of an honest broker-type committee as well as that of an arbiter of science, but it is clear that the government wants an issue advocate. When structure and function are incompatible, conflict inevitably will result.

We often debate issues that seem hopelessly complex, like stem cell research, vaccinations for children, policy responses to climate change, environmental regulation, capital reserve requirements for banks, and on and on. Because of such complexities it is absolutely crucial that we take care in how we use expertise, both for the decisions that we face, but also for the fidelity of expertise itself.

Roger Pielke, Jr. is author of The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press: 2007)