Before the Master Plan - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 30

1. Representation : where is the study area? What is its history? What are its
past and present physical, economic, and social geographies?
2. Process : what are the area's major natural and social processes? How are
they linked to each other? (By the way, several charts I've seen of the Iraqi
departmental environmental structure show many organizations isolated in
boxes with no arrows among them.)
3. Evaluation : are there important problems in the region? Are there impor-
tant opportunities in the region? Which? Where?
4. Change : what major changes are foreseen for the region? One of them is the
possibility that there is no water at all. Are the changes related to growth or
decline? Are the pressures for change from inside or outside? (Personally, I
think that for Iraq they're going to come from the outside.)
5. Impact : are foreseen changes seen as beneficial or harmful? Are they seen
as serious? As irreversible?
6. Decisions : who are the decision makers? Who are the major stakeholders?
Are they public or private? Are their positions known? Are they in conflict?
You need to ask those questions the first day you go someplace.
So we've asked those very preliminary questions.
And now we're going to go up through the framework to define the methods:
6. Decisions : what do decision makers need to know? What are their bases of
evaluation? Are these scientific evaluations? Cultural norms? Legal stan-
dards? Do the people who are going to make these decisions really know
the difference between the water chemistry at pH 8.2 or 8.3? And do they
care? Are there issues of public communication? Or visualization? Of edu-
cation? A general rule is that the more complex the models, the less people
understand and trust them, and they won't decide on their basis.
5. Impact : which impacts? Which costs and benefits are seen as good versus
bad? How much, where, when, and to whom are these seen as good versus
bad?
4. Change : is there one master plan, or several scenarios reflecting differ-
ent assumptions, policies, and uncertainty? Who defines the scenarios for
change, and how? Which scenarios are selected? Toward which time hori-
zon? At what scales? Which issues are beyond the capabilities of the mod-
els? Are the alternative future outcomes simulated, or are they normative
allocations? Are they the process of modeling the process of change, or are
they designs?
3. Evaluation : what are the measures of evaluation? In development, econom-
ics, ecology, and politics?
2. Process : which models should be included, and which not? How complex
should they be? How reliable must they be? In a special issue of Ecological
Systems in 1971, there is a wonderful article about the special problem of
modeling ecological systems that identified four models. First, they are sys-
tems with complex components and feedback mechanisms. Second, they
react to historic events as well as to the present. Third, they are interlocking;