Geoscience Reference
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2012] in the professional staff are matters of concern, given EPA's ever-present
and increasing need to defend programs and initiatives on economic grounds, its
concerns for environmental justice and community engagement in environ-
mental decision-making, and its goal of becoming more transdisciplinary. In
addition, and as noted above, economic, social, behavioral, and decision sci-
ences can make important contributions to improving environmental policy de-
cisions within the emerging integrated systems-based approach to environmental
management and contributions to innovation in strategies for achieving envi-
ronmental goals efficiently, equitably, and cooperatively. The importance of
behavioral science to the conduct of environmental economics research, includ-
ing environmental valuation, has been well established and has led to consider-
able research on the integration of behavioral sciences with environmental eco-
nomics (Sent 2004; Shogren and Taylor 2008; Shogren et al. 2010).
In particular, behavioral and decision science deals with such issues as
“framing effects” and the role of cognitive heuristics (see, for example, Kahneman
et al. 1982). It provides the intellectual basis of modern methods of risk communi-
cation (see, for example, Morgan et al. 2002), and its insights and ideas should
constitute a key complement of economics and decision analysis in such contexts
as the design and assessment of the likely effectiveness of alternative regulatory
strategies (Fischbeck and Farrow 2001). Those insights often arise from extensive
experimental studies in both laboratory and field settings. Without staff in EPA
who are experts in those subjects, not only can the agency not conduct such stud-
ies, but often it does not know how to ask the right questions or how to seek the
right expertise and advice. That is unfortunate—social, behavioral, and decision
sciences are essential in the design of survey research, the development of meth-
ods in expert elicitation to characterize the state of uncertain science (EPA 2009a),
the development and evaluation of risk-communication methods, the development
and use of mediation and other group-decision processes, the promotion of a vari-
ety of environmentally benign behaviors, and the anticipation of behavioral re-
sponses to alterative regulatory and other protective strategies. EPA needs to have
staff with sufficient expertise or cross-disciplinary training to allow it to become
an educated consumer of social, behavioral, and decisions sciences and to engage
more effectively with external entities to conduct innovative science.
Finding:
EPA's economic, social, behavioral, and decision science staff consists
almost entirely of economists. The agency is without strong expertise in social,
behavioral, and decision sciences, though it does support some research in these
areas through outside grants, collaborations, and procurement.
Recommendation: The committee recommends that EPA add staff who
have training in behavioral and decision sciences and find ways to enhance
the existing staff capabilities in these fields.
Options that EPA might explore to fulfill that recommendation include:
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