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Recruit several new staff who have earned advanced degrees in empiri-
cally based behavioral and decision sciences. The new staff would need to have
strong communication skills and would need to work closely with economists,
natural scientists, and engineers in the agency to help to make regulatory and
other agency policies that promote environmentally protective behaviors that are
more realistic. Their knowledge would assist the agency by helping it to make
more informed choices when seeking outside contractors and advisers and to
create stronger collaboration with academics in related fields. The committee
suggests that the new staff be located within the National Center for Environ-
mental Economics (NCEE). The reason for that suggestion is that NCEE cur-
rently staffs the largest number of social scientists within the agency. The large
interest in behavioral and decision sciences that exists now in economics
broadly, as exhibited by the fields of behavioral and neuroeconomics, will con-
tribute to making NCEE a productive location. More importantly, behavioral
economics is an essential source of new insight in environmental economics
research pertaining to the benefits of environmental protection and the design of
incentives for environmental management. Co-locating behavioral scientists
within NCEE will increase the capacity of economics staff to participate in the
advances in environmental economics emerging from the integration of behav-
ioral economics.
Provide mechanisms for cross-disciplinary training of staff in core dis-
ciplines that are relevant to behavioral and decision sciences. The committee
acknowledges that the number of staff in EPA who have advanced training in
these fields is likely to remain modest even with a concerted recruitment effort,
and it is important for staff scientists who work in adjacent disciplines to have
enough familiarity to know what questions to ask (and whom to ask).
Develop improved mechanisms for integrating economic, social, be-
havioral, and decision science into the development of science to support envi-
ronmental-management decisions.
Outside of EPA
EPA would be well-advised to continue to take advantage of such mecha-
nisms as extramural funding to access the expertise that it needs. One example is
the Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program, which is sponsored by EPA's
National Center for Environmental Research to support transdisciplinary and
interdisciplinary relationships through interactive and collaborative projects. It
can also access experts through collaborations. Specifically , it could reestablish
the collaborative research program between ORD and the NSF Decision, Risk,
and Management Sciences program. That type of collaboration would allow
EPA to harness the expertise that it needs to make informed judgments in behav-
ioral and social sciences.
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