SCIENCE—OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES AT THE INTERFACE WITH POLICY

The Department of the Interior's multifaceted mission lies at the confluence of people, land and water. That mission puts Interior at the center of complex environmental and land management issues. All human action has some environmental footprint. For the Department's land managers, a fundamental question is how to lighten that environmental footprint while maintaining thriving communities. How might land management decisions enable people to pursue their economic, recreation, and other activities while protecting landscapes? Informing these decisions with science insights and information is important, indeed, critical to our ability to maintain healthy lands and thriving communities. This interface of science and policy presents both opportunities and challenges. Policy and management challenges do not present themselves in pre-defined problem sets. Defining the scope and scale of the relevant problem set—the compass—of a land management decision can, itself raise both scientific and social questions. Through what process might we draw appropriate boundaries for a problem set and decision focus? Answering these questions demands scientific insights, but they are as much questions of human communities, values, and social constructs as they are matters of scientific distinctions and categories. The most distinctive challenge in any interface of science and policy pertains to context: policymaking is, fundamentally, about values. Policy makers ask: “What values do we care about?” “How clean is clean enough?” “How do we allocate which resources?” Scientists ask: “What is reality?” “How does the world work?” Yet understanding “what is” is not the same as exploring and illuminating responses to the questions of “what do we care about?” or “where do we want to go?” Joint fact-finding offers a way of bridging the conversation between those engaged in the policy question: “where do we want to go?” and those who have insights regarding “what do we know that might help us decide.” Building these bridges can advance better decisions and reduce conflict. Joint fact-finding is about process—and process can be as important as substance in assembling and communicating information relevant to land management decisions. Joint fact-finding is a way of linking science and scientists to the process of thinking through complex problems of reconciliation.