Michael E. Gorman1,*, Lekelia D. Jenkins2 and Raina K. Plowright3
1Department of Science, Technology & Society, University of Virginia, USA; 2School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington, 3707 Brooklyn Avenue Northeast, Seattle, Washington 98105 USA and 3David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow, Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 USA
Abstract: This chapter describes a framework for understanding and managing complex systems that couple human beings, nature and technology. The framework includes five major components; the first three are necessary capabilities for accomplishing the last two.
Superordinate goals: Human beings have to see the urgent necessity of working together to solve problems like climate change and depletion of natural resources.
Moral imagination: Differences in values can prevent adoption of a superordinate goal. Moral imagination is the equivalent of interactional expertise concerning values; it involves being able to ‘step into the shoes’ of another stakeholder and see the problem from her or his perspective.
Trading zones: Linking multiple stakeholders will require setting up a series of trading zones for exchanging ideas, resources, and solutions across different communities and interests.
Developing the three capabilities above will permit:
Adaptive management: This strategy involves treating management interventions like hypotheses, subjecting them to empirical tests, and revising the strategy based on the results. Adaptive management is difficult in tightly coupled human-technological-natural systems, where hypotheses should be constructed not only about environmental impacts, but also about effects on stakeholders.
Anticipatory governance: Global problems and opportunities will require adding more anticipatory, adaptive capability to governance mechanisms, linking decision makers with other stakeholders. These exchanges will have to be motivated by a superordinate goal so urgent that governance structures can be transformed, if necessary.
*Address correspondence to Michael E. Gorman: Department of Science, Technology & Society, University of Virginia, USA; Tel: (434) 924-3439; E-mail: [email protected]
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This framework will be applied to two detailed case studies, one concerned with developing better management practices for reducing bycatch in fisheries, the other with ecosystem disruptions like the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK. Limitations of the framework will be discussed in the light of these case studies, along with suggestions for how it can be improved.
One of Jared Diamond’s students, after reading the chapter on Easter Island in Collapse, asked how anyone could have cut down the last tree on Easter Island. Easter Island should have been a simple sustainability case, because the island is so small that the disappearance of trees would have been obvious to anyone. Easter Island had giant palms when humans first arrived, so the full-grown trees were a significant resource. Once they were gone, there would have been no new canoes, or fire. Surely it was obvious to everyone that they ought to preserve the trees?
Easter Island was divided into several tribal zones. If each tribe were trying to exploit dwindling resources for its own advantage, there might have been a rush to seize and cut down the final trees. Diamond cites evidence that Easter island society collapsed catastrophically, with violence and even cannibalism. Diamond cites the case of another island, Tikopia, whose inhabitants were able to sustain its population on their small island by adapting their socio-technical system to their natural environment. The term socio-technical system refers to the fact that society and technology are so intertwined that they become hard to distinguish: technologies embody ways of life. The early Tikopians followed the Easter Island pattern: they cut and burned most of their trees, and also ate most of the fish and killed the local seabirds. But in response, Tikopians adopted pigs as a source of protein and learned to store breadfruit to guard against famine. In 1600, all the pigs on the island were killed because this system was no longer sustainable and the natives returned to fish, shellfish and turtles. They also preserved small sections of rainforest and grew additional trees for nuts. It helped that the Tikopeians were a single society throughout—but the fact that they did not
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splinter into sub-groups and fight over resources shows that conflict over scarcities is not inevitable.
The point of these two cases is that sustainability depends on social and environmental and technological factors—and that human beings can destroy their local ecosystem or work together to sustain them.
On a larger scale, the Earth itself can be viewed as an island in space. The Earth is a much more complex system and contains many more potential resources than an island like Easter. It also contains multiple societies representing different experiments in living that can exchange knowledge and practices—or try to hoard resources and dominate each other. The Holocene has yielded to the Anthropocene.1 Human beings are now the keys to sustaining the current species diversity on the planet—“we have met the enemy and he is us.”2
A FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGING THE ANTHROPOCENE
This chapter describes a framework for understanding and managing complex systems that couple human beings, nature and technology [1]. The framework includes five major components; the first three are necessary capabilities for accomplishing the last two.
Trading zones: Linking multiple stakeholders will require setting up a series of trading zones for exchanging ideas, resources, and solutions across different communities and interests. Peter Galison studied the development of radar, which was motivated by an urgent goal: the survival of Great Britain at the beginning of World War II. He noticed that theoretical physicists, experimental physicists, instrument makers and engineers formed trading zones to work together to achieve this goal [2]. Participants from different expertise communities did not have to understand each others’ paradigms in order to cooperate; they simply had to agree on mechanisms and terms of exchange. In order to trade, participants in a zone have to develop one or more of the following:
1 Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen first coined this term in 2000, 2 Porkypine, in Walt Kelly’s Pogo.
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A reduced common language, which begins with participants in a zone agreeing on shared meanings for certain terms, then progresses to a kind of pidgin and eventually to a creole, which is a new language born out of old ones. At the creole stage, the trading zone may morph into a new expert community. Galison includes the possibility that visual and mathematical ‘creoles’ may also be formed in trading zones3. Consider the use of indicators of systems change [3] which can serve a quantitative or, if translated into graphic representations, a visual role similar to a creole.
A boundary object or system can give participants in the zone a common reference point. The Everglades, for example, serves as a boundary system that is represented differently by multiple stakeholders in a trading zone and leads to boundary objects like documented plans that form the basis for negotiations.4
Interactional expertise on the part of one or more participants who will serve a role similar to trade agents, facilitating exchanges of ideas and resources. Interactional expertise is the ability to carry out a sophisticated conversation with members of an expert community that shows real understanding of how they view and solve problems [4]. The interactional expert cannot do the research, but she or he can understand it.
Goals: Trading zones vary in the extent to which participants agree on goals and the means to achieve them. In the case of radar, all participants had to share in a goal, but different specialties could employ different means to achieve partial solutions. In the development of technologies, smaller trading zones can be nested within larger ones, e.g., a team of diverse specialists can work on a major component of a system like radar or a Mars Rover or a new jet airplane, and another higher-level trading zone can negotiate what components are needed and how they fit into the overall system.
3See Peter Galison, Trading with the enemy, in M.E. Gorman (Editor) Trading zones and interactional expertise: Creating new kinds of collaboration (MIT Press, 2010). 4Boyd Fuller, Trading Zones: cooperating and still disagreeing on what really matters. Under revision for probable publication in Journal of Planning Education and Research.
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Figure 1: Compatibility of Goals Assessment
The compatibility of goals can be assessed using two dimensions: the extent to which members of a trading zone agree on outcomes, and the extent to which they agree on the means used to achieve the outcome, as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Each trading zone could be placed on this graph based on the extent to which members agreed on both outcomes and means—and as the trading zone shifted, one could track its trajectory on the graph.
Superordinate Goals: The social psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif created this term to describe goals that can unite groups whose members had previously been in competition [5]. The Sherifs set up a summer camp and deliberately encouraged rivalry between two groups of boys; their goal was to figure out the most effective means of ending the intergroup hostility.
One uniting strategy is the need to defeat a common enemy, which motivated the formation of the trading zone around radar —if scientists, engineers and military officers did not work together, Britain would be devastated by the Luftwaffe.
The problem with the common enemy goal is that there always has to be an enemy; therefore, the Sherif’s tried what they termed a superordinate goal, or a
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problem that affected the basic needs of both rival groups. When there was a problem with the camp’s water supply (simulated by the staff in a believable way) the boys were sent out to solve it, and could only do it by cooperating. Later, the boys had to help jump start the truck that was going to get their lunches by pulling on ropes; the two groups first lined up on separate ropes, but then they mingled. When the camp ended, the rivalries had dissolved.
In the Anthropocene, human activity affects every aspect of the planetary ecosystem. Management of this activity therefore creates a set of superordinate goals on which our survival depends. Creating a shared sense of urgency around superordinate goals across a diverse population of distincty ethnic groups, economic strata and languages is orders of magnitude harder than convincing a homogeneous group of boys at a summer camp to work together. But global systems management would be much simpler if everyone saw the urgent need to work together—the same kind of urgency that exists during war or a natural disaster, but now focused on longer-term management to prevent crises—and the disparities in resources that are one factor in fueling (pun intended) wars.
Achieving a common sense of urgency depends on the next capability.
Moral imagination is the equivalent of interactional expertise concerning values; it involves being able to see a situation from the perspective of another stakeholder. Moral imagination involves a reflexive component: one must be aware of one’s own perspective before being able to inhabit another. If each group in a trading zone sees its values as reality, then there will be no possibility of adopting a superordinate goal. Say, for example, my group thinks that our God is on schedule to end the world anyway. Then there is no reason to work with others to stave off the inevitable—indeed, it might even be sacrilegious. To trade with such a group, one has to be able to see the world as they see it.
The end result is not relativism; seeing another’s view is not the same as agreeing with it. Moral imagination does enhance negotiations by allowing each party in a trading zone to understand where another party is coming from. It also opens up the possibility of evolving new shared values that transcend existing differences. For example, those who currently have more resources also have more resilience when it
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comes to dealing with climate change and other potential system disruptions—at least in the short term. Therefore, they do not see preventing global warming as superordinate goal. Moral imagination is required to make that leap.
Developing the Above Capabilities above is Essential For:
Adaptive Management: This strategy involves treating management interventions like hypotheses, subjecting them to empirical tests, and revising the strategy based on the results. The empirical tests can be based on historical interventions and data on their impacts, which can lead in turn to new hypotheses which can be implemented and tested going forward [6]. Adaptive management is difficult in tightly coupled human-technological-natural systems, where hypotheses should be constructed not only about environmental impacts, but also about effects on stakeholders. Complex systems are not amenable to classic single or multi-variable hypothetico-deductive techniques, because the results of small perturbations are not always predictable—it is hard to say when a small change will tip the system into a new state. New measures of systems change [7] could be coupled with other metrics to make adaptive management possible in these sorts of complex, coupled systems.
Anticipatory Governance 5: Current governance structures around the world are best at responding to well-characterized problems like the hole in the ozone layer. Response to this problem was rapid and effective. The ozone example illustrates the power of a superordinate goal.
It would, however, have been even better to have the problem not occur at all. Therefore, current regulatory and legal systems need to be complemented by a capacity for anticipatory governance: oversight mechanisms that provide the equivalent of early warning signals and systems-level management structures that can respond to these signals. Anticipatory governance requires at least three actions: the anticipation and assessment of an emerging situation; the engagement of stakeholders that are mostly still latent; and the integration of broader considerations into contexts that have been largely self-governing [8].
5Anticipatory governance is a new concept that forms the focus of Arizona State University’s Center for Nanotechnology in Society (http://cns.asu.edu/).
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The accelerating pace of technological change compounds the problem. As Allenby notes, technological change is autocatalytic, meaning each change catalyzes other changes at an increasing rate that varies from situation to situation. The interactions among all of these technologies can lead to emergent, unanticipated consequences.
Current political institutions are inadequate to perform this kind of anticipation for complex socio-ecological-technical systems [8]. When the complexity of socio-ecological-technical systems does not permit an accurate prediction of consequences, adaptive management is critically important. Adaptive management can be done by multiple stakeholders forming trading zones that cut across traditional governance structures [9]. However, governments have to be able to respond as well. Tools like scenario development can be used to anticipate possible futures, including metrics to see which possible future is emerging, but will only be an effective part of governance if management structures are in place to respond effectively—including the ability to reverse an intervention if it is not having the desired effect. These anticipatory structures need not be governmental—they could come from NGOs, industries and sciences. But all of these efforts would need coordination or at the very least blessing from government.
Consider, for example, the Dutch response to the possibility of global climate change. Instead of waiting until the changes are obvious, the Dutch are anticipating them by building floating cities. If it turns out that global climate change is averted, the Dutch will have sunk millions into systems that do not reduce their quality of life and will still provide additional insurance against huge storms.
What the Dutch have done locally needs to be done globally—sophisticated dams and floating cities in the Netherlands will not help Bangladesh if climate change occurs. It is far better to deal with the CO2 levels than hope for a rapid response if the variance in climate increases around a slowly rising temperature. Technologies like carbon sequestration will certainly be part of the solution, as will changes in behavior. In a coupled socio-technical-natural system, any response will have to be behavioral, environmental and technological.
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THE FRAMEWORK IN ACTION
This framework has been applied to a variety of situations6, including
the development of a new science of services (Gorman)
bridging the gap between biologists and programmers who need to work together (Shrager)
creating appropriate metrics for a large, public, urban school district (Mehalik)
seamlessly linking humanities and engineering, using a laboratory as a focus (Fisher & Mahajan)
helping businesses anticipate disruptive technologies and practices (Von Oettinger)
selling the female condom to women in the developing world who needed it as AIDs protection, but could not afford it (Leeper, Powell & Werhane)
In this chapter, we will use one of the most theoretically sophisticated of the cases reported in the volume [10] to further develop the framework.
Bycatch Reduction
Bycatch (i.e., non-target organisms that are unintentionally caught or harm by fishing gear) is a major environmental concern that makes many fisheries unsustainable. In order to reduce bycatch, policy -makers and managers are encouraging the use of conservation technologies (i.e., a technology that is primarily used to protect organisms and habitat). In the United States two of the most famous examples of this are a suite of dolphin conservation technologies used to prevent dolphin entanglement and death in tuna nets and the turtle 6 All of the examples in the bulleted list are described in a volume edited by Gorman, Trading zones and interactional expertise: Creating new kinds of collaboration, MIT Press, 2010. Each of the cases in the list is a separate chapter in the volume, and the author(s) names are listed at the end of each bullet.
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excluder device, a type of escape hatch used to prevent sea turtles drowning in shrimp nets. Using these two examples, we will illustrate boundary organization and interactional expertise trading zones in practice, describe the impact of goal compatibility, and discuss opportunities for the use of moral imagination that might have changed the course of history in these examples. We will also identify an instance of anticipatory governance at work.
Dolphin Conservation Technologies
The use of dolphin conservation technologies offers examples of moral imagination at work and the impact of incompatible means on the success of environmental initiatives. The governance mechanism was the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which required the executive branch of the federal government to reduce dolphin bycatch. The passage of the Act created a legislative mandate for the government and an economic incentive for the tuna fishing industry, driving both to solve the dolphin bycatch problem. The tuna fishing industry feared the complete closure of the of fishery if dolphin mortality was not reduced [11-13]. To achieve their common goals government and industry needed to work together. The government required the fishing knowledge and experience of the industry and industry required the financial and scientific support of the government.
Unfortunately, several points of contention made it difficult for them to coordinate their actions. Concerned about negative media coverage and potential lawsuits from environmentalists, the federal government was secretive about its research. This lack of transparency led many fishers to question whether or not the federal government—which had always been an advocate of fishery development—was truly committed to the continuance of the tuna fishery. Many government personnel, on the other hand, believed that the majority of tuna fishers were not committed to fully addressing the dolphin bycatch problem. Distrust of each other's motives created an unstable foundation on which to build collaborative projects. This tenuous but necessary sharing resulted in a boundary object trading zone [14].
An excellent example of this boundary object trading zone is the interaction between the fisherman who invented the Medina Panel (an area of safety netting that helps prevent dolphin entanglement), and the government scientist who tried to improve it.
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Their goals were similar but not the same. Both men wanted to reduce dolphin mortality while minimizing the impact on traditional fishing procedures and tuna catch. They differed in that the fisherman placed more value on minimizing the impact on the amount to tuna catch and the scientist placed more value on reducing dolphin bycatch. This is evidenced by the fisherman’s insistence that constructing the Medina Panel with a mesh-size smaller than two inches would create an unacceptable amount of drag when the net is pulled through the water, making fishing inefficient. The scientist was more concerned about minimizing dolphin entanglement and so experimented with mesh sizes as small as one inch [15]. Though they shared a common goal, the difference in priorities meant that they did not have a shared superordinate goal. As a result, they each worked around the same boundary object, the Medina Panel, but produced different outcomes. The fisherman produced simple, commercially practical designs, while the scientist produced complex, multi-functional designs that were troublesome to use under commercial fishing conditions. The boundary object trading zone was held together by mutual interests in each other's secondary priorities and by the insight that the other's work could shed on improving their designs [10, 14, 16, 17].
The testing of these various Medina Panel designs illustrates an instance of compatible goals with incompatible means. Both the industry and the government had the goal of scientifically evaluating the effectiveness of the Medina Panel designs, during the course of normal commercial fishing. Although the experiment involving a comparative analysis across twenty vessels was poorly controlled, lacked statistical power, and the results were compromised by a court ordered halt of the experiment, industry still favored this as a means of evaluating new technologies. They believed that testing technologies simultaneously on numerous commercial vessels would allow more technologies to be more thoroughly evaluated in less time. They also believed it would also expose more fishermen to the conservation technologies, thus increasing adoption. The federal government, however, thought that this approach was be too costly and could not yield more statistically useful results than the status quo of using a single vessel as a means to evaluate prototype dolphin conservation technologies [14].
Once it was established that the Medina Panel in conjunction with a number of other dolphin conservation technologies could substantially reduce dolphin
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bycatch, the federal government had a new goal of convincing the tuna fishermen to adopt these technologies. After a few years, technology adoption rates and reductions in dolphin bycatch reached a plateau. So in 1977, the federal government passed regulations requiring the formation of an Expert Skippers’ Panel in an attempt to identify and provide more personalized training to skippers of tuna boats that had high levels of dolphin bycatch. In 1975, industry proposed and created a plan for a Senior Captains’ Advisory Panel, but it was not established. However, the goals of this proposed panel matched many of those of the Expert Skippers’ Panel [14].
The federal government gave the tuna fishing industry the authority to create organizational rules and procedures for the Panel as well as the authority to take corrective action. Furthermore, the government solicited and with few exceptions heeded the advice of the Panel about the prosecution of skippers who violated regulations about dolphin bycatch reduction. The general procedure was that the government supplied the Panel with records of skippers' performance in reducing bycatch. The Panel analyzed this information and in problem cases the Panel either made recommendations to the government on how to address the problem or took action itself. When the Panel decided to take action it would call a meeting with the poorly performing skipper, who was usually a younger individual new to the fishery. During the meeting, the problem skipper would describe his fishing process and the panel members would give him advice on how to improve it. None of the problem skippers who attended one of these meetings ever needed to appear again before the Panel. The effectiveness of the Expert Skippers’ Panel is credited with improving skippers’ skill levels industry-wide, resulting in a decrease in dolphin mortality [14].
The creation of the Expert Skippers' Panel was an act indicative of moral imagination. The federal government realized that its previous promotional efforts were insufficient and that the fishery industry itself was best equipped to identify and remove the obstacles to further technology adoption and dolphin bycatch reduction. This example also illustrates that the result of an exercise in moral imagination does not necessarily default into a compromise position. The federal government adopted the industry's concept of a Senior Captains’ Advisory Panel almost entirely as the industry had envisioned it. The government ceded authority
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to analyze and correct industry performance to the industry itself. Even with the authority the government retained, the ability to prosecute offenders, it heeded the advice of the Panel about which cases to pursue and in which cases to show leniency. This reveals the power of moral imagination to yield solutions that are not just tolerable to all parties, but rather solutions that are best for addressing the problem, even at the cost of ceding power and authority.
The case of dolphin conservation technologies also offers an example of the impact of compatible means and incompatible outcomes on the fulfillment of conservation goals. In order to pressure tuna fishers to reduce dolphin bycatch, a number of environmental groups baned together and waged a campaign of boycotts and lawsuits. The result of this campaign was the dolphin-safe tuna label. This label, which appears on nearly every can of tuna sold in the United States, signifies that the tuna fishers were using a fishing method that did not involve dolphins in any way. The campaign in combination with the use of dolphin conservation technologies, successfully reduced the number of dolphins killed each year in this tuna fishery from several hundred thousand to less than two thousand [12]. Further reduction in the level of dolphin bycatch would likely require a fishing method that while better for dolphins would result in the bycatch of nearly 15, 000 other animals for every dolphin saved. These include species of sharks, rays, marlins and sea turtles, a number of which are threatened or endangered with extinction [18]. Faced with this trade-off, environmental organizations with a general focus on marine conservation, including Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, and the Ocean Conservancy, halted their aggressive campaigns and supported a change to more flexible regulations that would likely maintain the current level of dolphin bycatch and not increase bycatch of other species. In contrast, Earth Island Institute, an organization that was founded on the cause of reducing dolphin bycatch, persisted in a lawsuit that upheld strict regulations.
Initially all the environmental groups shared the same means--lawsuits and boycottt--but their ultimate outcomes were related but critically different. All the groups wanted to reduce dolphin bycatch, but only some of the groups wanted to reduce dolphin bycatch in harmony with improving the general health of the ocean. The organizations could persist in a cooperative relationship, during the initial effort to
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reduce dolphin bycatch from its massive level. The cooperative relationship crumbled, however, when one organization wanted to continue reduction in dolphin bycatch at the cost of increased bycatch of endangered species. Without both shared means and shared outcomes there is no superordinate goal.
This case study has illustrated elements of the framework for managing the anthropocene, namely a boundary object trading zone, shared goals with incompatible means and compatible outcomes, and moral imagination. The following case study offers additional examples of these elements and describes how together they can support anticipatory governance.
Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs)
A TED is a type of escape hatch in a shrimp net that allows sea turtles to exit the net while retaining the shrimp catch. The original TED arose from a melding of ideas from a fisherman and a government scientist. Despite this, much of the shrimp fishing industry viewed the TED with suspicion, because scientists developed it within a government controlled invention system. The shrimp fishing industry felt that government personnel had developed the TED without industry input and were forcing it on them as the only acceptable solution to the turtle bycatch problem. The industry believed that they had viable alternative ideas to solving the turtle bycatch problem that the federal government ignored. Thus, few shrimp fishers used the early versions of the TED [14, 19].
Because of the controversial nature of this situation, Sea Grant had kept its distance. Sea Grant is an outreach agency charged with engaging the fishing community on numerous issues, such as transferring new fishing technologies and educating the industry about new regulations. Most often Sea Grant serves to transfer information from government to the fishing industry, to do so Sea Grant agents must speak the 'language' of government scientists and managers as well as fishers. This in essence makes them professional interactional experts; this interactional expertise could have served to broker more productive trades between NMFS and the shrimping industry. Given the range of its responsibilities, however, Sea Grant was wary of spending precious social capital on the controversial sea turtle issue, especially in light of federal government's
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controlling approach to TED invention and previous resistance to fisher and Sea Grant ideas [10]
In 1982, in order to overcome Sea Grant's reticence, a NMFS manager staged an exchange to secure Sea Grant’s active support in TED development and promotion. The NMFS manager asked industry representatives to publicly request the help of Sea Grant with technology transfer during a workshop. The industry representatives assured Sea Grant that they wanted their help with the TED issue, and helped ease Sea Grant concerns that the controversial nature of TEDs might tarnish its relationship with industry. In this way the interactional expertise of Sea Grant was brought to bear, creating an interactional expertise trading zone. Interactional expertise involves the time-consuming development of a new linguistic ability. Even in the case of Sea Grant agents, who already had this ability, their use of it was dependent on establishing relationships between NMFS and shrimpers through which to exercise this ability. In the TED case, Sea Grant agents developed these relationships over the course of four years. They engaged with shrimpers, who had begun to develop new TEDs on their own, external to the government TED invention system. They also interacted with government personnel about the continued refinement of the original government-invented TED [10].
The TED case yields one solid example of anticipatory governance that clearly illustrates the fulfillment of the three required actions: the anticipation and assessment of an emerging situation; the engagement of stakeholders that are mostly still latent; and the integration of broader considerations into contexts that have been largely self-governing [8]. Sea Grant agents anticipated that the federal government might pass regulations requiring mandatory use of TEDs. The Sea Grant agents further assessed that for shrimp fishers to accept TEDs, the devices would need to be more practical for commercial use and that shrimp fishers would need more options in types of TEDs they could use. In addition, Sea Grant agents believed the best way to achieve this would be to bring shrimpers’ TED ideas to the attention of government scientists. So in 1986, Sea Grant sponsored a demonstration event comparing the government's TED with three fisher-invented TEDs. Drawing on their interactional expertise and cultural understanding of the two groups, Sea Grant convinced shrimpers and government scientists to participate. As a result of this event and further testing, the federal government
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certified all three shrimper-invented TEDs for commercial use. Also, in keeping with Sea Grant's anticipatory assumptions, shrimp fishers began to use more of the fisher-invented TEDs than of the government TED. This event solidified the interactional expertise trading zone, which rapidly engaged more fishers who had not previously been involved in trying to reduce sea turtle bycatch. Innovative shrimpers continue to bring their ideas for new TEDs to Sea Grant agents, who then communicate these ideas to the federal government. In this way, Sea Grant broadened the considerations about TEDs to include whether they were commercially practical and opened a door to shrimp fishers to take part in oversight of the TED invention-system, which had previously been governed exclusively by the federal government.
This case has provided examples of boundary object and interactional expertise trading zones and their significance for one important aspect of anticipatory governance: the development of new technologies and practices with input from multiple stakeholders. But conclusions from this case study might not generalize to other situations, therefore we need to test the usefulness of this framework in other situations, as a step towards developing more rigorous methods for determining which kinds of trading zones work best in what situations, and when trading zones are not useful.
Let us briefly consider a domain we are currently researching: management of epidemics affecting livestock. Our hypothesis is that, as in the case of the fishers and the marine scientists, the best results will be obtained if scientists and regulators form trading zones with farmers and veterinarians who have local knowledge of practices.
Foot and Mouth Disease
In 2001 the UK experienced a devastating outbreak of foot and mouth disease (FMD), a virulent and highly infectious disease of domestic ungulates. The epidemic and its control resulted in the death of approximately 10 million animals [20], destruction of livestock on over 10, 000 premises [21], an economic cost of around US $12 billion [20] and an unquantifiable social cost. Throughout the epidemic the public watched mounds of dead animals being burnt on funeral pyres, and carcasses being thrown into mass burial pits. Farmers lost their valued
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animals, there were suicides among those involved in the slaughter, and a general public disgust and anger at the ruthlessness of the slaughter [20].
The loss of British FMD-free status meant automatic bans on agricultural exports, with major economic consequences to a farming industry still ailing from the impacts of “mad cow disease” (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). The Blair Government was under intense pressure from the agricultural lobby to secure UK livestock markets as soon as possible and wanted to be seen as enacting a swift resolution before the 2001 general election [22]. The conditions were hence established for agreement on a common goal to eradicate FMD as quickly as possible. The controversy arose over the means to achieve this goal. In this section we examine how the failure to develop trading zones and a lack of moral imagination between the two major players in disease control, veterinarians and mathematical modelers, may have led to the unnecessary slaughter of millions of animals. We examine how anticipatory governance might have prevented the mistakes made during the FMD outbreak by laying the groundwork for effective scientific exchange.
Most controversial during the outbreak was the policy of pre-emptive slaughter, a control strategy based on mathematical models. Traditionally FMD has been controlled by bans on movement of livestock, and rapid detection and slaughter of infected and in-contact animals [20, 23]. During the 2001 FMD epidemic, mathematical models indicated that traditional approaches would not control the epidemic and additional “firebreak culling” [23] was required. “Firebreak culling” involved automatic pre-emptive slaughter of all susceptible animals on properties within 3 kilometers of infected premises, whether virus was suspected to be present or not, and resulted in the slaughter of unprecedented numbers of animals with severe economic and social costs. Veterinarians argue that the preemptive slaughter was unnecessary [20, 23], while the modelers argue that if “firebreak culling” had not been carried out, the impact and duration of the epidemic would have been much higher than that which actually occurred during 2001 [24] some argue that British countryside farming could have been wiped out altogether.
The breakdown in communication between veterinarians and modelers can be traced back to a number of historical factors. First, senior government advisors had personal
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connections with a team of modelers at Imperial College. Early conversations with this group led to the ad hoc formulation of a Science Advisory Group heavily weighted by modelers, contrary to pre-arranged contingency plans. The recent mad cow disease epidemic had created a loss of political confidence in veterinary science, and hence veterinarians were initially marginalized from the process. Furthermore, the mad cow disease inquiry had concluded that politicians failed to pay sufficient attention to scientists [22], laying out the conditions for modeling to play a disproportionate role with its “air of intellectual superiority pretence of precision, knowledge and control” [20]. By the time veterinarians had increased input, the contentious decisions had already been made [22].
Veterinarians felt disempowered and a conflict ensued over what constituted good science. Farmers and veterinarians have contextual knowledge of local environmental conditions, individual herds and animals (they were carrying out the slaughter and understood the practical reality of implementing the model derived policy). The modelers knowledge is decontextualised, they apply statistical criteria to data to make judgments about disease transmission risk and are somewhat removed from the events occurring on the ground [22]. However, modelers understand disease dynamics at large scales—the population scale, or in this case the scale of the UK—a contrast to veterinarians who are generally limited to the individual or herd scale.
When veterinarians criticized the contiguous culling policy, modelers responded with statements that denigrated veterinary knowledge to ‘experience and intuition’ in contrast to the ‘complex and seemingly abstract’ models of the epidemiologists [22]. For example, in one media interview Anderson (modeler from Imperial College), stated that veterinarians were “basing their stance on personal opinion rather than hard scientific assessment” [22], he went on to recommend that their role be in implementation of policy, not deciding policy, and suggested that their close personal connection to the issues impaired their judgment, while modelers had greater objectivity [22]. The veterinarians were equally mistrustful of the epidemiologists, epitomized by the statement of one veterinarian calling the culling “carnage by computer”, characterizing the modelers as isolated remote and inhumane, while suggesting that personal involvement was needed to understand the impacts of the culling [20].
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The fractious atmosphere that developed inhibited the formation of trading zones and subsequently the free flow of data and ideas between experts. The modelers argue that veterinarians would not provide data and the quality of the data, when it was forthcoming, was poor (for example farms were located in the ocean, census data on stock levels were out of date etc.). Veterinarians argued that models were not appropriate predictive tools in this case and the models didn’t reflect biological reality. For example, dairy farms faced five times greater risk of infection yet sheep were the species most intensively slaughtered on the basis of the models [25]. Veterinarians advocated a more local approach, where local experts are consulted and decisions made on a property by property basis (Michel 2001). The breakdown in communication between modelers and vets led to fundamental assumptions being based on flawed data and probably led to unnecessary culling.7 For example, veterinarians investigating the source of infection for an infected premises often assumed that infection spread from the nearest infected premises [25] while in fact the source was usually a distant property, infection being spread by vehicles and people’s clothing etc. If veterinarians had communicated their assumptions to the modelers, fundamental mistakes in the modeling may have been avoided. These mistakes led to overestimating the importance of local spread (e.g., by wind), and therefore overestimating the efficiency of a “firebreak” pre-emptive cull policy [20, 23].
ANTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE, TRADING ZONES, MORAL IMAGINATION AND AN ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO DISASTER MANAGEMENT
The UK authorities were poorly prepared for the unprecedented scale or characteristics of the 2001 FMD outbreak. Contingency planning was based on
7Brian Wynn describes a similar case, where scientists did not consult Cumbrian sheep farmers about radiation levels after Chernobyl. The scientific models predicted a negligible effect from fallout, but considered only the amount of rainfall, not where it would collect at different locations in the fells. Initially, the scientists said there would be no problem, but after six weeks, they recommended a ban on sale of the sheep, which was imposed. The farmers felt that the government ban and remediation plan ignored their knowledge and included silly recommendations like having the sheep eat straw until the grass was no longer radioactive [26]. A trading zone between farmers and scientists, perhaps mediated by someone like a veterinarian who had interactional expertise, would have produced a better plan for dealing with the radioactive fallout.
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the likelihood of there being a maximum of ten FMD cases at any one time, while the 2001 outbreak involved over fifty cases in the opening days of the epidemic [27]. Furthermore there are 7 strains of FMD, and control policies aimed at one particular strain may not be applicable to any other strain. Anticipatory governance with an adaptive, elastic response framework and trading zones between vets and modelers prior to the outbreak would have led to more effective outbreak control.
A lack of interactional expertise and moral imagination led to the failure to develop trading zones between vets and modelers. Cross training of vets in ecology, epidemiology and modeling, and modelers in the context of disease control at the farm to farm level, would have ensured there were experts who could understand the languages and practices of both communities. Moral imagination is important to ensure that each community would be willing to make the effort to see the problem the way the other community did. In the concluding remarks of their retrospective analysis of the crisis, Haydon et al., (2004) [23] state: “What is now required is a marriage of the value of the expert advice so staunchly defended by the veterinary practice, with the benefits of modern surveillance, diagnostic and data management technologies and the analytical capabilities of theoretical modelling at the strategic level.”
If the modelers from Imperial College had been put in a trading zone with veterinary specialists and farmers, then the models could have been used adaptively. For example, the initial assumption about airborne spread could have been quickly compared with data from the field about the actual pattern of spread. Did the data support the model? If not, modify the model and see how the pattern of spread changes. Adaptive management provides a framework for continuous monitoring and evaluation to determine the best strategy to control disease outbreaks. In adaptive management, triangulation between multiple methodologies, notably field, laboratory and computer-based approaches should be taken [28]. Models are more appropriate as tools to model hypothetical scenarios that can be tested in the field and used in conjunction with veterinary expertise to provide guidance in decision-making [20, 25, 29]. Because of the rarity of FMD epidemics and the multiple strains of virus that present a risk, the
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model could not have been tested before the outbreak, and should have been subjected to ongoing collection and analysis of data during the epidemic.
Anticipatory governance would involve building the capacity to handle epidemics by having interactional experts already engaged in trading zones across disciplinary and expertise cultures. Here moral imagination comes into play. Those making the policy prescriptions have to see the impact as if they were a farmer who has breed lines preserved for generations that will be destroyed. Seeing the other’s perspective does not prevent decisive action, but it does mean the action is more likely to be carried out with mutual understanding. Moral imagination is hard in the middle of a crisis: that is why the capacity must be built in advance. In this case, that would have meant contacts with farmers who could quickly help test assumptions from the models as they worked to prevent contagion. The farmers themselves would ideally be interactional experts, at least in the methods used by scientists.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have improved on an existing framework for managing socio-technical-natural systems, using two case studies:
1. Preservation of biodiversity by reducing bycatch.
2. Learning lessons from the way in which the UK handled foot and mouth disease that will lead to more effective response to future epidemics.
These two cases center on an issue that is critical to the survival of any civilization: maintenance of a long-term, reliable food supply without reducing the resilience of the environmental system that sustains life. In the case of bycatch, the answer is to manage fishing so only the species used for food are caught, preserving biodiversity. A corollary is that one must not overharvest the desired species, and bycatch reduction may help with this by developing management techniques that can be used to selectively harvest some species while leaving others to grow back. Such management will depend on the ability to mobilize stakeholders capable of understanding each other and willing to work
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together in trading zones that share not only a common goal, but can develop shared means to attaining the goal.
The case of the UK response to foot and mouth disease illustrates what happens when trading zones are not mobilized and expertise is not shared. One community dominated the response—in this case, quantitative modelers—and their model did not fit the reality as the veterinarians and farmers saw it. Here trading zones facilitated by interactional experts might have helped—but how could they be mobilized in time?
The answer is to put in place anticipatory governance capabilities. The stakeholder communities need to be given incentives and opportunities to maintain trading zones in the absence of a crisis, preserving the kind of common language and shared trust that makes them able to mobilize rapidly in a crisis.
Moral imagination is a critical element: the different stakeholders need to be able to ‘walk in each others shoes’ regularly. When a civilization fragments into groups that do not care about and cannot communicate with one another, it collapses. This is just as true for our emerging global civilization and shared sustainability crisis as for civilizations of the past.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author(s) confirm that this chapter content has no conflicts of interest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Declared none.
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