Decision Support in your stocking

'Tis the season to shop! I just received an email from the National Academies of Sciences with their recommended gift list for scientists and engineers - and #2 was Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate - great gift for myself!
On a closer look, this book has a lot to offer. The chapter on decision support and learning is a great review of a broad interdisciplinary domain, and offers some novel synthetic insights of its own, including Table 3.1 on learning modes. I found the two right hand columns, Adaptive Management and Deliberation with Analysis particularly informative. These two columns are pretty much the same, except for two key, and inextricably linked, differences: the assumed decision maker and the goals. Adaptive management assumes a unitary decision maker who sets goals that persist for the life of the program. In contrast, Deliberation with Analysis assumes a diverse decision maker with goals emerging from collaboration and subject to change.
I found this distinction interesting because the description of AM given in the book is a dead ringer for what I've called the "North American School" before, and more recently my student Jamie McFadden described as the "Experimental Resilience School" in a forthcoming paper. This isn't surprising as Kai Lee was one of the panel members for the report. Deliberation with Analysis sounds much like Adaptive Co-management to me - clearly there are some linkages to follow up on.

Political Ecology

In a recent post I wondered what a political ecologist looked like. This was an admittedly off-hand comment triggered by a reference to political economists. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that in fact there ARE political ecologists! Who knew?! I've yet to meet one, or at least be aware of meeting one, so I can't answer my original question yet. However, reading a couple articles from the Journal of Political Ecology I can say that it bears little resemblance to ecology as I know it. According to Wikipedia (my goto source for weird terminology)

Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena.

My first thought was "AHA, I'm an apolitical ecologist", but no, I'm not sure that's true either, because later the article refers to ecological social sciences - another term that's left me puzzled. Anyway, its clear that I'm not a political ecologist, despite being an ecologist that is engaging with policy and politics. Phew.