Framing effectiveness in impact assessment: Discourse accommodation in controversial infrastructure development

There is ongoing debate about the effectiveness of impact assessment tools, which matters both because of the threat to future practice of the tools which are frequently perceived to be ineffective, and because of the disillusionment that can ensue, and controversy generated, amongst stakeholders in a decision context where opportunities for meaningful debate have not been provided. In this article we regard debate about the meaning of effectiveness in impact assessment as an inevitable consequence of increased participation in environmental decision-making, and therefore frame effectiveness based on an inclusive democracy role to mean the extent to which impact assessment can accommodate civil society discourse. Our aim is to investigate effectiveness based on this framing by looking at one type of impact assessment - environmental impact assessment (EIA) - in two controversial project proposals: the HS2 rail network in England; and the A4DS motorway in the Netherlands. Documentary analysis and interviews held with key civil society stakeholders have been deployed to identify discourses that were mobilised in the cases. EIA was found to be able to accommodate only one out of four discourses that were identified; for the other three it did not provide the space for the arguments that characterised opposition. The conclusion in relation to debate on framings of effectiveness is that EIA will not be considered effective by the majority of stakeholders. EIA was established to support decision-making through a better understanding of impacts, so its ineffectiveness is unsurprising when its role is perceived to be broader. However, there remains a need to map discourses in different decision contexts and to analyse the extent to which the range of discourses are accommodated throughout the decision process, and the role of impact assessment in those processes, before recommendations can be made to either improve impact assessment effectiveness, or whether it is simply perceptions of effectiveness that need to be improved

Introduction: The effectiveness of impact assessment instruments

The global application of impact assessment instruments to achieve a variety of policy integration goals (e.g. the mainstreaming of environmental, gender or economic efficiency concerns) continues to proliferate. These instruments represent important components of contemporary political governance and hence are an important locus for applied research. This special issue of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal critically examines 'state-of-the-art' knowledge and understanding of the effectiveness of impact assessment instruments. Six articles explore this subject from a variety of orientations (in terms of theoretical versus empirical emphasis, policy integration concerns, contributors' beliefs and framing etc.). Individually and cumulatively, these articles make a powerful contribution to learning about the 'thorny' issue of effectiveness and its implications for the theory and practice of impact assessment

Contracts or scripts? A critical review of the application of institutional theories to the study of environmental change

The impact of new institutionalism on the study of human environment interactions has been meaningful. Institutional perspectives have further shaped and modified the field problems of common pool resources, environmental hazards, and risk and environmental management. Given the relative potential of institutional theories to increase the comprehension of the various dimensions of human-environmental interactions, it has become increasingly important to attempt to consolidate different interpretations of what institutions are, and how they mediate and constrain possibilities for more successful environmental outcomes. This article focuses primarily on contending ontological perspectives on institutions and institutional change. It argues that what should guide the application of institutional theories in practical research regarding environmental change is the ontological dimension, and that the focus of research should be on uncovering the underlying dynamics of institutional change. In doing so, it calls for a methodological pluralism in the investigation of the role institutions play in driving/managing for environmental change

Selective Attention, Priming, and Foraging Behavior

Animals selectively filter and transform their sensory input, increasing the accuracy with which some stimuli are detected and effectively ignoring others. This filtering process, collectively referred to as “selective attention,” takes place at a variety of different levels in the nervous system. It was described in considerable detail by William James over a century ago (James, 1890/1950) and has been a principal focus of research in cognitive psychology for nearly 50 years (Parasuraman & Davies, 1984; Pashler, 1998; Richards, 1998). Investigations of selective attention have also been central to the study of animal cognition, where the process of attention has been considered to play an important role in a variety of behavioral paradigms (e.g.. Mackintosh, 1975; Riley & Roitblat, 1978). Most attention research, particularly in the realm of visual search, has been directed to the nature of the filtering processes applied to relatively simple, geometrical stimuli (reviewed in Humphreys & Bruce, 1989). Such stimuli can easily be varied along independent physical dimensions, allowing the relationship between targets and distracters to be controlled with considerable precision (e.g., Treisman & Gelade, 1980). However, the role of selective attention in determining responses to more complex visual stimuli, of the sort that organisms regularly deal with in the course of their normal behavioral routines, has been less explored. This neglect is of particular concern because, in the absence of artificial limitations on search time, simple geometrical stimuli do not place a sufficient demand on information processing capacity to demonstrate selective attention effects (Riley & Leith, 1976). In addition to their use of simple geometrical stimuli, most attention studies in animals have used tasks with no clear, direct connection to the perceptual world of the species under study. There is, however, substantial literature suggesting that selective attention may play a significant role in nature, particularly in predator-prey interactions. A review of this literature, integrating it with more customary work on attentional psychology, raises questions of considerable interest to both psychologists and biologists. For psychologists, naturalistic experimental methods using more complex, multidimensional stimuli cast light on additional, unanticipated aspects of attentional processes in animals. For biologists, selective attention has long been considered a primary cognitive mechanism underlying the well-known tendency of visually searching predators to concentrate their attacks on relatively common prey types. As a consequence, the circumstances under which selective attention occurs and the magnitude of the enhancement in detection accuracy that results can have significant ecological and evolutionary effects. Our goal in this chapter, therefore, is to integrate data and hypotheses from both the ecological and the cognitive perspectives. When these two groups of literature are considered together, a variety of parallels emerge, parallels that lay the groundwork for a unified account of attentional phenomena in animals

The Evolution of Virtual Ecology

The relationship between the perceptual and cognitive abilities of predatory birds and the appearance of their insect prey has long been of intense interest to evolutionary biologists. One classic example is crypsis, the correspondence between the appearance of prey species and of the substrates on which they rest which has long been considered a prime illustration of effects of natural selection, in this case operating against individuals that were more readily detected by predators (Poulton 1890; Wallace 1891). But the influences of predator psychology are broader, more complex, and more subtle than just pattern matching. Many cryptic prey, including the underwing moths (Catocala) that rest against tree bark in the daytime, are also polymorphic. This discontinuous variation in appearance is thought to make prey harder to find initially and harder to detect even after the predator has learned of their appearance (Poulton 1890). In contrast to cryptic prey, other prey appear to have taken the opposite route, being quite conspicuous in appearance. The aposematic or warning coloration displayed by many distasteful or poisonous species appears to facilitate avoidance learning by predators (Guilford 1990; Schuler & Roper 1992). Batesian mimicry (Bates 1862), in which palatable prey evolve to imitate the appearance of aposematic species, appears to take advantage of the predator\u27s tendency to stimulus generalization (Oaten et al. 1975). Even a century after many of these ideas were first proposed, however, much of the work in this area is still based on correlational data or on experiments that bear only indirectly on the issue. The reason lies in part in the intractable nature of hypotheses about behavioral evolution. Behavior lacks a substantive fossil record, which means that any account of its origins must necessarily be inferential. Worse, behavioral evolution usually involves a dynamic interplay between the behavior and the environment that is difficult to reconstruct adequately under controlled conditions. As a result, even inferential investigations of the phenomenon generally bear only indirectly on the conditions under which the behavior actually evolved. To circumvent this constraint, we have developed an experimental method that allows realistic, repeatable simulation of the original processes involved in the evolution of color patterns in prey organisms. This virtual ecology technique provides an innovative approach to the experimental study of evolutionary dynamics and a quantum improvement in the ability to test evolutionary hypotheses. Our purpose in this chapter is to describe the development of the virtual ecology technique as the product of the cross-fertilization of ideas from a variety of disciplines, including operant psychology, behavioral ecology, population dynamics, and evolutionary computer algorithms. We have chosen to do this in a personal, autobiographical way in an attempt to communicate the flavor of what it has actually been like to experience these developments. In order to be historically accurate, we needed to emphasize the roles of coincidence and happenstance as well as of knowledge and synthesis in this process. We hope that the chapter will be fun to read and that it will provide useful insight into one example of how scientific research actually takes place

Searching images and the meaning of alarm calls

The snake alarm call of Japanese tits prompts nesting adults to search for and mob the reptile until it is driven away. From playback experiments, Suzuki (2018) has inferred that the call provides an associative cue, evoking a searching image of the salient visual features of the predator—a novel approach to exploring visual attention and vocal communication in the wild

Giving-Up as a Poisson Process: The Departure Decision of the Green Lacewing

Predators that forage for aggregated prey appear to require a decision rule for determining the point at which to discontinue their search in a given prey patch and move on to another. Although the optimum rule depends heavily on features of the searching behavior of the predator and the distribution of the prey (Oaten 1977), most previous authors have assumed that the decision must involve an assessment of the capture rate within a patch and a comparison with the mean capture rate in the environment as a whole (Krebs 1978). When the perceived quality of the given patch becomes significantly less than the expected quality of the next one, the predator should leave. Because the time interval since the last prey capture is the most readily available measure of the instantaneous capture rate, it has been suggested that foraging animals may monitor this interval and leave the patch when it exceeds some critical value (Krebs 1978). The “giving-up time,” by this argument, should be uniform across patches within a habitat and inversely proportional, across habitats, to the mean prey availability. Although this inference has been supported by empirical studies, Cowie & Krebs (1979) have recently suggested that the correlation could be a sampling artifact. Even if departure from a patch were independent of the interval between prey encounters, the mean giving-up time would still be shorter, on the average, in a rich environment than in a poor one. A reanalysis of several experiments on patch foraging by predatory insects, described in detail elsewhere (Bond 1980), can be used to test Cowie & Krebs’ independence hypothesis