Incorporating Value Trade-offs into Community-Based Environmental Risk Decisions

Although much attention has been given to the role of community stakeholders in developing environmental risk-management policies, most local and national initiatives are better known for their failings than their successes. One reason for this continuing difficulty, we contend, is a reluctance to address the many difficult value trade-offs that necessarily arise in the course of creating and evaluating alternative risk-management options. In this paper we discuss six reasons why such trade-offs are difficult and, for each, present helpful techniques from the decision sciences along with case study examples of successful applications.