114
CHAPTER 3 Structuring Policy Problems
120
Boundary Estimate
100%
100
75%
80
Rival Causes
Percent
50%
60
40
25%
20
0%
22
23
0
16
1
10 13
4
7
Stakeholders
FIGURE C3.1
Pareto chart-cumulative frequency of rival causes of traffic fatalities
"black lung" disease and other high-risk conditions
Evaluating Research on Risk in Mine Safety
have been intensively investigated. Despite the
and Health
importance of the black lung problem, additional
In 1997, a branch of the U.S. Office of Mine Safety
research is not a priority. Accordingly, data on high
and Health Research began a process of strategic
expected severity (probability \ severity) do not alone
planning. The aim of the process was to reach
provide a sufficient basis for prioritizing research
consensus, if possible, on the prioritization of
problems. Because judgments about research priorities
research projects that address different aspects of
are based on multiple, hidden, and frequently
risk associated with the safety and health of miners.
conflicting criteria, it is important to uncover and
Priority setting in this and other research
evaluate these criteria as part of the process of problem
organizations typically seeks to build consensus under
structuring. This is a classic ill-structured problem for
conditions in which researchers, research managers,
which the fatal error is defining the wrong problem.
and external stakeholders use conflicting criteria to
The problem-structuring process had three major
evaluate the relative merits of their own and other
research projects. Even when reliable and valid data are objectives. The first was to uncover hidden sources of
available--for example, quantitative data from large- agreement and disagreement, recognizing that
sample studies of the probabilities of different kinds of disagreement is an opportunity for identifying
mine injuries and deaths-it is often unclear whether alternative approaches to priority setting. Second, the
"objective" measures of risk, by themselves, provide a process was designed to generate from stakeholders
sufficient basis for prioritizing research. The difficulty the criteria they use to evaluate research on risks
is that extra-scientific as well as scientific factors affect affecting mine safety and health. Third, the process
judgments about the relative merits of research on risk.
For example, the probabilities of the occurrence of
employed graphs, matrices, and other visual displays
in order to externalize the criteria underlying individua
Demonstration Exercise
109
Beach resident- now $10 poorer-still spends
a lot of time driving around the block.
counties where apple orchards abound (Wall
Street Journal, December 1, 1977).
Edward J. Moody ... argues persuasively that
wurship of Satan has the effect of normalizing
abnormal people. Thus, to "keep secret" from
ordinary people their satanic power and exis-
tence, such persons are urged to behave as
straight as possible. The effect, of course, is
more effective social relations—the goal for
tich Satan's name has been invoked in the
first place! (P. E. Hammond, "Review of
Religious Movements in Contemporary
America, Science, May 2, 1975, p. 442).
Residents of San Francisco's North Beach
seas must now pay $10 for the privilege of
parking in their own neighborhood. A residen-
tal parking plan was recently implemented to
prevent commuters from using the area as a
daytime parking lot. But according to a story
in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (March 14,
1978), the plan has in no way improved the
residential parking situation. Numbers of
commuters from outlying districts of the city
have simply been changing their car registra-
tions to North Beach addresses, A North
Choose one of these problems and write a
short essay on how classification analysis, hier-
archy analysis, and synectics might be used to
structure this problem.
7. Construct a scenario on the state of one of the
following problem situations in the year 2030:
Availability of public mass transit
Arms control and national security
Crime prevention and public safety
Quality of public education
State of the world's ecological system
8. Select two editorials on a current issue of public
policy from two newspapers (e.g., New York
Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Le
Monde) or news magazine (e.g., Newsweek, The
New Republic, National Review). After reading
the editorial:
a. Use the procedures for argumentation
analysis (Chapter 8) to display contending
positions and underlying assumptions.
b. Rate the assumptions and plot them accord-
ing to their plausibility and importance
(Figure 3.16).
c. Which arguments are the most plausible?
H.
31:
of Planning,
155-69.)
are
“Department
peas-
6. The ill-structured problems that follow
nal Policy Analysis (now the Journal of Policy
taken from illustrations published in the jour-
Analysis and Management) under the title
of Unintended Consequences."
For several thousand years, Egyptian agricul-
ture depended on the fertilizing sediment
deposited by the flood of the Nile. No longer,
however. Due to expensive modern technology
intended to improve the age-old lot of the
John Gall, writing in the New York Times
ant, Egypt's fields must be artificially fertilized.
Magazine (December 26, 1976), reports that
the Nile sediment is now deposited in the
Aswan Dam's Lake Nasser. Much of the dam's
electrical output is used to supply enormous
amounts of electricity to new fertilizer plants
made necessary by the construction of the dam.
University of Illinois ecologists can explain
how certain harmful field mice spread from
their native regions into areas where they had
never before been found. They are using the
new, limited-access, cross-country highways
,
which turn out to be easy escape routes with
few barriers. Older highways and roads, as
well as railroad rights-of-way, run into towns
and villages every few miles and effectively
deter mice migration. The Illinois group found
that before interstate highways
central Illinois, one type of mouse was limited
to a single county. But in six years of super
highways the four-inch-long creatures
the state. The ecologists are concerned lest the
spread sixty miles south through the center of
mice, a species that loves to chew on trees,
become a threat in central and southern
ran through
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