Lake erie: Towards a macro-system perspective for decision making

256

Towarh a Macro-systemPerspectivejar Decision Making

LAKE ERIE:

TOWARDS

A MACRO-SYSTEM FOR DECISION

PERSPECTIVE

MAKING

John A. Evans There is much more to planning than working out an effective and economical distribution of available resources and arranging for efficient conduct of a particular operation. Planning implies a thoughtful formulation of goals, the input of as much relevant information as possible, the creation of a system offering multiple options, and the possibility of reformulating goals as circumstances demand. Planners should allow for continuous feedback between anticipation of possible futures and events as they actually happen.’ LAKE Erie’s abusers are prolific, and its users are vocal in their complaints about its condition. The situation is further complicated by jurisdictional considerations. The states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York and the Province of Ontario-representing two federal governments, four state governments, one provincial government and dozens of local governmentsborder upon it, each with its own requirments, each with its own contribution to the lake’s pollution. Views of the problem and its solution reflect a diversity of self-interests: from the swimmer’s “oil spills are ruining our beaches” to the industrialist’s “I have a device to free up the sludge”, * from the home owner’s “after I take a shower I smell worse than before” to the blame-shifter’s “the fault is really municipal solid waste disposal”. The complaints may be legitimate, but they do not usefully articulate the Lake Erie Basin’s problem. Constructive, action-oriented goals are inadequately defined or absent altogether; parochial views prevail. Substantive issues go begging while scarce resources are consumed by the ‘band-aid’ remedies prescribed and by emotional responses to ‘squeaky wheel’ demands. The result is little or no co-ordinated institutional action, which nevertheless has a great many impacts-most of them negative. The conflicting opinions invite polarisation : for example, industrialists who want to block legislation calling for installation of expensive equipment are pitted against conservationists who would like to track down the last microbe in Lake Erie and Mr Evans is a Senior Management and Systems Consultant at The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, Massachusetts. The First Lake Erie Congress was held on 12-14 July 1971 at Erie, Pennsylvania.

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exterminate it. The former, concerned with costs, envisages reduced profits and lay-of&; the latter is too mesmerised by the vision of a pupation-i~~ted world to carefully consider the costs. Both need a common context to which they can relate in gathering, organising, retrieving and sharing information before they can hope to arrive at realistic solutions.

It is needless to enumerate further the kinds of problems that surround a complex environmental situation such as water pollution. But we may note, by way of focusing our view, that the cost of water pollution control is immensethe Environmental Protection Agency estimates2 that it will cost $102 500 million to alleviate pollution over the next five years, and $38 000 million of that will be spent for water pollution. We lack information, regulatory wisdom and power, public consensus and means of co-ordinating effort through multiple political jurisdictions. We lack, as Gene Bylinsky states, both imagination and perspective. It is not enough to deal with this or that poihxtionproblem on a piecemeal, short-run basis. We must consider the complex interaction of a myriad of pollutants and their Iong-sun impact on the web of life, and undertake co-ordinate, systematic remedies. Unless we think more about the future, the future will turn out to be more polluted than the presenLg We have not even agreed on what the problem reafly is, let alone on what clean-up priorities we should follow. We are tempted to conchrde that whatever it is, it is insoluble. We ask if it can be bounded, if conflicting interests can be made to agree on anything. Pollution abatement strategies are afoot in numerous areas, but there is not even any mechanism by which they can be co-ordinated. Too often the response takes the form of piecemeal planning leading to fragmented efforts, with budgets coming before strategy. I can’t remember any other situation in which we have moved out on something that had so massive an economic and social impact with so inadequate a data base.4 * . . The root cause of our abuse of the ~vironment is the principle of fra~entatio~,

outru~in~ the principle of unity . . . producing a higher and higher degree of disorder and disunity.6

This kind of management has been called ‘muddling through’.* Muddling through is to a certain extent unavoidable in facing large-scale, complex social system problems. Our ability to deal with water pollution, for example, is no more perfect than our knowledge-and our knowledge exhibits large gaps. We will haw to muddle through, to some extent, in order to get anywhere. But we can-by scoping, structuring, ordering and pacing our effortsimprove the quality of our muddling through, and thereby lessen negative impacts of the kinds cited above. We can give ourseIves a context within which to wark; we do not have one now. We can begin to develop a broadened perspective of the problem and an improved process for recognising and making the relevant decision, It is past time we sought such an approach-for the rapidly deteriorating en~r~nment demands not only speedy, but more thoughtFUTURES

Sentember lS72

253

Toz.ourdsa M~~o-~ys~~ Per~~ec~ive~oyDecision Making

ful action-as the problem of Lake Erie demonstrates. example, this paper presents one possible approach. The First

Lake

The organisers

Erie

Within

the Lake Erie

Congress

of the First Lake Erie Congress summarised

the state of affairs

thus : The problem itself is unclear. Strong differences of opinions surround reports on the kinds and intensities of pollution in the lake. Widely acceptable lake-wide indicators are virtually non-existent, Governmental and private agencies with relevant regulatory, monitoring and advisory powers hold disparate, disjointed and at times conflicting interests and mandates. Goals for problem-response are undefined. We are not certain how clear we wish the lake to be, and what mechanisms we will employ for establishing trade-offs between clean water and industrial growth. The issue surmounts state and even national boundaries.7 One purpose of the congress was to provide a setting in which USA and Canadian vested and affected interests-scientists, businessmen, conservationists, educators and government administrators-could interact and react. Another purpose was to furnish a forum wherein concerns and mandates could be clarified and new technical and social interventions examined. As conceived, future sessions would also in&de legislative policy-makers who could carry the programmes engendered by this congress into the public arena. The congress was an ad hoc organisation; members’ commitments to their outside allegiances, their preoccupation with their own self-interests, were not relevant to its mission. Since self-interest could only add to the complexity and confusion of the setting and threaten to constrain achievement of the congress’ mission, it became apparent that the only way to establish effective commitment and consensus was to rise above self-interest and shape clear goals and objectives which were relevant to the broad and complex problems afflicting the Lake Erie Basin. This in turn provided a new focus of efforts and motivation which did much to harness the commitment of the participants. Committees were assigned either to the House of Context (which looked to the problem in terms of goals and criteria) or to the House of Interventions (which considered specific means of combating the problem: institutions, standards). This constituted an acid test in comtechnology, techniques, munications; participants could not very well hide behind technical jargon and talk about trade-offs and models. If they wanted their proposals ratified, they had to learn more and more about the other person’s point of view. At the same time, however, there were flaws. One major problem was the separate consideration of goals and means (context and inte~entions). Since the two discussions initially developed in isolation without agreement on basic assumptions, without ground rules as to how their information would be used, the deliberations ran the risk of not being able to integrate interventions with goals when joint committees from the separate Houses convened. To avoid confusion, an immediate inte~ention had to be initiated to improve the interHouse decision-making process. For example, the committee on institutions, working separately from the rest of the congress, was charged with creating new institutional forms. There was

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September 1972

Towards a Macro-system Perspective for Decision Making

no mechanism for relating its deliberations back to the context and intervention discussions, and little was understood of how existing institutions could be remobilised to solve the same problems. When institutional recommendations were brought to the floor of the congress, they made little headway for two main reasons: they threatened existing institutions because they appeared to overlap them and, more importantly, implied to many a redistribution of power which was unjustified; and they were unable to relate the new institutions to the goal or intervention recommendations because each committeee was working in isolation. Unless institutional measures are tied in with goals at an early stage-and are based on sound knowledge of goals and methods of existing institutions as wellthere is little basis for communication. The institutional example is singled out, not because it is unique, or to point a finger at anyone, but because it crystallises the nature of the goals/ means dilemma and the need for an improved decision-making process. There were other examples of hamstrung interactions-inevitable, in a first attempt. As a political experiment, the congress was a microcosm of the real world in its attempts to do something useful about water pollution. The author, in collaboration with key congress participants, was able to help the congress clarify its attack on the critical problem it faced by improving the decision-making methodology available to it. In part, this methodology, by providing a useful framework for multi-committee involvement in setting goals and relating goals to means, broke through the isolation that surrounded the working groups in the early part of the sessions and enabled the congress to draft more effective resolutions and avoid logjams in their passage. The method appears to have potential to macro-system problems in other socio-political contexts. An improved

methodology

for decision-making:

an overview

The improved decision-making process begins with the development of a macro-system perspective8 during its first stage, and proceeds through two additional stages which are repeated iteratively. In detail, the macro-system perspective should: embrace the basic problem area-here the Lake Erie Basinas a whole; scope and bound the problem from the problem’s point of view-in this context, the Lake Erie Basin with its users and abusers and the effects of each on the other; identify and interrelate the important aspects of types of pollution, use, actors, and so forth; and provide a basis for developing a goal-setting framework within which priorities for solution can be realistically assigned. To be effective, the improved decision-making process must scope, stage, structure and order the attack on the problem by: emphasising the clarity of problem-finding and goal formulation made possible by the macro-system perspective; identifying the technical-economic sensitivity analyses and system design studies needed to develop a programme plan that meets required standards; indicating the extent and limitations of knowledge and techniques; and developing criteria for allocating financial and human resources for solving the problem. The result should be, first, that we really do focus our energies on the right

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259

problem, and second, that we come up with better options, plans and strategies for its solution. The process begins by viewing the problem from the problem’s point of view. This means we must look at the Basin as an entity within which certain physical resources are going on, certain needs are manifest, certain problems are evident-and on which impinge the demands of a variety of users and abusers. By developing a macro-system perspective first-moving out-we develop a context that provides the background needed for thinking through the complexities, relationships and sensitivities that must be considered-moving in-to establish realistic goals and politically negotiable and technically feasible salutions and implementation strategies in a cost/effective way. The effort now can be broken into stages, each of which can be further subdivided into a series of steps.

Three complexikies As shown in Figure f, we can identify three basic stages of a process for successfully attacking large-scale socio-political problems. Each is a complexity which must be unraveled not only in itself, but also in respect to the other stages : o problem-find~g (definition of what the problem really is) ; e problem-solving (analysis of means and costs-social, legal, political, economic and technical-of combating it and the benefits of doing so) ; and o implementation (working out organisational and financial strategies for putting the solution into effect). Al three stages incorporate fallback strategies and rely on feedback (interrelation, revision and recombination of what has been learned throughout the process) to refine and re-refine each stage until the goals, techniques and implementation strategies become realistic and workable. Here the method is deliberately simplified to indicate the kind of ‘quick-look’ use that might be made of this procedure during a first study of the Lake Erie Basin water pollution problem, It should be kept in mind that such a first study must be followed by many further iterations, during which each new piece of information is allowed to impact on all stages. The process offers us a way of organising for problem-finding and problem-solving by ordering the aspects and pacing the solution, using appropriate information and a common decisionmaking process.

We may begin our first stage (see Figure I) by identifying a series of key aspects of the pollution problem which need to be studied, classified and related to each other in order to provide goals for the next stage. These will help us understand what it is we are attacking. There are, for example: multiple types of pollution; multiple types of contaminants per type of pollution; muttiple uses of water; multiple political boundaries; effects of contaminants on the various uses to which the water is put; lack of consensus as to both the relative importance of the water uses, and extent of effects of various contaminants on those uses.

Towards a Macroqstem

Problem solving

Implementation

Problem funding t-

PersgeGtivefor Decision Making

--I I

l

GLals

0 Criteria

Macro-system perspective

l

STDs

l

Technical plan

0 Org. plan l Financial plan Decreasing pollution

Goal

Effective $ use Minimal social costs

Fallback and feedback Figure 1. Macro-system decision-making process

Though we have tried to simplify the situation by structuring it, even this list shows that we have by no means accounted for all of the complexity of the problem as yet. Further iterations and feedback from successive stages of the decision-making process will turn up much more detail : informational, technological and social. We have barely made a start; at the same time, we are at the beginning of an effort to arrive at a more useful data base which will allow us to set better goals according to information common to all and construct a list of negotiable options. Complexity

of problem-solving

The second stage (see Figure 1) of our method is primarily concerned with specific technological interventions. Once we have understood what the problem is, we can begin to consider what techniques would be more attractive, what system designs we shall have to conceive, what specific technical-economic sensitivity analyses will need to be performed and, based on this, what standards are pragmatically feasible in terms of both costs and benefits. Armed with a structured understanding of our goals, we can attempt to ascertain the limits of existing knowledge and our present technical capability to provide solutions. Where gaps are identified, we can start to comprehend what new information, techniques, and so forth, we are likely to need in order to fulfill the goals we have set. Doubtless we shall discover that some of our findings will suggest areas of research and development and thus alter our goals in some respect. Briefly, our efforts during this stage may be classified as: identification of system technological capability (surveying the state-of-the-art of pollution abatement techniques and their use); analytical modelling (analysing the effects of pollution abatement techniques on the various types of pollution and water use) ; and technical-economic sensitivity analysis (using the models to

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L

261

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Towards a Macro-system Perspective for Decision Making

identify economic realities, both in dollars and social costs, of various interventions). We should emerge from our problem-solving stage with a preliminary idea of the techniques and standards necessary to achieve the goals we set earlier-but, it should be remembered, we will only be able to sharpen this idea into usable form after many iterations. Complexity

of implementation

Meanwhile, we move into the stage in which we must test whether we have realistically conceived our goals, standards and programmes-whether the options we have identified are broad enough to be negotiable among the wide spectrum of organisational and financial interests that impinge on Lake Erie. The implementation strategies must be tailorable to: the funds available; current interests of potential funding sources; and interests and plans of existing federal, state and local government pollution agencies. They may also be sensitive to: the inter- and intra-state political power of polluting industries; and the extent to which various groups of sufferers from pollution benefit or lose if recommended technical interventions are implemented. Successful implementation strategies will largely depend upon our ability, first, to make a sound case for social and economic benefits that exceed the social and economic costs to the interests concerned, and second, to conceive ways of organising in order to increase the political power of sufferer groups-for example, new intra-state organisational forms, better information dissemination techniques to more comprehensively organised and previously unidentified citizen groups. These and other facets of the implementation stage will have considerable impact on our problem-finding and problem-solving considerations. The following section includes some details on how the initial or problemfinding stage of this improved decision-making process was applied at the Lake Erie Congress. A simple, static context map was used to guide and focus the discussions. The map referred to as Figure 2 in the following section represents a refined version of that map. Application

of the improved

decision-making

process

Time was a scarce commodity at the congress, just as-in a larger sense-it is for our society in its battle to control water pollution. Once it was realised that the efforts of the participants had to be scoped, structured, and ordered to become effective, the need for a macro-system perspective and a tool for communicating it became self-evident. The development of a macro-system perspective is crucial to the entire process, and so it is achieved as the first step of the first or problem-finding stage. The context map shown in Figure 2 allows its viewers to gain some initial insights as to the size and concentration of industry, the size and distribution of municipalities, the number of political jurisdictions, and the relative extent of land area, by jurisdiction, that borders on Lake Erie.

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Towards a Macro-systemPetqkctivefor Decision Making

NEW YORK

PENNSYLVANIA

/3=

& *

Types of uses

Types of pollution

Actors 0 Upstream polluters

0 Municipal wastes

*

0 Downstream

a Industrial wastes

l Fishing

0 Funding agencies

0 Agricultural

l Wastes assimilation

0 Pollution products, businesses

0 Oil spills

sufferers

l Existing political

wastes

Recreation

l Aesthetics

units

Figure 2. Developing a macro-system perspective: unraveiling and structuring aspects of complexity

Use of this map during the First Lake Erie Congress conveyed some useful information to the various vested and affected interests represented at the sessions. By comparing the size of individual municipalities and the concentration of industry, for example, they could derive some insights as to the correlation between the volume of waste dumped into Lake Erie and the severity and extent of the Lake’s pollution problems. They could begin to understand what information they needed about industries and municipalities. It also became clear that Michigan probably is less concerned about water pollution in Lake Erie than New York State. As a state, Michigan has other lakes to use for recreational purposes and for commercial fishing. Property owners in New York, however, run yacht clubs and resorts that border on Lake Erie. Their assessed property values are decreasing because the beaches are polluted and the fish are dying. Alleviating the Lake Erie pollution problem at one of its prime sources, Detroit, may decrease profits to some of the industries located there while increasing profits to resort owners in New York, an insight which the situation map immediately helps to crystallise. This kind of perspective is important in developing a rationale for sharing the costs of a pollution control programme. It should be reflected in the financial and organisational plans proposed for implementing the solution. The map also illustrates the fact that existing governmental and private funding sources and pollution control agencies belong to different national and FUTURES

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Towads a Macro-systemPerspectivefor Decision Making

state governments. Pollution abatement industries are similarly distributed. We realise how sensitive we must be in cutting across political boundaries to involve the agencies and interests of various states in our goals and objectives. This is particularly true in the case of Lake Erie where two very large statesMichigan and Pennsylvania-border on the Lake only in very small portions of their total shoreline and of their total land area. And Michigan, because it is located upstream, is even less likely to be interested than Pennsylvania in clean-up programmes. In summary, a macro-system perspective can help us to understand the problem from the problem’s point of view by increasing our span of awarenessby forcing us to forget our preoccupation with current flows and levels of specific microbes and contaminants and augment our understanding of the problem by relating the ecological aspects to the social, political, industri.al and technological viewpoints. The goal-setting

process

Viewing Lake Erie’s problems from the problem’s point of view permitted the congress participants to identify three critical aspects, also shown in Figure 2: Actors (polluters and sufferers); Types of pollution; and Types of uses (the ways in which Lake Erie serves the various publics, industries and governments who use it). To implement the problem-finding stage of the methodology, taxonomies were developed by key congress participants for two of the critical aspects : Types of pollution and Types of uses. This information was restructured into matrix form (see Figure 3) in order to focus and limit the debate to relevant issues and thereby provide a context for action. The congress was asked for its opinions regarding the relationships between each type of pollution and each type of use (for simplicity at this stage, all uses were rated equally important). The opinions were scaled from 1 to 3, with 1 indicating the least, and 3 the most, severe negative impact of each type of pollution to the rate of deterioration of the lake. The numbers shown in the matrix represent an aggregation of results. The consensus of the Congress is shown to be that sewage is the most extensive type of pollution and that recreation is the use most severely affected. And, because the ratings were based largely on opinions, and probably not on the best factual knowledge available, the conclusions regarding pollution-alleviation priorities can only be considered tentative. However, the matrix does provide some insight on the relative value of the uses to the participants themselves. Impact of the decision-making political problems

methodology

on complex

socio-

The multi-stage decision-making process described in this paper offers a means for guiding future congresses-as well as the efforts of other groups concerned with complex social-political issues-along relevant and integratable paths. The improved process permits the attack on the problem to be scoped, staged, structured and ordered by emphasising the clarity of the problem and goal formulation made possible from the macro-system perspective; identifying the

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Towa& Q Macro-system Pets&e&e

for Decision

Making

technical-economic sensitivity analyses and system design studies needed to develop a programme plan that meets required standards; indicating the extent and limitation of current knowledge and techniques; and developing criteria for allocating financial and human resources to solve the problem. Although the application of the multi-stage decision-making process was limited to a partial implementation of the problem-finding stage, significant impacts on problem definition, goal statements and criteria for resource allocation were produced. By surfacing critical aspects of the Lake Erie Basin’s probIems from a macro-system perspective and then restructuring those aspects into a matrix that focused on crystallising relationships between types of pollution and types of Lake Erie uses, a context for action was structured and bounded. This context helped to sharpen debate and limit it to relevant issues, thus providing clear-cut guidance to the committees. By working through the problem-finding stage within a relatable context, Congress participants were able to resolve the goals/means dilemma and move towards specific, unambiguous and implementable goal statements. The work of the Environmental Context Committee now could be meshed with that of the Technical Interventions Committee during joint sessions. By deriving a matrix to aid the goal-setting process, insight on value judgements of the vested and affected interests were provided. These values must be taken into account in any attempt to create and maintain a healthy environment. How each vested and affected interest views the severity of the problem is one of the inputs needed in determi~ng criteria for assigning alleviation priorities, allocating resources and developing alternative implementation strategies. Other criteria include the variety of water uses affected, the extent of the geographical areas affected, the rates of deterioration due to types of pollution involved, present and future. From these inputs we can then consider the technical, economic, institutional and financial feasibility of various solutions and their implementations.

Macro-system perspective

Types of wafer uses

Waste Recrea- Fish- Aesthe- assimiration tion ing tics

lndustries

Poliution Rate of priority Potable detetiora- indiHealth water tion cator

Type of pollution * Sewage l Industrial wastes l Other waste sources (cdrre~gi;~ water-

3 3 2

f

:

:

:

2”

:

I

2

2

1

1

1

1

1

l Agrikultural wastes 0 Power generation

2 1

22 $1

-

111

7

4

0 Indicator of pollutlon impact on specific use

11

9

9

: 7

7

Scale 1 to 3-progressively worse Rate of deterioration-prognosis limited to about 5 years Figure 3. Matrix for aiding the goal-setting

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process

19 17 11 11 6

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Towards a Macro-system Perspective for Decision Making

Refinements

and potential

Several refinements are needed in order to realise the potential of the improved decision-making process described in this paper. These include: detailing the use/pollution classification scheme (see Figure 3) to achieve a more balanced and comprehensive classification; identifying the major contaminants associated with each type of pollution; incorporating the political units into the matrix in order to specifically link types of pollution by source and by impact; using the insights and knowledge gained from the above to refine the multistage decision-making process to include the identification and characterisation of specific steps to be taken within each stage; organising all existing data so that it is easily accessible to advocacy and adversary groups as they debate the issues associated with the various steps in each stage of the decision-making process. If this is accomplished, it will ensure that the data and expert opinion available to future congresses will be effectively used to resolve socially and politically sensitive issues such as those regarding the effects of various types of pollution on various types of uses. It will also provide a mechanism for exploring the feelings of the various groups represented by congress participants, an insight essential in developing implementation options for various political jurisdictions and affected and vested interests. The potential of the process lies in its ability to focus and limit discussion to relevant issues, such as those that will accompany the translation of the recent $2 500 million USA-Canadian anti-pollution pact into feasible plans and achievable goals Q. It can be used to provide a common context for training environmental planners at the local, state and national levels; and, most significantly perhaps, is that it promises the mechanism by which interdisciplinary skills can begin to move forward together in a positive, collaborative way to establish the criteria, goals, trade-offs and give direction to the basic research and development efforts necessary to combat complex socio-political issues. References 1. Rent Dubos, Reason Awake: Science for Man (New York, Columbia University Press, 1970) 2. The .New York Times, 7 August 1971 3. Gene Bylinsky, “The long-littered path to clean air and water”, Fortune, LXXXII, October 1970, page 134 4. Walter Hamilton, Executive Director of the National Industrial Pollution Control Council, quoted by Gene Bylinsky, “The mounting bill for pollution control”, Fortune, LXXXII, July 1971, page 132 in The Environment-A 5. Max Ways, “How to think about the environment”, National Mission for the Seventies (New York, Harper and Row, 1969) 6. Charles Lindblom, “The science of muddling through”, in Public Administration Review, Spring 1959, pages 79-88 7. The First Lake Erie Congress Agenda, page 1 8. See Frank P. Davidson, “Macro engineering: a capability in search of a methodology”, Futures, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1969 9. “Nixon, Trudeau sign pact to clean up Great Lakes”, Boston Sunday Globe, 16 April 1972

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