Structured Decision Making for the Real World: A Qualitative Analysis of How Governance Structures En(Dis)able SDM in Local Watershed Planning.

Structured decision making (SDM) is defined by having a variety of characteristics, including a focus on clarifying the context, defining all relevant objectives, developing alternatives, predicting consequences, evaluating tradeoffs, and monitoring and learning from decisions. Some of the most compelling aspects for public decision making are the inclusion of diverse values in the selection of objectives and the opportunity to create a shared understanding of the system, both the context and potential tradeoffs of different strategies. While the technological requirements of the most rigid SDM processes are out of reach of most public agencies and interested publics, governance structures may enable the use of different stages of SDM to improve decisions, without relying on complete datasets and extensive statistical knowledge. Building upon a 4-year participatory research project, we analyze the use of SDM with four different watershed groups to understand the governance factors that facilitated the use of SDM as a decision support tool. All groups aimed to add human wellbeing objectives to existing natural resource health objectives when making decisions. We found that who defines the objectives and required outputs of planning as well as how decisions were made influenced the extent to which groups completed SDM steps. We also demonstrate that decisions can be improved by engaging in each step of the SDM process, and the perfect decision may not depend on completing all steps.