Hasta La Gadget!

As the US Surgeon General highlighted last week, opioid addiction is a public health crisis destroying families and communities across the country, in blue states and red states, in cities and rural areas. Its causes are as complex as its impact is wide-ranging; solving it will require coordinated action from across the public and private sectors.

In Portland, Maine, local leaders are tackling this crisis with a collaborative effort. The Greater Portland Addiction Collaborative, catalyzed by Mercy Hospital, is bringing together healthcare providers and homeless shelter operators as well as law enforcement and the courts in an integrated, community-led initiative that will serve 1,200 people most in need of support. At the 2016 Clinton Global Initiative America meeting last week in Atlanta, Mercy Hospital launched this collaborative as a CGI America Commitment to Action.

This Collaborative represents one of many inspiring projects underway across the country that illustrate how we are beginning to rewire our approaches to solving social problems. These projects are reducing the number of youth in foster care, helping homeless people find permanent housing, helping former prisoners find and keep jobs, and helping ensure all children are ready to learn when they start school. Uniting these efforts is a fundamental recognition that solving complex problems requires us to coordinate around a clear understanding of the results we seek. And a realization that if we do this well, we will not only address these challenges, we will also substantially reduce the costs of doing so.

This may seem obvious. But most of our social spending does not actually pay for results, such as reducing opioid overdoses. Instead, funders, usually government, pay social service organizations to undertake activities, such as providing drug counseling or giving an addict a bed in a homeless shelter. These activities are often helpful but can’t on their own address the wider problem. When we organize instead around the desired outcome, we are forced to see how the pieces fit together and to collaborate across traditional silos of public and private sector.

At the CGI America meeting in Atlanta, I was privileged to lead discussions about how we can accelerate this shift to outcomes-oriented approaches. Participants in the Outcomes Based Financing Working Group included representatives of the country’s largest hospitals and social service agencies, state and county government leaders, and community finance leaders. The rapid shifts in our healthcare system provide a particular focus for this conversation: With Medicare and Medicaid beginning to pay for keeping groups of patients healthy rather than paying for treatments dispensed, $1.3 trillion in annual spending is at stake. The discussions promise to lead to other, similar commitments.

The discussions were as inspiring as they were wonky. These are some of the smartest people in their fields, committed to thinking about old problems in new ways. A conversation that starts by asking why America pays more for healthcare than any other nation but gets worse outcomes than most of our peers, quickly led to a plan for providing people leaving prison with housing and job prospects.

But old habits are hard to break, and the CGI America meeting highlighted what it will take to collaboratively organize around outcomes:

• Learn by doing: New ways of doing things are always held to higher levels of scrutiny than business as usual. It’s easy to get caught in an endless cycle of research and analysis to prove that collaboration is worth it or results predictable. We need to get comfortable with taking leaps and adjusting as we learn.

• Identify the win-win: Organizing around outcomes is often a much more efficient way to address a social problem in theory. But there is no natural constituency for efficiency; instead, individuals and institutions are oriented to getting the most out of the current way of working. For collaborative ideas to take off, they must benefit all the people we need to join us, in all levels of government, the private sector, and the ultimate beneficiaries of services. We must identify who could be threatened by change and figure out how to help them benefit as well.

• Build trust: Outcomes-oriented approaches often require collaboration between people unused to working together. In the Maine example, hospital workers, homeless shelter operators, drug treatment professionals, and the police have come together around common goals. We must take the time to understand the values and constraints that everyone works under, rather than allowing ourselves to fall back onto stereotypes about people and organizations we may not know well.

There is no short-cut to this work. It requires principled and effective leadership just as much as sophisticated analysis. The stakes are so high and the opportunity for improvement so clear. This galvanizing idea is already drawing support from across the political spectrum. Together, we can make tangible improvements in the lives of many people and communities.

And most exciting in this season of pessimism and political division, the CGI America conversations reinvigorated a sense of optimism and excitement about what we can achieve together when committed citizens work alongside government to collaborate to solve the issues that matter most.

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The grizzly, or brown, bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is posed to lose protections under the Endangered Species Act. Jim Peaco, Yellowstone National Park via flickr

By Jeremy T. Bruskotter, The Ohio State University; John A Vucetich, Michigan Technology University, and Robyn S. Wilson, The Ohio State University

In March, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced its intent to remove protections afforded by the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) to grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE).

Citing four decades of growth in the bear population, the USFWS Director Dan Ashe heralded the decision as “a historic success for partnership-driven wildlife conservation.”

However, conservation organizations oppose “delisting” GYE grizzlies. They cite persistent threats to grizzlies, public opposition to delisting and ongoing scientific uncertainty regarding the population’s viability. Indeed, scientific uncertainty, especially threats posed by a changing climate, is one reason a federal court reversed a similar decision back in 2009, returning federal protections to GYE grizzlies.

According to the ESA, decisions about the listing of species are to be made “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available.” The ESA also mandates that decisions about whether to list a species be guided by a scientific assessment of potential threats to a species.

The ESA is hardly unique in this regard. Numerous environmental statutes mandate that government agencies consider “the best available science” when making decisions. And agencies routinely consult with scientific experts to fullfill such mandates.

These requirements ostensibly insulate decisions from undue political influence. Such provisions work reasonably well when science offers clear and simple, black-and-white answers. But when there is uncertainty, is the expectation of scientific objectivity realistic?

To gain insight into what role bias may play in listing decisions, we surveyed a group of grizzly bear researchers. We found that experts’ judgments were associated with a number of factors outside the “best commercial and scientific data,” including their professional affiliations and social norms. Furthermore, we found that while there is no consensus in the scientific community regarding the threats to grizzly bears, the majority of scientists support continued listing.

The Yellowstone grizzly: a case study in scientific uncertainty

In December of 2014, we (along with graduate student Harmony Szarek and Dr. Eric Toman) contacted
593 individuals who published research related to grizzly or brown bears during the prior decade. We asked them to judge the risk (likelihood and severity) of seven threats identified by the USFWS and to recommend the appropriate conservation status – delisted, threatened or endangered – for GYE grizzlies.

In total, 60 percent of 211 respondents recommended continued protection under the ESA, about one-fifth indicated the population should be delisted and a similar proportion were unsure. When unsure respondents were removed, 74 percent of 172 experts recommended continuing ESA protections (see project report).

As expected, we found considerable evidence of uncertainty in experts’ ratings of risk (indicated by variability across experts). But surprisingly, judgments about the conservation status of grizzlies were unrelated to level of expertise. Rather, conservation judgments were strongly associated with the type of organization that employed the experts.

We found those working for state or federal wildlife agencies were 2-3 times more likely to recommend delisting grizzlies than those employed by academic institutions. Furthermore, experts belonging to The Wildlife Society, which has openly advocated delisting bears since 2011, were more likely than members of other professional organizations (e.g., The American Society of Mammologists) to recommend delisting.

Our data suggest that conservation judgments were influenced not so much by an expert’s knowledge or assessment of risk but more so by their social environment; in particular, the peers with whom an expert regularly interacts and respects.

That interpretation is reinforced by additional analyses indicating that experts’ judgments about bears’ conservation status were statistically associated with their beliefs about (i) the listing judgments of other scientists and managers (i.e., their “social norms”), and (ii) the way humans ought to relate to wild animals – what researchers call “wildlife value orientations.” Further, when controlling for these factors, judgments about the conservation status of grizzlies were not statistically associated with experts’ assessments of risk.

Social and political pressure

Psychologists have long known that social pressure created by the presence of others can influence our thoughts and actions. A now-classic experiment shows that people will even give obviously wrong answers to empirical questions when under the sway of the group. But our experts faced no such pressure. Their responses were given anonymously.

Our data suggest that social pressure can affect judgments even when we’re alone. Of course, while the norms of the social groups we interact with are likely to shape our judgments, we are also likely to select social groups that reflect the norms we embrace. In either case, our concern is that supposed scientific judgments may well be heavily influenced by socially segregated groups and their associated beliefs.

Of course, it is not inherently problematic that an expert’s judgment is affected, in part, by how he or she expects respected peers would judge a given circumstance. Nor is it necessarily problematic that judgments about conservation routinely depend on factors beyond science, like one’s values and emotions. Indeed, the dichotomy between facts and values may well be a false dichotomy, as argued by the great American philosopher Hillary Putnam.

It is, however, potentially problematic when groups of scientists disagree about the appropriate status of a species. Especially when the individuals charged with providing guidance on species recovery are comprised entirely of one of these groups – in the case of GYE grizzly bears, members of state and federal agencies who were 2-3 times more likely to advocate delisting.

What’s concerning here is that, as opposed to academic scientists who are somewhat shielded from politics by tenure, scientists in state and federal agencies can face strong, top-down pressure to reach a particular decision.

Expert judgment and ‘the best available science’

Is there a way to apply the best available science to conservation decisions in order to minimize the effect of undue biases and, to the extent practicable, isolate scientific judgment from other factors? Two sources of scholarly research provide useful insights.

First, scholars in the field of judgment and decision-making have long recognized the problem of implicit bias, noting the often substantial gap between how we would ideally think and how we actually think. These scholars have developed a variety of strategies for assisting people in “debiasing” judgments and decisions.

These strategies can be remarkably simple. Often the best technique is simply being aware of one’s own biases and predispositions, and engaging in “perspective taking” to assess if one’s own judgments are unduly influenced by preexisting values and beliefs.

Other strategies are far more involved, and considerably more labor-intensive. For example, Structured Decision-Making (SDM) is an approach for identifying and evaluating alternatives through a process designed to deal with complexity, value-based trade-offs and competing interests. This process focuses on clearly defining the problem at hand and identifying the full suite of decision-relevant objectives, such that the best available science can be used to evaluate the utility of different actions and the trade-offs in choosing one option over another.

Although such approaches can help decision-makers negotiate uncertainty, their appropriateness depends greatly on their application. One concern is that they can be readily manipulated to obtain a prejudged outcome. An especially pernicious manipulation is the purposeful exclusion of some interests, thereby limiting participants to like-minded individuals and constraining the range of values taken into account. Such concerns lie at the heart of a recent report criticizing the USFWS’s use of SDM to develop a National Wolf Strategy.

A second source of underappreciated insights is from the academic discipline of conservation ethics. A broadly applicable insight from that discipline is that robust conservation decisions result from sound and valid arguments that are necessarily comprised both of scientific premises and ethical premises.

The implication is that in many instances the best an expert can do is explain their judgment fully. That is, to lay bare all of the premises (scientific and otherwise) necessary to arrive at the judgment being proffered; and in so doing, demonstrate the robustness of the judgment (or reveal its flaws).

So an expert judgment is not merely a judgment made within the area of one’s expertise. Rather, an expert judgment is one whose underlying argument can be laid bare and demonstrated to be sound and valid for an audience of nonexperts. Importantly, this includes both scientific assessments as well as value judgments. Sadly, courses that convey skills in analyzing ethical arguments (i.e., courses in critical thinking and environmental ethics) are not typically part of the curricula that produce conservation professionals.

The grizzly, or brown, bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is posed to lose protections under the Endangered Species Act. Jim Peaco, Yellowstone National Park via flickr

Our research should not be taken as an unqualified condemnation of the USFWS’s decision to delist GYE grizzlies, though the fact that nearly three-fourths of experts felt the species should remain listed should give the USFWS pause. Rather, our interest here is to call attention to potential sources of bias, and call on the agencies charged with using the best available science to take efforts to minimize bias to the extent practicable.

We recognize this is likely to prove a challenging task. Fortunately, agencies need not brave that challenge alone. Indeed, the first step in minimizing bias is broadening the type of experts with which agencies consult to include scholars well-versed in these tools.

Jeremy T. Bruskotter, Associate Professor of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University; John A Vucetich, Professor, Michigan Technology University, and Robyn S. Wilson, Associate Professor of Risk Analysis and Decision Science, The Ohio State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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