ABSTRACT
Place-based environmental management strategies grant greater control to local decision makers. Such approaches are gaining increased acceptance in the United States as federal agencies transfer authority to state, county and city governments. For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program is part of the U.S. Clean Water Act and establishes “the maximum amount of pollution that a water body can receive and still meet water quality standards”. The program establishes pollution regulatory standards but lets local decision-makers determine how these standards will be reached. Solutions to environmental problems derived from such place-based decision-making have the potential to be innovative, efficacious, and more politically feasible than those derived from more traditional top-down approaches. Local decision-makers, however, confront at least three new and significant challenges as they attempt to implement place-based environmental management. First, the systems under consideration are often complex and interrelated. For example, the reduction of a stream’s sediment load below TMDL requirements may be achievable, but only at an economic cost to the agricultural community. Second, solutions to environmental problems often impact multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders may hold diverse viewpoints on the relative importance of alternative criteria (e.g., water quality vs. farm income) and, thus, the search for acceptable solutions often requires consensus building and compromise. Finally, while the set of potential solutions (the solution space) to spatial problems is often very large, the set of solutions evaluated by decision-makers is often limited to a few options. The “best” alternative, therefore, may remain unidentified.
