Decision-making under environmental uncertainty

Abstract

The paper's main concern is with different decision-making models for environmental issues and with the hypotheses of rationality underlying such models. The hypothesis supported here is that most environmental problems are in a context of uncertainty, of irreversibility and of complexity. We shall explain why stressing the role of these elements implies a reversal of the traditional attitude towards decision-making. This presupposes a paradigm of economic rationality much broader that that of orthodox economics, called “procedural rationality”. Our paper is in two parts. The first part concerns the limits of the stochastic environmental approaches based on the Bayesian decision theory and on a substantive rationality hypothesis. The second part concerns the decision-making analyses based upon a procedural rationality, as well as their ability to take account of the interactions between uncertainty, irreversibility and complexity.