• Complain

Michael Heazle - Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions

Here you can read online Michael Heazle - Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2010, publisher: Routledge, genre: Science / Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Michael Heazle Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions
  • Book:
    Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Routledge
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2010
  • City:
    London
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Uncertainty in Policy Making explores how uncertainty is interpreted and used by policy makers, experts and politicians. It argues that conventional notions of rational, evidence-based policy making - hailed by governments and organisations across the world as the only way to make good policy - is an impossible aim in highly complex and uncertain environments; the blind pursuit of such a rational goal is in fact irrational in a world of competing values and interests. The book centres around two high-profile and important case studies: the Iraq war and climate change policy in the US, UK and Australia. Based on three years research, including interviews with experts such as Hans Blix, Paul Pillar, and Brian Jones, these two case studies show that the treatment of uncertainty issues in specialist advice is largely determined by how well the advice fits with or contradicts the policy goals and orientation of the policy elite. Instead of allowing the debates to be side-tracked by arguments over whose science or expert advice is more right, we must accept that uncertainty in complex issues is unavoidable and recognise the values and interests that lie at the heart of the issues. The book offers a hedging approach which will enable policy makers to manage rather than eliminate uncertainty.

Michael Heazle: author's other books


Who wrote Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Uncertainty in Policy Making
Science in Society Series Series Editor Steve Rayner Institute for Science - photo 1
Science in Society Series
Series Editor: Steve Rayner
Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford
Editorial Board: Gary Kass, Anne Kerr, Melissa Leach, Angela Liberatore,
Stan Metcalfe, Paul Nightingale, Timothy O'Riordan, Nick Pidgeon, Ortwin Renn,
Dan Sarewitz, Andrew Webster, James Wilsdon, Steve Yearley
Animals as Biotechnology
Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies
Richard Twine
Business Planning for Turbulent Times
New Methods for Applying Scenarios
Edited by Rafael Ramrez, John W. Selsky and Kees van der Heijden
Debating Climate Change
Pathways through Argument to Agreement
Elizabeth L. Malone
Democratizing Technology
Risk, Responsibility and the Regulation of Chemicals
Anne Chapman
Genomics and Society
Legal, Ethical and Social Dimensions
Edited by George Gaskell and Martin W. Bauer
Influenza and Public Health
Learning from Past Pandemics
Edited by Tamara Giles-Vernick and Susan Craddock, with Jennifer Gunn
Marginalized Reproduction
Ethnicity, Infertility and Reproductive Technologies
Lorraine Culley, Nicky Hudson and Floor van Rooij
Nanotechnology
Risk, Ethics and Law
Edited by Geoffrey Hunt and Michael Mehta
Resolving Messy Policy Problems
Handling Conflict in Environmental, Transport, Health and Ageing Policy
Steven Ney
Uncertainty in Policy Making
Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions
Michael Heazle
Unnatural Selection
The Challenges of Engineering Tomorrow's People
Edited by Peter Healey and Steve Rayner
Vaccine Anxieties
Global Science, Child Health and Society
Melissa Leach and James Fairhead
A Web of Prevention
Biological Weapons, Life Sciences and the Governance of Research
Edited by Brian Rappert and Caitrona McLeish
Uncertainty in Policy Making
Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions
Michael Heazle
First published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2010 For a full list of - photo 2
First published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2010
For a full list of publications please contact:
Earthscan
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Earthscan is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright Michael Heazle, 2010. Published by Taylor & Francis.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notices
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-84971-083-1 hardback
Typeset by Composition and Design Services
Cover design by Susanne Harris
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heazle, Michael.
Uncertainty in policy making: values and evidence in complex decisions/Michael Heazle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84971-083-1 (hardback)
1. Political planningUnited States. 2. United StatesPolitics and government. 3. Policy sciences. I. Title.
JK468.P64H43 2010
320.6dc22
2010005699
For Kazu, Alexi and Jake, and my parents
Contents
List of Figures and Tables Figures Tables Foreword - photo 3
List of Figures and Tables
Figures Tables Foreword Policy makers habitually portray the policies - photo 4
Figures
Tables
Foreword
Policy makers habitually portray the policies they make as flowing directly - photo 5
Policy makers habitually portray the policies they make as flowing, directly and inexorably, from facts. Strong political incentives underlie such portrayals. The policy maker looks good in so far as he is perceived to be acting on facts rather than on beliefs, hunches or wishes. He looks informed rather than ignorant. He also is better able to muster support for his policy, which he depicts as a product of reality rather than ideology. Wars or other policy departures are presented as acts of necessity rather than of choice.
An outstanding example, one of those that Michael Heazle examines in this volume, was the adducing of supposed facts about unconventional weapons programmes as one of the chief rationales for launching a US-led offensive war against Iraq in 2003. The Iraq War was an extreme instance of an ostensibly fact-based case being used to sell a policy decision that was reached in other ways and on other grounds. The famously flawed intelligence analysis about Iraqi weapons that became associated with that war had not been requested (or, at the highest levels, even read) by the US administration of George W. Bush, which, in any case, had no process for examining whether initiating the war was a good idea. Whatever empirical input flawed or accurate, on weapons programmes or anything else that might have been relevant to Bush's war decision had no opportunity to influence it, at least as far as a formal governmental process was concerned. The war was the product of instinct, ideology and long-held wishes to remake the politics and economics of the Middle East. It did not stem from the ostensible, and mistaken, facts that were used to sell it.
Although the Iraq War was an extreme case, it was by no means the only instance of a policy issue being coloured, and even redefined, as an intelligence issue. The Cold War presented other examples, including ones involving the strategic arms race with the Soviet Union and Moscow's relations with violent revolutionary groups. Hard-fought battles in the 1970s and 1980s over intelligence assessments on these subjects, purportedly to establish an accurate factual basis for making policy, were really ideologically driven contests over the policy itself.
For the ideologically committed, depicting policy issues as factual or intelligence issues has the aforementioned advantage of salesmanship. For the less committed or the less involved or less informed, such as members of legislatures who must vote on policies the wisdom of which they are unsure this depiction offers a different attraction. It relieves (or rather, appears to relieve) the individual from making his own judgement about policy. My duty, he can say, is just to follow the facts.
Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions»

Look at similar books to Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions»

Discussion, reviews of the book Uncertainty in Policy Making: Values and Evidence in Complex Decisions and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.