Walter V. Reid is a consulting professor with the Stanford Institute for the Environment in Stanford, California, and was the Director of the Millennuim Ecosystem Assessment.

Fikret Berkes is professor of natural resources and Canada Research Chair in Community-Based Resource Management at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

Thomas J. Wilbanks is a Corporate Research Fellow and Leader of Global Change and Developing Country Programs at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Doris Capistrano is Director of the Forests and Governance Programme at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.

Introduction

WALTER V. REID, FIKRET BERKES, THOMAS J. WILBANKS, AND DORIS CAPISTRANO

Local communities, national governments, and international institutions all face difficult choices concerning goals, priorities, investments, policies, and institutions needed to effectively address interlinked challenges concerning development and the environment (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005a). They must make these choices in the face of substantial uncertainty about current conditions and the potential future consequences of actions taken, or not taken, today. One way to improve those decisions is to ensure that the best knowledge concerning the problem and potential solutions is available to decision makers and the public. Better knowledge does not guarantee that better choices will be made, but it does provide a sound basis for making better decisions and for holding decision makers accountable.

But how can knowledge concerning environment and development be best mobilized in support of decision making? Over the past thirty to forty years, many different mechanisms have been developed to assemble, assess, and synthesize information for use in decision processes, including environmental impact assessments, technology assessments, scientific advisory boards, national environmental reports, global environmental (or development or economic) reports, and global environmental assessments. Both the processes and scientific methods used for these types of "knowledge assessments" have evolved considerably during this time. Modern global assessments, for example, commonly make use of such tools as scenarios and integrated assessment models used infrequently in earlier assessments. And while the "product" (that is, the assessment report) was all that mattered in earlier assessments, more recent assessments increasingly generate a range of products to better respond to specific needs of diverse stakeholders and are often as heavily focused on the process of stakeholder engagement as they are on the product itself.

This book explores two issues at the cutting edge of the further development and evolution of knowledge assessments: how to address issues of scale and how to embrace different knowledge systems in assessments. More specifically, in the case of scale, there are many reasons to think that both the findings of an assessment and the use of those findings could be enhanced if the assessment incorporates information from multiple spatial and temporal scales and if "cross-scale" effects are examined. But what are the real costs and benefits of such multiscale assessments and, from a pragmatic standpoint, just how can they be implemented? In the case of knowledge systems, assessments traditionally have relied almost exclusively on scientific information, yet considerable knowledge relevant to decisions concerning the environment and development can be found outside of formal scientific disciplines. This includes knowledge held within businesses, knowledge held by local resource managers, and traditional knowledge passed down from one generation to the next. But how can a science assessment be transformed into a knowledge assessment? Scientific disciplines have well-developed means of validating information through peer review that would rule out incorporating many other forms of knowledge. How can multiple types of knowledge be incorporated in an assessment when each type of knowledge has its own mechanisms for determining validity and utility?

Although these issues of scale and knowledge systems could be dealt with separately and although the literature on the two issues tends to be distinct, in this book we expressly seek to examine the intersection of these issues for both pragmatic and heuristic reasons. From a pragmatic standpoint, while scientific knowledge dominates the considerations of global and long-term processes (such as climate change), local, traditional, and practitioner's knowledge often dominates the considerations of site- specific resource management issues, where detailed scientific studies may not exist. Thus, in order to deal with "multiple scales," an assessment cannot help but confront the need to deal with multiple types of knowledge, reflecting not only different paradigms but also, in some cases, different processes and phenomena. From a heuristic standpoint, the intersection of the issues of scale, knowledge systems, and assessment provides a rich opportunity for obtaining insights into not just how best to assess knowledge for the purposes of decision making but also how to further our understanding of basic socioecological processes.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

This book was catalyzed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a multiscale assessment of the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being that was carried out between 2001 and 2005 (MA 2003, MA 2005a). The MA was one of the first global assessments to attempt to incorporate multiple scales and multiple knowledge systems. Recognizing that the base of experience on which to develop these dimensions of the assessment was quite limited, the MA organized an international conference—Bridging Scales and Epistemologies: Linking Local Knowledge and Global Science in Multi-scale Assessments—at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, in March 2004. The conference provided an opportunity for assessment practitioners, academic researchers, indigenous peoples, and individuals directly involved in the MA process to discuss theory, learn from case studies and practical experiences, and debate the strengths and weaknesses of various...