Bonnie C. Wintle

Expert status and performance.

Expert judgements are essential when time and resources are stretched or we face novel dilemmas requiring fast solutions. Good advice can save lives and large sums of money. Typically, experts are defined by their qualifications, track record and experience [1], [2]. The social expectation hypothesis argues that more highly regarded and more experienced experts will give better advice. We asked experts to predict how they will perform, and how their peers will perform, on sets of questions. The results indicate that the way experts regard each other is consistent, but unfortunately, ranks are a poor guide to actual performance. Expert advice will be more accurate if technical decisions routinely use broadly-defined expert groups, structured question protocols and feedback.

Using Strategic Foresight to Assess Conservation Opportunity

The nature of conservation challenges can foster a reactive, rather than proactive approach to decision making. Failure to anticipate problems before they escalate results in the need for more costly and time-consuming solutions. Proactive conservation requires forward-looking approaches to decision making that consider possible futures without being overly constrained by the past. Strategic foresight provides a structured process for considering the most desirable future and for mapping the most efficient and effective approaches to promoting that future with tools that facilitate creative thinking. The process involves 6 steps: setting the scope, collecting inputs, analyzing signals, interpreting the information, determining how to act, and implementing the outcomes. Strategic foresight is ideal for seeking, recognizing, and realizing conservation opportunities because it explicitly encourages a broad-minded, forward-looking perspective on an issue. Despite its potential value, the foresight process is rarely used to address conservation issues, and previous attempts have generally failed to influence policy. We present the strategic foresight process as it can be used for proactive conservation planning, describing some of the key tools in the foresight tool kit and how they can be used to identify and exploit different types of conservation opportunities. Scanning is an important tool for collecting and organizing diverse streams of information and can be used to recognize new opportunities and those that could be created. Scenario planning explores how current trends, drivers of change, and key uncertainties might influence the future and can be used to identify barriers to opportunities. Backcasting is used to map out a path to a goal and can determine how to remove barriers to opportunities. We highlight how the foresight process was used to identify conservation opportunities during the development of a strategic plan to address climate change in New York State. The plan identified solutions that should be effective across a range of possible futures. Illustrating the application of strategic foresight to identify conservation opportunities should provide the impetus for decision makers to explore strategic foresight as a way to support more proactive conservation policy, planning, and management.

Classical meets modern in the IDEA protocol for structured expert judgement

Expert judgement is pervasive in all forms of risk analysis, yet the development of tools to deal with such judgements in a repeatable and transparent fashion is relatively recent. This work outlines new findings related to an approach to expert elicitation termed the IDEA protocol. IDEA combines psychologically robust interactions among experts with mathematical aggregation of individual estimates. In particular, this research explores whether communication among experts adversely effects the reliability of group estimates. Using data from estimates of the outcomes of geopolitical events, we find that loss of independence is relatively modest and it is compensated by improvements in group accuracy.

Exploring Risk Judgments in a Trade Dispute Using Bayesian Networks

Bayesian networks (BNs) are graphical modeling tools that are generally recommended for exploring what-if scenarios, visualizing systems and problems, and for communication between stakeholders during decision making. In this article, we investigate their potential for exploring different perspectives in trade disputes. To do so, we draw on a specific case study that was arbitrated by the World Trade Organization (WTO): the Australia-New Zealand apples dispute. The dispute centered on disagreement about judgments contained within Australias 2006 import risk analysis (IRA). We built a range of BNs of increasing complexity that modeled various approaches to undertaking IRAs, from the basic qualitative and semi-quantitative risk analyses routinely performed in government agencies, to the more complex quantitative simulation undertaken by Australia in the apples dispute. We found the BNs useful for exploring disagreements under uncertainty because they are probabilistic and transparently represent steps in the analysis. Different scenarios and evidence can easily be entered. Specifically, we explore the sensitivity of the risk output to different judgments (particularly volume of trade). Thus, we explore how BNs could usefully aid WTO dispute settlement. We conclude that BNs are preferable to basic qualitative and semi-quantitative risk analyses because they offer an accessible interface and are mathematically sound. However, most current BN modeling tools are limited compared with complex simulations, as was used in the 2006 apples IRA. Although complex simulations may be more accurate, they are a black box for stakeholders. BNs have the potential to be a transparent aid to complex decision making, but they are currently computationally limited. Recent technological software developments are promising.

Interpreting risk in international trade

After an eight year risk analysis process, Biosecurity Australia released its final import risk analysis (IRA) in 2006, allowing apple imports from New Zealand into Australia, subject to stringent phytosanitary measures. New Zealand apple imports were previously banned due to the risks of transmitting pests and diseases, in particular, fire blight. New Zealand commenced dispute settlement proceedings at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the grounds that Australia’s risk mitigation measures were scientifically unjustified, thus violating international trade law. The WTO largely ruled in New Zealand’s favour in August 2010, and again in November after Australia unsuccessfully appealed. This paper argues that the cause and nature of this dispute stem largely from the varied risk interpretations in the context of international trade and, by extension, from the non-scientific factors (such as values, interests and politics) shaping these interpretations. It examines the risk analysis, identifying a number of potentially important risk governance issues in the IRA process, derives the judgements and perspectives of the main stakeholders and the factors influencing their position, and finally analyses the case in the context of the WTO dispute settlement system. Despite the intent of the relevant WTO legislation, the dispute may not be appropriately reconciled through scientific considerations alone. The case study is used to explore the challenges accompanying import risk analysis under severe uncertainty.