By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
It’s not hard to find people who support restoring and sustaining oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay. Agreeing on the best way to manage such efforts, however, is more difficult. Challenges arise when it comes to prioritizing different goals, such as rebuilding oyster reefs, improving water quality, and supporting a fishery.
That’s why an interdisciplinary team will be working together on a National Science Foundation-funded study to observe and improve the process of collaborative decision-making, using oyster restoration as its focus.
The team, which includes several biologists from the University of Maryland, members of the law faculty at Florida State University, and Virginia Sea Grant Director Troy Hartley, will work with about 15 stakeholders who represent differing objectives for oyster restoration and management in the bay. Throughout eight workshops over two years, they’ll evaluate those objectives and the policy options that could help to achieve them. The resulting model will combine physical features of the bay, the history of its oyster population, the benefits of oysters to the ecosystem, and the stakeholders’ objectives.
Hartley, who is also a Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences research associate professor, will lead the social science portion of the project. In his field of public policy and implementation, observational studies are much more common than experiments because researchers rarely have control over the variables that drive behavior or outcomes. But in this case, the same people will be attending the same workshops for two years, creating a more controlled environment.
“You’ve got an experiment,” says Hartley. “It’s a very unique advantage for social science in real world marine management settings.”
Over the course of the study, Hartley will measure changes in stakeholders’ attitudes and perceptions, including the credibility of the science and models they’re exposed to and the perceived legitimacy of the modeling process.
He’ll also employ network analysis strategies to assess how the participating stakeholders’ professional networks change over time and what role the stakeholders play in the oyster management workshop network.
“Network analysis captures snapshots in time of professional or social networks,” says Hartley. “You kind of plop into a situation and measure everyone’s connection to each other at that moment. Then they go back to work, their network evolves, and tomorrow’s network looks and functions differently.”
The result is a long-term look at how networks evolve over time. “That longitudinal network analysis is really exciting to do from a social science and theoretical perspective, because it hasn’t been done before,” says Hartley.
Hartley will also develop additional measures of connections in the network. A common measure is how often people communicate with each other. Hartley is interested in refining other measures as well, such as the usefulness of the network, the stakeholders’ mutual understanding of the network, its influence on stakeholders, and even its trustworthiness.
“Those are tough factors to measure,” Hartley admits, but he wants to discover how a network of trusted individuals dealing with trusted science may change through deliberation and inform people’s willingness to use science in decision-making. Still, he says, “We’re really just scratching the surface on how to measure these things in networks. It is a very exciting time to be a social scientist studying coastal and marine resource management.”
