Inside the Decision-Making Process: Ethnography and Environmental Risk Management
Author(s)
Liebow, Edward
Abstract
This article is not from the “tales from the field” genre, filled with accounts of embarrassments I’ve endured as a fieldworker. Rather, much of my recent work concerns how local knowledge may inform environmental risk management decisions. This work relies on insights offered by a number of scholars who argue that our views of what constitute environmental hazards worth worrying about are situated in a more encompassing scheme of social organization and value orientations. From this viewpoint, culturally patterned orientations toward equity, consent, trust, liability and time may be of particular relevance to the selection and evaluation of environmental hazards. This article focuses on locating cultural knowledge and questions what qualifies as applicable knowledge and insight in reducing the risk of environmental hazard. The author argues that one specific aim of the practice of anthropology in environmental planning is to give voice to the knowledge and insights of nonspecialists, whose experience, often with a series of highly relevant events, lends authority to lay judgments about environmental dangers and the public agencies responsible for managing those dangers.
