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Impact Assessment in an effort to better inform planners and decision-makers of the potential
outcomes of proposed projects, programs and policies. These requirements – including the
acquisition of baseline data and trends, scoping of probable outcomes to proposed actions, and
projections of estimated effects – fundamentally shape the architecture of resource management
frameworks. However, these management technologies of hard science – particularly under
conditions of risk and uncertainty – also run the risk of becoming what Foucault has called a
“regime of truth”, used by decision-makers in attempts to shield themselves from the fundamental
political discourse each of those technologies abstractly represents (Foucault, as quoted in Scott
2012).
In the United States, current ‘regimes of truth’ still go to great lengths and expense to prioritize
particular forms of inquiry and management practice. Scientists charged with ecosystem based
management test and tinker with systematic and rational conceptual management frameworks while
the complex issues facing these agencies have yet to become systematic and rational problems.
Millions of dollars are spent on a handful of all-too-brief marine research cruises in the U.S. Arctic
to capture data on physical and biological oceanographic conditions that, in the end, often fail to
describe the seasonal pulse and pattern of an ecological system that is known intimately by local or
indigenous residents. The rich empirical data captured by these cruises are undeniably valuable. They
are necessary and appropriate for integration into risk computations and political discourses
surrounding important governance decisions at certain governance scales. However, both the data
and the scales of governance to which they are directed often remain inherently unresponsive to the
day-to-day survival needs of subsistence hunters and fishers or to the management of human wellbeing in small coastal communities where qualitative calculations of environmental change manifest
themselves in descriptive place names, oral histories, and the cultural norms and practices rarely
recognized or given value by the “usual” indicators of sustainable development or economic welfare.
As Karen Scott has discussed (2012), “in a policy world dominated by discourses of ‘hard’ evidence,
policy actors have to back up their decisions with statistical evidence that represents the interests of
all concerned as fully as possible” (8). Yet, ironically, the increasing wealth of hard evidence
available to today’s decision-makers has not been shown to have an empirical linkage to substantive
changes in policy or societal outcomes (Flyvbjerg 1998; Boulanger 2007; Rydin 2007; Rydin et al.
2003; Levett 1998; Cobb 2000; Innes 1990; Scott 2012). Indeed, given the high levels of uncertainty
that hangs over predictive science and the vague probabilistic nature of risk assessments, it should
not be surprising that socio-political factors drive most decisions and that science is instead used to
shield decision-makers against the inherent challenges and difficulties of social debate, negotiation
and collective action.
Resource managers in both the U.S. and Canada responsible for updating or developing plans to
govern the proposed multi-sector use of marine environments are increasingly looking to
environmental consulting firms to fill knowledge gaps and temporarily augment the institutional
capacity of management agencies charged with fulfilling unique planning mandates. Many
environmental consultant firms have, in the process, been tasked by their public sector clients with
the independent development of indicators to describe environmental and coastal community well-
Sojka