Environmental Decision Making in the Argentine Delta

Abstract

This analysis focuses on decision making by groups of people (organizations, government) in addressing a particular political issue (failure by the government to enforce water quality regulations in the Paraná Delta of Argentina). A subjective ethnographic approach teases out the subtleties to understand the context in which legal redress is thwarted by a stew of good intentions, suspicions, poor communication, entrenched interests, and institutional dysfunction. The process that ultimately leads to a decision by a judicial arm of government does not readily fit general process models of decision making; instead it evokes a set of concepts that characterize and underscore the situation’s uniqueness. The goals, methods, and interpretations in this study enrich and extend the dimensions of the comparative decision making project by incorporating a humanities perspective. In contrast with the objective behavioral approaches noted in the previous chapters, here the relation between intention and outcome plays a central role. Kane’s analysis focuses on decision making by groups of people (organizations, government) in addressing a particular political issue (failure by the government to enforce water quality regulations in the Paraná Delta of Argentina). She uses a subjective ethnographic approach to tease out the subtleties and to understand the context in which legal redress is thwarted by a stew of good intentions, suspicions, poor communication, entrenched interests, and institutional dysfunction. The process that ultimately leads to a decision by a judicial arm of government does not readily fit general process models of decision making; instead it evokes a set of concepts that characterize and underscore the situation’s uniqueness. The goals, methods, and interpretations in this study enrich and extend the dimensions of the comparative decision-making project by incorporating a humanities perspective. In contrast with the objective behavioral approaches emphasized in most of the book’s chapters, here the relation between intention and outcome plays a central role.