Science Policy Project Overview

Back to GM Food - The Major Debates

Background
Effective science policy making depends on our ability to manage information. In the face of continuous information overload, policy makers need to be able to easily and quickly navigate through levels of detail, see patterns, notice claims rebuttals and counterrebuttals, weigh evidence, consider uncertainty, evaluate risk, and assess unknowns.

The new maps project
Our project has been designing and developing highly visual "cognitive maps" that facilitate the management and navigation through major issues. These maps have benefits similar to those of geographic maps. They provide patterned abstractions of policy landscapes that permit the decision makers and recommenders to consider which roads to take within the wider policy context. Like the hundreds of different projections of maps (e.g. polar or Mercator), they provide different ways of viewing issues and their backgrounds. Like the current geographic mapping software, they enable policy makers to drill down to the appropriate level of detail. In short they provide an invaluable information management tool.

Argumentation maps
One such type of cognitive map we have been developing is the argumentation map (for a review, see Nature, 12/12/98, 396, 426-7) The reviewer said,"There is no mush here...The honesty of the editing comes through in the project's very refusal to stick to the usual diet of the great and the good." The purpose of the argumentation map is to provide an easy-to-trace overview of debates. The maps provide both an intellectual history of the debate and easy to identify boundaries of the disputes (i.e. the current status of the debates). This type of cognitive map will be invaluable for it will provide the science policy maker both with a quick history and a way to characterize the unknowns and uncertainties.

Other maps
Other maps we are developing will address such aspects of the issues areas as:

• How should the changing, public context of the science issues, "mediasphere", be portrayed?
• How should the relevant political and economic contexts to the issues be rendered?
• How should different levels of policy debate be visualized?
• How shall large numbers of stakeholders with multiple interests be displayed?

Goals of the new maps project
1. Our current project is developing prototypes that will have wide applicability to many (if not all) science policy issues. In so doing we are both developing a tool and a way of thinking about policy.

2. At the same time we are also deeply involved in mapping a specific science policy issue, the debates about how to implement and regulate genetically modified crops and food.

Project director
Robert E. Horn, visiting scholar, Stanford University