Project Summary: Doctoral Dissertation Research in STS: Preventing marine bioinvasions in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand: Science, politics, and institutions across national contexts This dissertation project explores the emergence and evolution of marine bioinvasions as a scientific and policy issue. It studies key factors and processes shaping policy responses to that problem. The key motivation for this inquiry is: Bioinvasions are a critical component of human-caused global change, yet the bioinvasions issue is conspicuously under-addressed because of how science, politics, and policy interact. In addition to their practical urgency and significance, bioinvasions offer rich material to investigate the complex dynamics of environmental decision-making along contested policy-science boundaries. To understand how these boundaries and dynamics shape each other, I do a cross-national comparison of marine bioinvasions science and policy in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. At global and local scales, the rapidly growing human-mediated movement of non-indigenous species across previous biogeographic barriers to migration is changing marine ecosystems with serious and irreversible ecological consequences. Over the past two decades, scientific researchers and government agencies have shifted in their views of the risks that bioinvasions pose, seeing these as much more serious than previously understood. They have also changed in their understandings of the problems nature, causes, magnitude, and implications. Yet official government and policy responses have largely remained unaltered in this context of a changing problem. Across relevant policy levels and across national policy contexts, policy-making does not adequately reflect new scientific insights about the dynamics and the significance of the bioinvasions phenomenon, although scientists and policy-makers have widely acknowledged this scientific knowledge as relevant, credible, and legitimate. Intellectual Merit. The study examines two questions: What are the processes that determine whether changes in scientific understanding of a problems' nature, dynamics, and significance become reflected in relevant policy and management approaches? And what are the processes behind apparent failures of policy and practice to respond to changes in relevant scientific knowledge and insight? These questions are approached by analyzing how science-politics-institutional interactions are shaping the formulation of bioinvasions policy in the U. S., Australia, and New Zealand, and by comparing respective national dynamics of bioinvasions science and policy-making. The three countries are selected as cases because of their similarities in experience with bioinvasions and shared history of policy concern. But they also have significant differences in scientific, policy and management responses to the bioinvasions problem. .Analysis of relevant issues is grounded in key theoretical insights from the social studies of science and technology. These include: the reciprocal influences between science and policy; the significance of boundary negotiations around scientific and political preferences, practices and priorities in shaping the processes and outcomes of policy and regulation; and how the simultaneous production of scientific knowledge and political order within the process of making policy decisions can ensure the legitimacy of both, and thereby facilitate more productive policy making. My exploration of bioinvasions policy dynamics and the current bioinvasions policy paradox is further grounded in the following hypotheses: Bioinvasions are a complex and multi-faceted problem, and different actors in the policy process have different perceptions regarding the policy relevance, significance, and manageability of various problem facets. In the course of policy decision-making, scientific insights regarding the preferred policy responses can therefore be tempered by views on what is politically and bureaucratically desired and acceptable; the ultimate policy outcomes therefore depend on the particulars of negotiating tradeoffs between ecologically informed conservation priorities, and politically and bureaucratically defined policy prerogatives and constraints. Archival and interview research conducted so far in the U.S. and Australia has confirmed the relevance of these hypotheses, and validated their usefulness as a tool for examining and explaining bioinvasions policy dynamics. This proposal seeks to continue developing these insights in New Zealand, the U.S., and Australia. Broader Impacts The research also aims to use insights from the cross-national comparison of bioinvasions policy processes and outcomes in recommending new ways of managing science-policy interactions to improve environmental decision making.
