This Professional Development Fellowship--supported by the Science, Technology & Society Program at NSF--develops a training and research project for an informed institutional analysis of stewardship of contaminated sites. Contamination by chemicals and radionuclides is being cleaned up at hundreds of sites around the US. While Federal, state, and local agencies, as well as various NGOs and private parties, are moving ahead with clean-ups of many sites, oftentimes, cleanup does not mean that all contaminants have been removed. When residual contamination remains, mechanisms must be established for longterm institutional management (also called longterm stewardship) of the remaining contaminants and of the systems put in place to contain them. The mechanisms may involve a combination of engineering controls, such as physical barriers intended to prevent contaminant migration or intrusion, and institutional controls, such as restriction of development or public access to contain or prevent exposures to residual contamination.
The need for longterm stewardship (LTS) of sites is widespread. Analytic frameworks for designing and sustaining LTS systems are lacking, however, and efforts must draw on models and frameworks from other contexts. This Professional Development Fellowship promotes development of knowledge to support improvements in practical applications of LTS systems. Research conducted as part of the Fellowship will explore in 2-3 case studies perspectives about: a) LTS system requirements for anticipating, recognizing, and responding to failures of engineering and institutional controls, and b) the role of public participation to achieve these functions. The research compares how these perspectives reflect analytical propositions about creating and sustaining resource and hazard management institutions over long periods of time. The four streams of research used to identify propositions for creating and sustaining LTS systems focus on: high reliability organizations, adaptive management, risk governance, and common-pool resources. The intellectual merit of this work is to build conceptual understandings and theory of LTS and of public participation in LTS. The Fellowship provides broader impacts by informing practice in a pressing social challenge: the protection of health and the environment from sites that will remain contaminated for very long periods of time.
