As governments and other institutions become aware of new information about changing conditions in their environments, they alter their goals, expectations, and behavior. This process by which institutions change their skills, beliefs, and/or interpretations in response to new information and experiences is called social learning. Most research on learning has focused on individuals and small groups. This project will continue research at a different scale, focusing on the ways that national governments alter their attitudes and actions with respect to environmental risks as new information becomes available. Work begun in 1989 will be continued, with initial emphasis on the prototyping of research methods in a case study in the Federal Republic of Germany. Those efforts will lay the foundation for a subsequent comparative analysis that also will include the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, the U.S.S.R., the United Kingdom, and the European Community. Within each jurisdiction, news reports, official records, and other sources of information will be used to outline the historical sequence of major environmental events and responses. Among the major functions for which processes in different states will be compared are (1) risk identification and characterization, (2) risk context, (3) risk estimation, (4) identification of control options, (5) assessment of costs of implementation, (6) goal selection, (7) strategy selection, (8) strategy implementation, and (9) strategy evaluation. This project will continue research on an important line of inquiry into the processes by which human institutions perceive and respond to changing environmental conditions. It will enhance our general understandings of how large, complex institutions function, and it will provide a comparative framework for assessing the ways in which different nations evaluate and deal with global environmental change.
