Scientists and stakeholders: Evaluating the legitimacy of the Illinois River basin management protocol

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss a persistent problem in the legitimation of environmental policy: the proper interaction between scientific expertise and stakeholder autonomy. I refer my discussion to an ongoing project by a team of researchers, of which I am a member, from the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Oklahoma State University (OSU), to develop a management protocol for the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma. I first review briefly the circumstances of the Illinois River watershed and summarize the OU/OSU protocol. I then discuss the increasing use in recent years of stakeholder processes in the environmental policy arena. Next, I present a scheme that represents the ways that both scientific assessment and stakeholder processes factor into policy legitimation.  Finally, I use this scheme to illuminate the roles assigned to scientific experts and stakeholders in the OU/OSU protocol and to explore the broader question of the complex relation between those roles in general.