In a later post I will describe in detail the attributes of a legitimate socioeconomic study and assessment. For now I am proposing what I call (somewhat tongue-in-cheek)… the Falck-Zepeda law of legitimate socioeconomic studies and assessments:
“For any socioeconomic study and/or assessment to be legitimate and credible, it has to have a fair shot of having any outcome possible –positive, negative or neutral- AND follow strictly the standards of excellence for such assessments”
A legitimate study and/or assessment may thus contradict or even negate any or all position or positions held by one or all stakeholders in a debate, even those who will not be convinced by such study regardless of how good the study is or even if the body of evidence contradicts their position.
Those of us who are socioeconomic assessors –and thus may be classified as “experts”- have to maintain research independence and thus have to present results regardless of the outcome. We cannot yield on this aspect of our commitment to science and excellence.
Dear Dr Falck-Zepeda,
I have been following your posts for about a year and I am most interested in the new direction of your focus in this blog. As someone who is just starting a career in GMO biosafety policies, I have been struck by the apparent paralysis of many regulatory systems worldwide concerning GMO applications. Almost in all cases, my impression was that this paralysis is the result of conflicting views over the usefulness of GMOs in solving immediate problems (e.g. agriculture or food security) or over their safety. And again, in almost every case, all these conflicting views are backed by various studies and experts. This situation puts decision-makers and the public at large in difficulty regarding who or what to believe. Yet decision-making needs to be made according to objective evidence. Evidence-based decision-making seems to be clearer in medicine, where qualitative standards for studies are well known. There are also qualitative standards for social science studies, while acknowledging their limitations compared with medical studies (it is almost impossible to conduct double blind random studies in social sciences, for example). Nonetheless, such standards exist, yet they do not seem to be employed in assessing the evidence provided to decision-makers. What hope do you have, even if devising specific quality standards for socio-economic studies and assessments, that these standards will help “clean” the messy worldwide regulatory picture for GMOs?
Sincerely,
MR
Dear MR,
First of all, thank you very much for reading my blog and taking time to make your comment. I will respond your questions in a much more extended manner shortly in a blog posting. The abbreviated response is that I am quite skeptical that we will be able to standardize socioeconomic assessments in a meaningful way. That is why I focus on elements of best practice and describing processes. We can talk about quality standards for evidence and on mapping issues to assessment methods…but there is no best way to do assessments. In the blog I have presented some discussion about the latter issues. The International Association for Impact Assessment has a set of guidelines and publications that can help mold this discussion click here for documents
Thank you kindly, Dr Falck-Zepeda, for the answer and useful links.
And the international guidelines for social impact assessments…for the document click here