THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF ACID-RAIN - SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR SCIENCE POLICY ASSESSMENT

There is currently a great deal of discussion in various national and international fora about how to design global change research programmes (for an overview of part of the terrain see Price).(1) American policy analysts often invoke the National Acid Precipitation Project (NAPAP) as a textbook example of how not to do policy relevant research (see for example US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment(2)). We fear that the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the NAPAP experience. In this paper we re-examine NAPAP with a view towards discovering what this experience can teach us about global change research initiatives.