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 programm es (for an overview of part of the terrain see Price).(1) American pol icy analysts often invoke the National Acid Precipitation Project (NAP AP) as a textbook example of how not to do policy relevant research (s ee for example US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment(2)). We fe ar that the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the NAPAP experienc e. In this paper we re-examine NAPAP with a view towards discovering w hat this experience can teach us about global change research initiati ves.