Coastal management using public judgments, importance scales, and predetermined schedule

A predetermined schedule of sanctions and regulations that reflect both sci entific knowledge of resources and the preference and judgments of resource users in the community may provide a useful guide for management decisions involving complex coastal resource systems. Such a schedule can be impleme nted by constructing scales reflecting public judgments of the relative imp ortance of adverse impacts on resources, or of activities causing such impa cts. The importance scales can then be used to assess existing regulations and current management priorities and to serve as a guide for revisions and changes to current practice, for the design of new policy, for rationalizi ng regulatory controls, and for determining damage awards and other deterre nce sanctions. The resulting evolution of a schedule can improve the consis tency of resource use with community preferences by, for example, prescribi ng more severe restrictions on what are widely agreed to be more serious ha rms and lesser controls on less important ones. The application of this app roach is demonstrated using Ban Don Bay, Thailand.