tailieunhanh - This article was published in the January/February 2007 issue of Environment

In the second half of the 1990s economic growth has been favourable stimulated by a clear fall in inte- rest rates. Unemployment was rapidly decreasing and the demand for housing has been growing causing house prices to double since 1991. Production of new housing in urban areas has not increased to the same extent as the population. A shortage of housing and high house prices, especially in the capital city of Oslo and surrounding municipalities, have been the result. Especially the main cities and notably the capital Oslo have experienced an increasing pressure on the housing market, with high prices even for older modest housing. This has made it quite difficult for low-income. | This article was published in the January February 2007 issue of Environment. Volume 49 Number 1 pages 20-34. This article is in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted. For information about Environment see http . I A DIALOGUE I NOT A DIATrIb 3 - n _ _ - Effective Integration of Science ị and Policy through Joint Fact Fin by Herman A. Karl Lawrence E. Susskind and Katherine H. Wallace TODD A T a reception honoring his service as the chairman of the House Science Committee in November 2006 retiring Representative Sherwood Boehlert R-NY quipped that Washington is a town where people say they are for science-based decisionmaking until the overwhelming scientific consensus leads to a politically inconvenient conclusion. 1 He added We should be guided by sound science. We shouldn t have politics determining science. While few in the scientific community or the public at large would disagree with this argument a problem arises when parties involved in a dispute disagree on what science has found or on the very definition of sound science. Indeed the news is filled with cases where politics has trumped science particularly in environmental decisionmaking. Typically in such cases parties on both sides of the dispute continue to argue that science is on their side or exploit the uncertainty in the data and interpretations to delay a decision. A case in point is the debate surrounding climate change in the United To move forward we need to acknowledge the role politics plays in policymaking and adopt a new and better way of ensuring that both science and politics are given their due in public policymaking. Boehlert s remarks echo the sentiments of President Theodore Roosevelt and other political progressives at the end of the nineteenth century. They believed that the nation s resources could only be conserved for future generations through objective and rational decisionmaking or management as they called it enabled .