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 Assessment²). 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.