A major premise of ecosystem-based management (EBM) is that it improves the use of ecology in political decision-making by helping stakeholders reframe highly politicized issues so that the underlying science can be brought to bear on the problem and used in decision-making. Research on EBM projects and programs has demonstrated the importance of social mechanisms to build trust and facilitate consensus-based decision-making, but little work has been done to examine the thesis that ecological science helps reframe stakeholder perspectives of political issues. This study investigates political decision-making in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) basin to determine how the ecosystem focus of policy discussions relates to the logical structure of science in decision-making. A media content analysis and ethnographic research are used in combination to analyze how political discourse invokes ecology in framing of political issues.

Results/Conclusions

Initial results from the media content analysis indicate diverse policy issue frames with little attention to ecology in comparison with hydrology despite decades of ecological research within the ACF basin. This suggests that the structure of scientific logic as “cause and effect” was not important in driving policy issue definitions. In contrast, ethnographic work suggests that the concept of the ACF basin as an ecosystem has played a significant role in a paradigmatic shift that redefined political issues and stakeholders. Political issues were reframed by challenging existing meta-narratives, changing the boundaries of the problem, re-examining taken-for granted relationships, and recognizing the diversity of human interfaces with the ecosystem.