Environmental management decisions: A paramorphic analysis of planning permission for mineral development

Many decisions on the management of the environment are made within the Town and Country Planning Acts by way of development control decisions. The cognitive continuum and lens models are used as frameworks for describing how people make judgements in practice. A logit decision model is developed to analyse the recommendation of the planning officer and the decision of the planning committee, with respect to applications to develop mineral deposits. The problem of a “gold standard” against which decisions can be judged is discussed. The logit model of planning decisions has a high hit rate in predicting development control judgements. The results demonstrate that cue utilization by subjects using intuitive methods is poor. Planning officers and committee members engage in differential dimension focus: whilst they believe in complexity, in reality their judgements depend on just a few major variables.