Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty

RAND Corporation, applying quantitative analysis to public policy problems at the local, regional, national, and international levels. His recent research has focused on methods for dealing with deep uncertainty in making public policies (especially with respect to climate change), improving the freight transport system in the Netherlands, and the design of decision support systems for airport strategic planning. He has led several large policy studies for the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, most of which have involved cost-effectiveness analyses of complex problems with multiple stakeholders in which a range of impacts of alternative policies are assessed and tradeoffs are made among the environmental, economic, and social impacts. He has been a special advisor to the Director for Freight Policy in the Netherlands Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, and has carried out strategic planning studies for that Directorate. He was a member of the Scientific Committee of a project for the European Commission that helped to design a European Transportation Information System (ETIS). He is the recipient of the 1997 President¿s Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for his "contributions to the welfare of society through quantitative analysis of governmental policy problems."


Pieter Bloemen is the Chief Strategic Officer of the Dutch Delta Programme. He is responsible for the formulation of the core values of the Delta Programme, for the development and application of Adaptive Delta Management and of the Comparison Scheme that was used for the selection of the preferred regional strategies. He led the Strategic Environmental Assessment of the Deltadecisions and preferred regional strategies that are presented in ¿Deltaprogramme 2015¿, and presently works on the development of a monitoring and evaluation system that matches the adaptive approach of the Delta Programme. Bloemen was the program leader of the National Program on Climate Adaptation and Spatial Planning (ARK Program) that developed the first National Adaptation Strategy of the Netherlands in 2007. He was advisor spatial planning and climate adaptation to His Royal Highness Willem Alexander and member of the quarter-making team of the Delta Programme. Before joining the national government in 2000, he worked, from 1986 onward, at the international consultancy company IWACO. At IWACO Bloemen worked three years in West Africa (geophysics for urban water supply). In the Netherlands he worked on groundwater modeling, environmental impact assessment and mediation, and was head of the department of Water and Spatial Planning at the Head Office in Rotterdam. He is Visiting Researcher at Unesco-IHE in Delft (Chair Group Flood Resilience) since January 2015, and is now working on a PhD on the governance of the adaptive approach.


Steven W. Popper (RAND Corporation) is a RAND Senior Economist and professor of science and technology policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His work on macro transitions led to an invitation by President Vaclav Havel to advise the government of Czechoslovakia, participation in an OECD delegation on the first foreign visit to one of the secret cities of the former Soviet Union, and consultation to the World Bank on issues of industrial restructuring in Hungary and in Mexico. His work on micro-level transition focuses on innovation. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Associate Director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute, providing analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other executive branch agencies. He has taught planning under deep uncertainty at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the India School of Business, and the Shanghai Climate Institute. He is co-developer of the Robust Decision Making (RDM) approach. He is an elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, served as chair of the AAAS Industrial Science and Technology section and is the founding chair for education and training of the Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty.