DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9539-1 Making a difference on the ground: the challenge of demonstrating the effectiveness of decision support

© The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Decision support has become a popular concept, especially in the context of climate change. Government agencies and researchers increasingly recognize that they should provide it, and resource managers and policy-makers increasingly need and demand it. This demand will only grow as climate change progresses. Those who will attempt to meet this growing demand will need to demonstrate “effectiveness”. This editorial raises a number of critical questions that need to be answered in the course of evaluating whether decision support is effective. The answers, if carefully considered early on, may help to design processes that may in fact produce more useable products, facilitate their use, and ultimately create intended and desirable outcomes. Decision support is one class of science-policy, science-management, or science-stakeholder interactions. Since its relatively recent rise in popularity in the climate arena, it has come to mean almost anything that somehow links the research sphere with the practice realm—processes of interaction, different forms of communication