Honest Broker
The Mitchell Center helps the Legislature evaluate a bill to reduce food waste and hunger in Maine
When the Maine Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) needed an independent, outside organization to provide crucial data for Representative Craig Hickman鈥檚 proposed Act to Address Hunger, Support Maine Farms and Reduce Waste (Legislative Document 1534), it turned to the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at 91爆料.
Specifically, it asked the Mitchell Center鈥檚 Materials Management team to convene a diverse stakeholder working group to identify areas of consensus around the largest problems associated with food waste in Maine and barriers that impede efforts to eliminate, reduce, redistribute or utilize food waste.
The group, which met in early August, was composed of commercial waste producers, retailers, grocers, restaurateurs, waste haulers, organic waste processors, landfillers, farmers, hunger relief and food recovery organizations, gleaning networks, educators, and institutional representatives鈥攊ncluding hospitals.
The Materials Management team focuses its work on the life cycle of solid waste materials from raw materials, to products, to end disposal. It combines all aspects of solid waste, including organic food waste, with all forms of diversion to establish a systems approach to this complex topic.聽The interdisciplinary group is comprised of an anthropologist and a social psychologist, economists, environmental and civil engineers, a food scientist, and a member of the nursing faculty, among others.
Team members Cindy Isenhour, assistant professor of anthropology, and Ph.D. student Brianne Berry have headed up the stakeholder working group charged with coming up with specific recommendations of what to focus on for the final version of LD1534. They are responsible for delivering a final report to the ENR committee. The Stakeholder Working Group鈥檚 final Synthesis Report can be viewed here.
鈥淲e were selected to convene the working group because the Mitchell Center is seen as being an impartial knowledge broker that doesn鈥檛 represent the interest of any particular stakeholder,鈥 says Isenhour. 鈥淥ur intent is to synthesize stakeholder perspectives and bring them together to provide data that can support decision making without necessarily saying 鈥楬ere鈥檚 our recommendation鈥 but, instead 鈥楬ere鈥檚 your range of options and here鈥檚 what the stakeholders think are some of the tradeoffs and potential negative and positive impacts.鈥欌
鈥淭he exciting thing about the Mitchell Center isn鈥檛 just its innovative focus on solutions, but its commitment to serving as an ‘honest broker’ by providing credible, independent analyses of policy options.鈥
鈥擱oger Pielke Jr., author of 鈥淭he Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics.鈥 More…
The Mitchell Center took the job 鈥渂ecause we want to be good partners to the state and our nonprofit and industry sector partners,鈥 Isenhour notes. She adds, 鈥淥ur goal is to educate the committee to help them better understand what would be the tradeoffs for economy, society, and the environment with different types of options in LD1534. That鈥檚 what we hope to do through our report, which we will deliver to the committee in mid-December of this year.鈥
The report will聽be in two parts: an outline of the state of food waste in Maine鈥攚hat it looks like and what the costs are; and, a stakeholder-informed review of potential policy options and a discussion of the tradeoffs.
Through a series of exercises and discussions, the working group considered a variety of approaches and options but finally settled on three policy areas to focus on and carry forward: recycling laws, K-12 education, and food donation.
鈥淭he first step we鈥檝e taken is to essentially build a consensus around what might be the best policies to include in LD1534 in its final version,鈥 Isenhour says. 鈥淭hen, the committee will revise it and it鈥檒l be up again for a vote in the next legislative session.鈥
Berry, who most recently has been working on the issue of food waste in schools, notes that the Materials Management team is particularly well suited for the task due to its extensive experience engaging with stakeholders around the state.
鈥淲ithout the diverse and interdisciplinary expertise on our team, I don鈥檛 think we could have assembled this group of stakeholders for this task,鈥 Berry says. 鈥淔or a different group, it could have been easy to get very limited perspectives.鈥
But, Berry adds, after the working group wrapped things up, 鈥淧eople didn鈥檛 want to leave and said things like 鈥業t鈥檚 just so great to be here and have this conversation鈥 because, after all, how often does a farmer, a grocer, a hauler, a gleaner and others all sit at the same table at the same time and share their concerns?鈥
鈥擠avid Sims