Abstract:
The philosophical basis of this study is the Biblical concept of Stewardship, making the best use of resources for social and economic purposes. The study objective was to demonstrate that measurement of public attitudes can assist in the planning of efficient socio-economic stewardship. The theoretical foundations of the study are based on the axiom that the objective of socio-economic resource management is to maximise the total welfare of society. Implicit in this axiom are the unavoidable trade-offs between the economic and social components of total welfare that exist in a fixed resource situation, which are embodied in the Conceptual Socio-Economic Resource Management Model showing the socio-economic welfare possibilities available to the resource manager. The crucial task of the resource manager is to choose the Pareto Optimal, welfare satisficing position using a planned optimisation strategy with efficient planning requiring an information feedback system between the public and the manager as embodied in the concept of an Attitudinal Management Planning Model. In this model the manager uses the intellectual, affective data of public attitudes to narrow the response gap between present and future public behaviour. The major input of timely attitudinal data plus minor input of outdated behaviour data are absorbed into the manager's Strategic Issue Management System where these quantitative data are assessed as threats or opportunities, graded for urgency and impact within a Strategic Issues Priority Matrix and then the top priority data meshed with the interpretive, qualitative data arising from the manager's intuition and experience, out of this data amalgam ultimately emerging the manager's decision which is communicated to the public. In an ongoing process the manager continues to monitor future public behaviour and future public attitudes and modifies his decision accordingly so as to move incrementally towards Pareto Optimality. The Attitudinal Management Planning Model was calibrated on two pilot case studies on separate social and economic problems using a national sample survey system which provided large randomly selected, representative samples comprising a geographic and demographic cross section of the New Zealand public - a social management case study on forecasting elections from political attitudes, and an economic management case study on forecasting consumer demand from economic attitudes. The Model was then applied to two socio- economic resource management problems - a micro-level case study on the socio-economic use of New Zealand forests, and a macro-level case study on the socio-economic use of all New Zealand resources. The applied work demonstrated that Attitudinal Management Planning Models can work in terms of providing timely, meaningful information for decision making. Thus it can be concluded that the measurements of public attitudes, within the context of an Attitudinal Management Planning Model, can contribute greatly to the planning of efficient. socio-economic stewardship.