Biological considerations are often a major focus in conservation translocations: they include the physiological, behavioural, demographic, and ecological considerations relevant to management decisions about translocation planning, implementation, and evaluation. The vast array of biological, and other, considerations that managers must wrestle with render conservation translocations exceedingly complex, and a framework that supports thinking through this complexity to inform decisions in a transparent and deliberative fashion is indispensable. Structured decision-making (SDM) is a framework that is well suited to help managers deal with the complexity of their decisions, and SDM facilitates the integration of science (biological knowledge) to inform decisions. Scientists supporting conservation translocations have many tools at their disposal to help them provide predictions of management outcomes that are as accurate as possible, recognising that various sources of data are valid, and there is substantial guidance available on the appropriate methods to obtain, analyse, and interpret available data. Decisions will represent a mix of objective scientific prediction and subjective attitudes regarding trade-offs between objectives and regarding the uncertainty surrounding predictions. All conservation translocation decisions can be informed using SDM irrespective of their focus being biological, non-biological, and perhaps most realistically a mix across these concerns.

What is the essence of group decision-making? How does group dynamics affect policy outcomes? This chapter contributes to foreign policy analysis and national security decision-making by advancing a comparative group dynamic perspective. Specifically, we examine three models of group decision-making: Groupthink, Polythink, and Con-Div, and apply each model to the Kennedy administration’s decision to impose a naval blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We claim that applying different group decision-making models to real-world cases presents a new way of explaining governmental decisions. Based on our comparative analysis of the three models, we find that the Con-Div model performs best in explaining the naval blockade decision.

A new argument about interpretation appeared in the twentieth century: the idea that Supreme Court justices should make their own judgments about the best national policy, and then write their opinions in language that gives the impression that the decision represents an interpretation of the Constitution. This chapter argues that decision science says that the Supreme Court justices are not well-suited for making good policy decisions, and that, if they do so, they should be transparent in their reasoning. For thousands of years, the public and its elected representatives have looked to the courts to provide answers to difficult and important issues involving interpretation, something for which judges are well-trained and well-placed to do. When that traditional process metamorphizes into pure political policymaking, the justices need to defend it as such, and not put at risk the Court’s essential role as the authoritative interpreter of legal texts.