Many dam decisions in New England have become contentious, with community opposition often stalling or delaying projects, especially when local values and attachments to the landscape are overlooked by outside agencies. Traditional public engagement methods, like town hall meetings, can be dominated by a few strong voices and may not foster genuine dialogue or include the full range of community perspectives. While decision support tools exist, they often focus on scientific or technical priorities and fail to capture the social and cultural values that matter to residents, such as history, sense of place, and aesthetics.

To address these challenges, the Dam Atlas approach blends structured decision-making with design charrettes, creating a process that respects local values, uses neutral facilitators, and encourages participants to move beyond fixed positions to underlying interests. By exploring a range of creative alternatives—not just “keep or remove”—and making information accessible and visual, the process helps communities understand trade-offs and make transparent, informed choices. This method aims to foster learning, build trust, and ensure that both scientific and social objectives are openly discussed and weighed in dam decisions.

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One of the first steps in any decision-making process is to define the problem, clarify the decision context, and establish the project’s scope. This typically occurs early with the project team and steering committee to ensure a shared understanding of what the process will address.

Key questions to clarify include:

• What is the decision to be made?
• Should the focus be on a single dam, a river reach, or the entire watershed?
• Who are the final decision-makers, and how will public input be incorporated?
• How does this decision relate to others in the region?
• What is the timeline and expected outcome?

Determining the appropriate spatial scale of a project is a critical early step that shapes both analysis and engagement. Focusing on a single dam may be appropriate when the structure presents immediate safety concerns, clear ecological opportunities, or strong community interest. However, rivers rarely function as isolated systems—decisions about one dam often affect conditions upstream and downstream. Taking a reach-scale or whole-river perspective can help reveal cumulative impacts, interdependencies among structures, and broader opportunities for restoration, access, and recreation. In some cases, beginning with one dam can serve as a pilot that informs future projects within the same watershed.

At this stage, it is also critical to identify who the ultimate decision-makers are and how public input will be incorporated into the final decision. Clarifying this early helps manage expectations, ensures transparency, and avoids confusion later in the process. It also enables the project team to design engagement strategies that align with how and when decisions will actually be made. By making the decision pathway explicit from the start, participants can better understand how their voices contribute to the outcome and where influence is most meaningful along the way.

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Project objectives represent the social, ecological, and economic attributes that are important to both the public and decision-makers. These objectives are used to evaluate and understand the consequences of the alternatives. The wording of each objective typically includes the thing that matters and a verb that indicates the desired direction of change. Clearly defining objectives helps translate important but ambiguously defined community values into concrete terms relevant to the specific decision. Because individuals and groups will assign different levels of importance to different objectives, it is important to include a range of perspectives.

Common objectives in dam decision-making include:

• Increase fish populations
• Improve water quality
• Maintain views of the historic dam structure
• Minimize negative impacts on hydropower production
• Reduce costs

In their classic book Getting to Yes (2007), Roger Fisher and William Ury describe the distinction between positions and interests in the negotiation process:“Your position is something you have decided upon. Your interests are what caused you to so decide.” Unlike positions, which can lock people into a single outcome, focusing on interests opens space for solutions that satisfy multiple parties’ needs. One goal of defining objectives is to help participants shift their focus from positions to interests.

Performance measures are specific metrics linked to each objective that help compare and report how well each alternative performs. No objectives should be excluded simply because they are difficult to measure. While scientific and economic metrics (e.g., water temperature, cost) may be easier to quantify, social and cultural considerations—such as sense of place or aesthetics—are equally important and must be included in the decision-making process.

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Within the Narragansett Bay and coastal watersheds, many aging dams are in poor condition and in need of repair. Each dam is unique, with distinct ecological, social, physical, and economic factors that must be considered when exploring solutions. Because most dams in New England are relatively small, there is often a range of feasible alternatives that can achieve multiple objectives.

Dam removal is frequently the most cost-effective approach to managing aging dams. It restores natural river functions and ecological connectivity, eliminates the risk of structural failure, and avoids long-term maintenance and repair costs. However, the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of local communities often warrant exploring additional options.

In some cases, conventional or nature-like fishways may be used in combination with partial dam removal or with maintaining water levels upstream. Where dams remain in place, engineering studies are essential to identify repair and maintenance costs and assess the potential risks of failure to property, infrastructure, and livelihoods. Ultimately, decisions about a dam’s future should consider a spectrum of alternatives, moving beyond the binary choice of keeping or removing the dam.

This diversity of potential outcomes underscores the need for a transparent, structured decision-making process—one that integrates technical studies with community values to support balanced, informed, and durable solutions for rivers and the communities that depend on them.

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Once the objectives and alternatives have been identified and agreed upon, the next step is to estimate the consequences of each alternative with respect to the evaluation criteria, using available knowledge and predictive tools. This step is primarily an analytical task, typically undertaken by scientists, engineers, economists, and specialists in traditional ecological knowledge.

Some of these specialists may be part of the core project team, while others may be external consultants engaged to provide specific expertise. For example, a fish biologist may be needed to estimate impacts on anadromous fish populations; engineers may conduct hydrology and hydraulics analyses to understand flood risk or flow changes; and landscape architects can help visualize aesthetic and spatial impacts, including how different alternatives may affect the community’s sense of place.

The information gathered during this stage should be relevant to the decision context and developed according to best practices for avoiding bias, addressing uncertainty, and maintaining transparent documentation.

Once the data has been collected, it is essential to consider how this information will be communicated to the steering committee and the broader public. Technical results must often be translated into accessible, decision-relevant formats so that participants without disciplinary expertise can meaningfully engage with the material.

We recommend using visualizations and well-designed graphics—such as maps, diagrams, or before-and-after renderings—to facilitate dialogue and develop shared understanding. These visual tools can reveal relationships and insights that may not emerge through verbal or quantitative explanations alone, helping participants build a more holistic picture of the potential consequences of each alternative.

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The Structured Decision-Making (SDM) process provides a transparent framework for evaluating how well each alternative meets the project objectives. Individual participants may assign different levels of importance—or weights—to each objective, influencing how they rank their preferred alternatives.

By clearly organizing objectives and alternatives within a consequence matrix, the process makes subjective values visible and open for discussion. The matrix encourages participants to focus on their interests—the underlying reasons behind their positions—and to recognize that multiple alternatives may satisfy those interests in different ways.

Given the complexity of dam decisions and the number of often competing objectives, the consequence matrix serves as a visual tool for organizing and comparing information. It helps participants track the implications of each alternative, preventing discussions from reverting to entrenched positions or relying on quick cognitive shortcuts.

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While the Structured Decision-Making (SDM) process does not itself make a decision, it provides a transparent way to communicate trade-offs among alternatives and to convey the preferences of the steering committee and community to decision-makers. The ultimate goal is to support an informed and actionable decision about the future of the dam.

In contentious projects, full consensus may be unlikely, but the process helps clarify where agreement and disagreement exist and illuminates the reasoning behind different viewpoints. Using three levels of support—endorse, accept, and oppose—can reveal areas of potential compromise, highlighting alternatives that, while not ideal for everyone, may be acceptable to all parties as a foundation for moving forward.

Once the evaluation of trade-offs is complete, the project team should compile a final report summarizing both the technical analyses and the community engagement process. This report should document the alternatives considered, the objectives used for evaluation, and the range of stakeholder perspectives. A concise executive summary can then be prepared for the decision-making body—whether that is a private dam owner, select board, city council, or state agency—highlighting the preferred alternatives, areas of alignment, and key trade-offs identified through the process.

Presenting the final report to decision-makers provides an opportunity for the project team and steering committee to clearly communicate the outcomes of the process, ensuring that decisions are grounded in both community values and sound technical information. This presentation also serves as a bridge between participatory engagement and formal governance, reinforcing transparency and demonstrating that public input has been meaningfully integrated into the path forward.