We provide empirical evidence that supports a commonly-held assumption: that experts’ appraisals of policy options are often very distinct from those of resource users most affected by those policy choices. We analyse perspectives about 40 policy options to address peatland fires in Indonesia, using a Q methodology approach to rank the options according to perceived effectiveness. Peatland fires in Indonesia are a long-standing and complex social-ecological challenge, where unsolved disagreements about policy options have profound implications for environmental governance, resulting in fires recurring and causing significant CO₂ emissions and transboundary haze that affects the health of millions. We collected data from 219 respondents, covering twelve stakeholder categories, including small and large landholders, industrial farmers, scientists, local leaders and government officials. We identified the most representative response from each stakeholder category, and used hierarchical cluster analysis to explore the closeness/distance in perspectives among categories. The results show a particularly noticeable distinction between two broad groups, which we labelled as experts and resource users. Experts tend to prefer solutions that are centralised and largely transformative, whereas resource users favour more localised measures that are more compatible with business-as-usual. We discuss possible reasons for these differences, and their implications for environmental governance, including for how scientists engage in policy.

我们提供的实证证据支持一个普遍持有的假设：专家对政策选择的评估通常与受这些政策选择影响最大的资源使用者的评估截然不同。我们分析了有关解决印度尼西亚泥炭地火灾的 40 个政策选项的观点，使用 Q 方法根据感知的有效性对选项进行排名。印度尼西亚的泥炭地火灾是一个长期存在且复杂的社会生态挑战，未解决的政策选择分歧对环境治理具有深远的影响，导致火灾反复发生并造成大量 CO ₂排放和跨界雾霾影响数百万人的健康。我们收集了 219 名受访者的数据，涵盖十二个利益相关者类别，包括大小土地所有者、工业农民、科学家、地方领导人和政府官员。我们确定了每个利益相关者类别中最具代表性的回应，并使用层次聚类分析来探索类别之间观点的接近度/距离。结果显示了两个广泛的群体之间特别明显的区别，我们将其标记为专家和资源用户。专家往往更喜欢集中式且在很大程度上具有变革性的解决方案，而资源用户则更喜欢与常规业务更兼容的更本地化的措施。我们讨论了这些差异的可能原因，