Such knowledge is likely to develop with more thought and practice, but its present absence makes it ill-advised to pursue a single, authoritative vision of integrated assessment. On both intellectual and managerial dimensions, many plausible ways of addressing the most basic challenges of integrated assessment can be used. There is no single right way to do it. For example, one of the most basic problems of integrated assessment is that coupling knowledge across domain boundaries is challenging for the domains being coupled. The bulk of the intellectual contribution of integrated assessment will be made at the joints, through these processes of linking, sharing, and reconciling knowledge.
Joints are also where friction occurs.
As researchers working in their fields do not normally attend to borders of other fields, achieving this attention shift requires some form of authority in an integrated assessment project, at least a coordination mechanism. The problem of how loosely or tightly coupled the components of a project should be, closely related to the question of the centrality of a single integrating model, has no evident dominant solution. Each study must make a design choice, somehow balancing appropriate pressure to take integration seriously with respect for the outrage of component experts when their tolerance is stretched beyond the bounds of intellectual honesty. The next section covers The Need for Multiple Parallel Projects . University Center, Mich. 1995.