Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making (2008) / Chapter Skim
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5 Practice: Organizing Participation
5 Practice: Organizing Participation
Pages 111-136
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From page 111... ...
PUBLIC PARTICIPATION FORMATS AND PRACTICES Public participation processes can be organized in many different ways. So it is reasonable to ask if certain formats work better generally, or in some circumstances, than others.
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From page 112... ...
. Some terms refer to broad "formats." Examples include public hearings, scoping meetings, focus groups, workshops, open houses, charrettes, listening sessions, advisory committees, blue-ribbon commissions, summits, policy dialogues, negotiated rule-making, task forces, town meetings, citizen juries, study circles, future search conferences, online deliberation, and deliberative polling.
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From page 113... ...
Agency personnel might or might not play a substantive role. Variations from traditional advisory committee structures include citizen juries, policy dialogues, citizen panels, study groups, and consensus conferences (Stewart, Kendall, and Coote, 1994; Dienel and Renn, 1995; Renn, Webler, and Wiedemann, 1995; Beierle and Cayford, 2002)
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From page 114... ...
They require some level of facilitation, whether by an involved agency or stakeholder or by an uninvolved professional. Outcomes might be constituted as a proposed rule, a memorandum of understanding, a statement of principles, a legal settlement, or a less formalized agreement.1 Public participation processes are commonly tailored to the specific circumstances of an assessment or decision, drawing on elements or practices from the various available formats to suit the context, explicitly addressing potential obstacles to success that are diagnosed at the planning stage and incorporating different participatory modes at different project stages (Creighton, 1999; Bleiker and Bleiker, 2000; Bradbury, Branch, and Malone, 2003; Zarger, 2003)
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From page 115... ...
Though not a format in itself, it is attractive because it might provide a way to deal with some of the practical difficulties of conducting participatory processes when the participants are geographically dispersed or have limited available time and cannot be available for face-to-face contact. The individual and institutional costs of information transfer and acquisition can be lowered by Internet technologies, while convenience can rise.
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From page 116... ...
intensity: the amount of time and effort participants put into the process and the amount of interaction that takes place among them, as well as between public participants and the agency officials and scientists who would otherwise be involved; and 4. influence: the extent to which the process allows for or provides mechanisms by which the public participants can affect how the convening agency defines, considers, and acts on the issue.
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From page 117... ...
Generally, processes designed to involve stakeholders in consensus building, such as advisory committees, summits, or commissions, are usually quite bounded even when meetings are open to the public, in that specific individuals are named as members of the group. In contrast, processes designed to inform or consult the public, such as scoping meetings, listening sessions, and online deliberations, often are more open.
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From page 118... ...
A major rationale for public participation processes is that, without such processes, many who are interested in or who will be affected by a decision may not have a chance to influence that decision, a situation widely judged inappropriate in a democracy. However, this normative justification does not necessarily entail that public influence is best organized through the kinds of direct participation in agency activities that are the focus of this volume.
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From page 119... ...
has noted that local and national perspectives have to be balanced in participatory processes, although Shindler and Neburka (1997) argue that the inclusion of national interest groups may lead to their strong influence on and even domination of a local process.
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From page 120... ...
An agency has to balance these costs against the value to be gained by engaging all the interested and affected parties and by helping individuals and groups to build capacity. Many practices are available to identify and include all stakeholders.
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From page 121... ...
However, some of the advice emerging from recent studies appears to suggest that the notion of a "spectrum of interested and affected parties" (National Research Council, 1996:30) may be reasonably interpreted differently in relation to the needs of different parts of an assessment or decision process.
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From page 122... ...
Involving community members should also reduce the dissonance and long delays that often occur when EPA proposes solutions before discussing goals and costs with stakeholders." As the discussion of breadth suggests, although public involvement from the start may be good advice as a general rule of thumb, the evidence suggests that it may be useful to differentiate the kinds of public input that are needed in different phases of the process. It may be wise to refine the "early and often" dictum to take into account the possibilities that somewhat different kinds of input are needed in different phases, and that the importance of maximally broad public participation may be greater at some phases of an assessment or decision process than at others.
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From page 123... ...
. Public participation processes benefit in terms of both quality and legitimacy if the spectrum of interested and affected parties is involved in formulating the problem for assessment or decision.
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From page 124... ...
. Many disputes about technological and environmental risks appear to involve fundamental disagreements about the definition and nature of the problem to be addressed (Snow et al., 1986; Bradbury, 1989; U.S.
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Broadly based problem formulation can ensure that the agency's initial frame is not the only frame applied. Collaboration in problem formulation at the start can also ensure that the process is attentive to the most imporant values of interested and affected parties.
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From page 126... ...
However, when the context calls for intense interactions, results are highly dependent on how those interactions are organized. Intense deliberative processes create significant potential to promote desired results from participation, but at some costs.
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From page 127... ...
Furthermore, intense processes may create distance between those participating and other interested and affected parties not involved, thus reducing transparency. They can also lead to consensus on novel solutions among those participating that may meet resistance among the constituencies that the participants are expected to represent.
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From page 128... ...
, participants in regulatory negotiation had more favorable overall assessments of the processes, both in terms of their assessments of the final rule and of some aspects of the process. This was true even though participants in regulatory negotiation perceived the regulatory issues at hand to be more complex than those involved in cases of conventional rule-making and perceived negotiated rules to address more difficult issues of regulatory compliance and implementation (Langbein, 2005)
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From page 129... ...
Individuals with more intense involvement judged the assessment as more legitimate and believed it was "more likely to build lasting and trusting relationships or spawn new collaborations" and to produce broader environmental and social outcomes. Although the regional assessments varied greatly in the intensity of the processes used, the small number of respondents per regional assessment made it impossible to analyze the relationships between intensity and the quality of the output by comparing across assessments.
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From page 130... ...
It has instead focused primarily on the contextual issues reviewed in Chapters 7 and 8 and some of the issues of process management, such as breadth and intensity of participation addressed earlier in this chapter. However, a substantial research literature on small-group interaction and deliberative process, much of it conducted by experimental methods that allow for fairly strong inferences about cause and effect, gives ample evidence for the importance of the interaction process and provides useful insight into what happens in relatively intense interactions that affect the quality and legitimacy of their outputs.
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From page 131... ...
. Public participation in environmental assessment and decision making inevitably involves multiple such languages, including those of technical experts, such as scientists and lawyers; experts on what is politically and organizationally feasible, such as agency officials and politicians; and interested and affected parties, who bring knowledge of both local context and the concerns of their communities (e.g., Dietz, 1987)
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From page 132... ...
Such mechanisms can vary considerably in the degree to which they provide for public influence. This section examines evidence on how the extent to which public participation processes invite or allow such influence affects their results.
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From page 133... ...
. The benefits of transparency have been documented from the earliest through the final stages of public participation processes.
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From page 134... ...
A negotiated consensus on rules for communication, deliberation, and decision making, before the substantive issues are discussed, creates a basis for good-faith communication because with agreed-on procedural rules, it is easier for the moderator to enforce these rules and to ensure fair play among all participants. Especially when an agency has problems of public trust, demonstrations of good-faith communication through action and the maintenance of mechanisms provides an avenue for public influence and an indication to interested and affected parties that influence is possible.
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From page 135... ...
Although facilitation and training do not preclude disingenous communications, they can reduce misunderstandings. CONCLUSION The evidence supports four principles of good practice for organizing public participation processes: inclusiveness, collaborative problem formulation and process design, transparency of process, and good-faith communication.
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