Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making (2008) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 The Promise and Perils of Participation
2 The Promise and Perils of Participation
Pages 33-74
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From page 33... ...
Critics worry that participation in practice may not achieve the lofty goals articulated in theory and may actually impede good decision making. They offer three basic arguments: that the costs are not justified by the benefits, that the public is ill-equipped to deal with the complex nature of analyses that are needed for good environmental assessments and decisions, and that participation processes seldom achieve equity in process and outcome.
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From page 34... ...
. This recognition provides a context for understanding participation processes, the motivations for public participation, and the challenges to it.
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From page 35... ...
. The advantage of grounding the design of public participation processes in lessons from scientific analysis of public participation is that it can help avoid unintended consequences and make more transparent the implications of the choices made.
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From page 36... ...
This discussion sets the stage for our analysis of what happens in public participation processes and of which factors influence the results. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT: LAWS AND AGENCY PRACTICES In the United States, the tradition of direct public involvement in policy making traces back at least to the New England town meeting (Bryan, 2004)
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From page 37... ...
It is an important element of the context in which environmental public participation evolved. Increased public involvement in the decision process of federal environmental agencies was required beginning with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
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From page 38... ...
These requirements made it possible for members of the public to make their informed judgments known to agencies before decisions were made and thus potentially to have an influence on the decisions. However, they did not require agency decision makers, for example, to use the public input or explain why they did not.
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From page 39... ...
But considering a full range of options is often noted as a first principle of effective decision making. Administrative and judicial decisions under NEPA and other environmental laws have also broadened both the scope of government actions that are considered environmentally consequential and broadened the basis for the public to have "standing" to participate in both the courts and in administrative processes.
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From page 40... ...
The extension of legal requirements for participatory processes did not address issues that arose when agency responsibilities and jurisdictions overlapped, as is frequently the case for environmental assessments and decisions. Public participation processes often crossed the boundaries of agency-specific mandates.
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From page 41... ...
The committee's report, Sustaining the eople's Lands, proposed participatory processes that were highly colP laborative with other governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders in order to improve both the quality of the decision and its implementation capacity (U.S.D.A. Forest Service, 1997)
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From page 42... ...
The Forest Service published new planning regulations in December 2005. They categorically exempt bioregional assessments and national forest integrated land and resource management plans from the NEPA process on grounds that no decisions about action are made through those processes.
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. In exercising this discretion, agency officials may or may not be explicit in stating the purposes they intend public input to serve.
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. Improving Decision Quality • Clarify the nature of the problem or problems to be addressed (problem formulation)
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From page 45... ...
For example, invited public participants may not understand the legal limits to which an agency can delegate authority or its willingness to share responsibility in its range of discretion, so the participants may assume that their input will have more influence than is possible. Agency officials may not be clear about their purposes, and so may convey ambiguous messages to public participants with regard to which of the many steps in a decision process are being opened to public input and influence.
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From page 46... ...
Equality entails not only equal consideration in terms of "one person, one vote," but also equal opportunity to express preferences throughout the process of decision making on public matters and to shape the public agenda. It entails, as well, what Dahl (1989:141; see also Habermas, 1991)
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. Taken together, equality and autonomy imply that democratic governance is a means of managing power relations so as to minimize domination (Shapiro, 1999)
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From page 48... ...
Advocates of different perspectives may find themselves in opposition about the likely value of a participatory process because of their differing priorities about the purposes of such processes. Substantive and Instrumental Justifications Officially sanctioned opportunities for direct citizen participation in governance proliferated markedly over the last half of the 20th century in the United States -- and indeed throughout much of the world -- even as participation in elections and related activities stagnated (Franklin, 2004; Franklin, Lyons, and Marsh, 2004; Geys, 2006)
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THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF PARTICIPATION 49 TABLE 2-1 Six Concepts of Public Participation Models and Concept Main Objective Rationale Instruments Functionalist Improvement of quality Representation Delphi, of decision output of all knowledge workshops, carriers; integration hearing, inquiry, of systematic, citizen advisory experiential, and committees local knowledge Neoliberal Representation of all Informed consent Referendum, values and preferences of the affected focus groups, in proportion to their population; deliberative share in the affected Pareto-rationality polling, Internet population plus Kaldor-Hicks participation, (improvements) negotiated rule-making, mediation, etc.
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From page 50... ...
. Enhancing Legitimacy Many federal agencies and other mission-oriented organizations that convene public participation processes see them as a means of making their decisions more broadly acceptable to the public and thus of helping them move forward with their missions.
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It is also argued that participation increases public understanding of science and scientists' and agency officials' understanding of public concerns, thus enabling future participatory processes to proceed more efficiently (Schwarz and Thompson, 1990)
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From the standpoint of democratic theory, building legitimacy and trust among all participants, including public trust of a decision-making agency, are appropriate normative goals if the agency is making active use of public input in shaping its assessments and decisions. Agency officials are sometimes divided in their stance on public participation, with some officials sincerely committed to using public input and others viewing such input as having little value, even as they orchestrate the public participation process to gain the desired legitimacy.
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From page 53... ...
It is reasonable for an agency to expect to avoid lawsuits, legislative action, and countermoves by other agencies if participation processes are used to shape an agency's assessments and decisions. But when a participation process is done pro forma, with no influence on the agency, it can subvert the legitimate influence of the public on government decisions (Bora and Hausendorf, 2006)
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Decision Quality One of the most critical concerns about public participation processes is that they may reduce the overall quality of assessments and decisions by introducing poor-quality thinking or reducing the effective use of science in public decision making. These issues are closely connected.
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. Indeed, professionals working on risk policy often see "public ignorance" as a major source of conflict in environmental policy (e.g., Dietz, Stern, and Rycroft, 1989; Futrell, 2003)
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Thus, it seems that for public participation processes to contribute to highquality decisions, they need to be clear about what kinds of input to obtain from whom and how to use this input (Stirling, 2008)
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Everyone makes use of both systems, although for most choices, people do not engage in the great effort that System 2 thinking often requires. The challenge for participation processes is to ensure that the collective assessment or decision process benefits from the experiential knowledge that influences System 1 and yet approximates the ideals of careful thinking characteristic of System 2 -- even if individual participants fall short of those ideals.
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From page 58... ...
In Chapter 5 we review what is known about how the practice of participation affects decision quality, drawing on the best information from case studies, accumulated practitioner knowledge, and insights from related fields, such as decision science and the study of small-group processes. On one hand, public participation processes can indeed result in inept handling of information on uncertainty, misunderstanding of science, and clumsy assessment of public values.
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; competence requires that the process take full account of all available information about facts and values. Public participation processes have been criticized on the grounds that they may not be competent, as discussed in the previous section.
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. From this perspective, participation processes are successful in part if they empower the disempowered and thus make the political process more fair.
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The effectiveness of public participation processes in leveling the playing field has been questioned. Most participation processes make a point of involving "stakeholders." As Gastil (2008:192)
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Existing inequalities make some groups more vulnerable than others to adverse consequences. Fair and competently conducted participation processes can improve the ability to identify such adverse consequences and devise strategies to mitigate them, but such anticipation and mitigation will always be imperfect.
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. We are not aware of well-documented efforts to implement it in environmental public participation, so it is not possible to assess its implications in practice.
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. While this literature has not been deployed to inform the design of public participation processes, it might offer some useful insights.
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From page 65... ...
. This argument holds that the more public input is allowed to enter the process, the more likely that "window-dressing" -- superficial outcomes -- will occur.
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From page 66... ...
Chapters 3-8 examine these hypotheses by considering in detail the scientific and experiential evidence regarding the outcomes of participatory processes and what shapes them. CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION Our discussion so far makes obvious the diversity of expectations -- positive and negative, hopeful and cautionary, normative, substantive, and instrumental -- that have been expressed for public participation processes.
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From page 67... ...
These outcomes were identified by Beierle and Cayford (2002) as stages of implementation that intervene between the outputs of public participation processes and the ultimate impacts of decisions on environmental quality and other social goals.
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From page 68... ...
They also include immediate outcomes, such as changes in the attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, skills, and practices of the various participants (including scientists and the convening agency) , and changes in relationships or mutual understanding among the participants at the conclusion of a participatory process.
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From page 69... ...
Given these considerations and the relatively greater amount of evidence concerning immediate results relative to implementation outcomes and impacts in most studies of environmental public participation, it is much more feasible to evaluate most environmental public participation processes on the basis of immediate outputs and outcomes than against implementation or impact criteria. The further down the list of implementation stages, the more difficult data collection and interpretation become.
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From page 70... ...
; • identification and systematic consideration of the effects that might follow from the environmental processes or actions being considered, including uncertainties about these effects, in terms of the values, interests, and concerns of interested and affected parties; • outputs consistent with the best available knowledge and methods relevant to the above tasks, particularly the third; and • incorporation of new information, methods, and concerns that arise over time.4 A number of attributes of outputs and immediate outcomes may be used as indicators of quality; see Box 2-2. Legitimacy is related to the traditional concept of consent of the governed in U.S.
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From page 71... ...
3. Capacity for Future Decisions • Public participants became better informed about relevant environmental, scientific, social, and other issues • Participants and public officials gained a better understanding of each other • Public officials gained skill in organizing decision processes • Participants gained skill in participatory decision making • Scientists gained understanding of public concerns • Scientists developed, or committed to develop, new data or methods claims of inequity are imperfect measures, though, because parties may be mistaken about the impacts a decision will have on them.
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From page 72... ...
When a public participation process results in such commitments, it is appropriate to judge the process in part by how well the participants keep the commitments. It is worth emphasizing that although decision quality and legitimacy and changes in decision-making capacity can be analyzed as immediate outcomes of participatory processes, as we do here, implementation can also affect each of these outcomes at later times, sometimes profoundly.
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From page 73... ...
Multiple criteria have been suggested in the literature (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983; Fiorino, 1989, 1990; Tuler and Webler, 1995; Steelman and Ascher, 1997; Rowe and Frewer, 2000; Webler, Tuler, and Krueger, 2001; Beierle and Cayford, 2002; Renn, 2004; Rowe et al., 2004; Abels, 2007; Blackstock et al., 2007) , but given the diversity of goals for participation, not all these criteria are appropriate for every participatory process.
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From page 74... ...
and Parkinson (2006) also posit connections between theoretical framings for public participation and methods for conducting participatory processes.
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