Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making (2008) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 7-32
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. These characteristics of environmental decisions suggest the need for significant influence to be in the hands of experts.
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It is in this highly complex arena -- in which those who believe that industry and development are being unnecessarily stifled contend with those who believe that the environment is being irreparably damaged and those who believe that the costs of environmental change are being unfairly distributed -- that public decisions are made about making and implementing environmental policy. The conflicts that arise in environmental policy result not only from differences in values and interests.
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Environmentalists, advocates for disadvantaged communities, resource user groups, Native American tribes, and others have criticized policy makers as being out of touch with public desires and as having made too many bad environmental decisions (e.g., Bullard, 1990; Pellow, 1999; Durant, Fiorino, and O'Leary, 2004)
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From page 10... ...
Broader and more direct participation of the public and interested or affected groups in official environmental policy processes has been widely advocated as a way to increase both the legitimacy and the substantive quality of policy decisions (e.g., Dietz, 1987; Shannon, 1987; Fiorino, 1989, 1990; Renn, Webler, and Wiedermann, 1995; Williams and Matheny, 1995; National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, 1996; National Research Council, 1996; Liberatore and Funtowicz, 2003; Renn, 2004; Stirling, 2004, 2008)
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In one sense of the term, all decisions in a democracy involve public participation. People participate through voting, expressing opinions on public issues and governmental actions, forming interest groups or holding public demonstrations to influence government decisions, lobbying, filing lawsuits to contest government actions, physically interfering with the execution of objectionable policy decisions, acting in partnership with government agencies, and even producing films, songs, and artistic events to mobilize public attention to issues.
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.1 These processes may engage people at the earliest stages of environmental assessments, but they are most common as an immediate precursor to decision making. In some cases, public participation is focused on providing input to ongoing decisions about implementation.
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To assure that government action is as responsive as possible to public concerns; (4) To encourage public involvement in implementing environmental laws; (5)
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In contrast, the Forest Service has a broad multiple-use mandate and must seek to satisfy a broad range of perspectives and uses of natural resources and environmental qualities. DIMENSIONS OF PARTICIPATION For the purpose of assessing public participation processes across a large range of types of agency activities, it is important to distinguish several dimensions along which assessments and decisions can be participatory.
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Although the label "public" often refers to individual citizens or relatively unorganized groups of individuals, our definition of public participation includes the full range of interested and affected parties, including corporations, nonprofit educational or advocacy organizations, and associations, and it also considers the roles of public officials, agencies, and scientists, the last acting as individuals or on behalf of organizations. The "who" dimension includes the variety of kinds of participants as well as their number, which may range from a handful to thousands in any single process.
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It is normal, and sometimes required by law, for federal agencies to invite public involvement in gathering information for making environmental decisions and in commenting on draft documents that synthesize that information (e.g., the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, http://www.nepa.gov/nepa/ regs/nepa/nepaeqia.htm) or in commenting on proposed decisions (e.g., the Administrative Procedure Act, http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/ Learning and Feedback Public Officials Implementation Process Problem Option Information Design Summarization Formation Generation Gathering Evaluation Natural and Social Scientists Technical Analysis Decision Analysis Deliberation Deliberation Interested and Affected Parties FIGURE 1-1 A schematic representation of environmental decision processes.
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Participation processes may be convened as a way to educate or empower the public, or only to elicit information and concerns. As discussed further in Chapter 2, there is considerable dispute about what the goals of public participation should be, both among observers of the processes generally and among participants in particular processes.
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For example, it is easier to achieve the goal of a broadly informed debate, and easier to document that achievement, than it is to know that public participation has led to a better decision. Indeed, it can be quite difficult to define what is meant by better environmental decisions.
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A synthesis of available knowledge can both advance basic understanding and provide practical advice to those who carry out environmental public participation processes. Environmental public participation is a matter of concern nearly everywhere in the world.
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. This spectrum of approaches has its origins in analyses from the 1960s that described a "ladder" of increasing intensity and influence of public participation processes (Arnstein, 1969; see also Fung, 2006)
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We thus focus on general aspects of the context and process of public participation and on a search for general principles that can be used in the design of specific processes. SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE Environmental public participation has been a topic of increasing interest among scholars for decades.
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Government agencies have increasingly implemented procedures to broaden public input to environmental decisions. During the 1970s and 1980s, federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies organized many hundreds of public participation processes (Bingham, 1986, 2003)
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case studies of individual instances of environmental public participation; 5. research comparing multiple public participation processes focused on similar environmental issues, similar mechanisms, or a single convening organization ("families" of cases)
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Connaughton, chair of the President's Office of Environmental Quality. These principles are consistent with collective professional experience and research in interest-based negotiation, consensus building, col laborative management, environmental mediation, and conflict resolution.
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The first two of these are also valuable for understanding the nuances of public participation processes and the ways that such processes develop over time. But these forms of knowledge are not readily codified, which makes it difficult to assess general hypotheses that are thought to hold across a variety of cases or to evaluate systematically the plausibility of explanations that differ from those offered by experience or case studies.
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The panel examined several of these lines of research for their implications for environmental public participation. Panel members and staff prepared papers summarizing these implications, which were discussed at a public workshop held on February 3-5, 2005.
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HOW WE CONDUCTED THE STUDY The basic strategy of this study has been to consider possible conclusions and guidance for environmental public participation in light of all the available sources of knowledge and insight. Our presumption is that conclusions that are robust across various methods and sources of knowledge provide a stronger basis than previously available for offering the science-based guidance that government agencies and others need in order to improve the practice of public participation.
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. A second set of papers sought insights for environmental public participation from basic social science knowledge on such topics as civic engagement and political participation (Markus, Chess, and Shannon, 2005)
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Chapter 3 considers the most basic evaluative questions about environmental public participation: the overall degree to which public participation efforts succeed, and whether tradeoffs among the desired consequences are necessary, so that some can only be achieved at the expense of others. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 consider how the practice of public participation
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We discuss the implications of work on the commons further in Chapter 5. 2Environmental public participation processes may also be convened outside of government, for example, by a business or nonprofit nongovernmental organization or even by a previously unorganized group of affected individuals.
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From page 31... ...
. When this distinction is made, public participation generally connotes processes that do not "differentiate among different members of the public" (Ashford and Rest, 1999:1-3)
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