Democracy in Practice

Public Participation in Environmental Decisions

Thomas C. Beierle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781891853548
• eBook ISBN: 9781136528088
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

In spite of the expanding role of public participation in environmental decisionmaking, there has been little systematic examination of whether it has, to date, contributed toward better environmental management. Neither have there been extensive empirical studies to examine how participation processes can be made more effective. Democracy in Practice brings together, for the first time, the collected experience of 30 years of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. Using data from 239 cases, the authors evaluate the success of public participation and the contextual and procedural factors that lead to it. Thomas Beierle and Jerry Cayford demonstrate that public participation has not only improved environmental policy, but it has also played an important educational role and has helped resolve the conflict and mistrust that often plague environmental issues. Among the authors' findings are that intensive 'problem-solving' processes are most effective for achieving a broad set of social goals, and participant motivation and agency responsiveness are key factors for success. Democracy in Practice will be useful for a broad range of interests. For researchers, it assembles the most comprehensive data set on the practice of public participation, and presents a systematic typology and evaluation framework. For policymakers, political leaders, and citizens, it provides concrete advice about what to expect from public participation, and how it can be made more effective. Democracy in Practice concludes with a systematic guide for use by government agencies in their efforts to design successful public participation efforts.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Over the past 30 years, public participation has taken center stage in the play of influences that determine how society will manage and protect the environment. Its increasing role in environmental policymaking has led to much recent discussion—accompanied by some cheering, some hand-wringing, a great deal of speculation, and always a recognition of its growing importance.

A broad array of processes that emphasize face-to-face deliberation, problem-solving, and consensus building have joined traditional public hearings and public comment procedures. Policy dialogues, stakeholder advisory committees, citizen juries, facilitated mediations, and various other processes are now familiar components of the public participation mix. The amount of influence the public can wield has changed as well. Agreements in regulatory negotiations among interest groups, for example, actually determine the content of proposed environmental rules. Understanding the role of public participation is increasingly crucial for understanding how government makes and carries out environmental policy.

Over the past three decades, the thousands of cases in which the public has become involved in U.S. environmental policy decisions have produced many hundreds of documents that describe what happened in one case or another. In this book, we provide a systematic analysis of this case study literature and evaluate how well public participation has performed in its central role in environmental policymaking. We synthesize the work of hundreds of researchers to describe what public participation has accomplished and to understand what leads to effective processes.

Two main objectives guided our research. First and foremost, we wanted to develop an understanding of the social value of public participation, that is, its “value added” for society. To do so, we identified several “social goals” for public participation and used these goals as criteria for evaluating the success of public participation efforts. Second, we wanted to understand what makes some processes successful and others not. We examined how the success of public participation varies with the kinds of issues under debate and other aspects of the context in which participation takes place. We also compared the effectiveness of several different approaches to public participation, from public hearings to formal mediations. The literature is full of hypotheses about what makes public participation successful, and data from the case study record allowed us to test some of these hypotheses empirically.

Our study is the first to apply a consistent evaluation framework to such a large, diverse set of public participation cases. It joins a small but growing body of research that draws lessons from numerous cases of particular types of participation, such as environmental mediation (Bingham 1986), collaborative watershed partnerships (Leach, Pelkey, and Sabatier 2000), and regulatory negotiations (Coglianese 1997). However, the bulk of the previous literature on public participation analyzes one case study or a few case studies. Such analyses are not comprehensive enough to facilitate understanding of how the practice of public participation changes from one decisionmaking context to another or from one method of participation to another. Previous studies have used widely varying definitions of success, making it difficult to compare their conclusions or extrapolate beyond a given study's focus. Several researchers have noted the need to draw more broadly applicable lessons from the experience of public participation (Kraft 1995; Lynn and Busenberg 1995; NNOTF 1997; Stern and Fineberg 1996). This book responds to these calls.

A Brief History of Public Participation
in Environmental Decisionmaking

Public participation is best understood as a challenge to the traditional management of government policy by experts in administrative agencies. From the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, public administration in the United States was dominated by the “managerial” model in which government administrators were entrusted to identify and pursue the common good.

As government responsibilities increased in scope and complexity, large professional bureaucracies grew to manage them. Around the turn of the century, for example, Gifford Pinchot established a strong managerial ethos for the nascent U.S. Forest Service, which was responsible for managing vast tracts of public land. Through “scientific forestry,” Pinchot sought to serve the public interest by applying conservation policies that produced the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time (Hays 1959). Such a concept of social welfare maximization still drives managerialism. It is most often associated in modern environmental policymaking with the decision tools of risk assessment and cost–benefit analysis (Breyer 1995).

The managerial approach to decisionmaking has always occupied a tenuous position in democracy. In the context of regulatory rulemaking, for example, the demands of expert management and the demands of democratic accountability can be at odds with each other:

On the one hand, we have established that in order for government to be truly responsive to the incessant demands of the American people for public programs to solve private problems, rulemaking is essential.… On the other hand, as an indispensable surrogate to the legislative process, rulemaking has a fundamental flaw that violates basic democratic principles. Those who write the law embodied in rules are not elected; they are accountable to the American people only through indirect and less than foolproof means. (Kerwin 1999, 157)

A fundamental challenge for administrative governance is reconciling the need for expertise in managing administrative programs with the transparency and participation demanded by a democratic system. Kerwin (1999) argues that major expansions of government programs have brought this tension between managerialism and public accountability to a head at various times in the nation's history, each time to be relieved by new legislation promoting public participation.

The first example is the New Deal of the 1930s, which dramatically increased the influence of the executive branch of government in the workings of the economy. It provoked legislative reaction in the form of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in 1946. The APA systematized for the first time the process that federal agencies must use when making law through rulemaking. It requires that agencies provide public notice about the rules they are proposing, information on which the rules are based, an opportunity for public comment on those rules, and judicial review of the rulemaking process. The APA continues to govern all regulatory proceedings and is the cornerstone of public participation in administrative governance.

The decades after the passage of the APA saw increasing challenges to the managerial model. Traditional tensions between expertise and accountability were exacerbated by increasing skepticism that managers could adequately identify a public interest in ever-more-complicated administrative systems. The concept of pluralism began to replace managerialism as the dominant paradigm of administrative decisionmaking (Stewart 1975; Reich 1985). According to the pluralist view, government administrators were not a source of objective decisionmaking in the public interest but arbiters among different interests within the public. Whereas the managerial perspective identified maximization of social welfare as the ultimate social goal, pluralism did not recognize an objective sense of the “public good.” Rather, a contingent public good was to be debated and arrived at by negotiation among interests (Williams and Matheny 1995).

Pluralism flourished in a burst of public participation legislation that followed the expansion of government under President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs in the 1960s. From 1966 to 1976, the U.S. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (1966), the Federal Advisory Committee Act (1972), the Privacy Act (1974), and the Government in the Sunshine Act (1976). Together, these laws greatly expanded citizens’ access to government information and decisionmaking. The major environmental statutes of the 1970s were also “pluralist-created and pluralist-driven,” with their strong provisions for public review and citizen suits, which gave interest groups bargaining rights with industry (Gauna 1998, 24). During the past three decades, interest group membership and representation in Washington have risen dramatically to take advantage of the pluralism enshrined in environmental laws (Coglianese 1999b).

In recent years, the pluralist paradigm has come under pressure from an even more intensely participatory perspective. This “popular” democratic theory stresses the importance of the act of participation, not only in influencing decisions but also in strengthening civic capacity and social capital. Like pluralism, popular democracy emphasizes interaction among often adversarial interests, but that interaction is viewed less as a competitive negotiation than as a way to identify the common good and subsequently act on shared communal (versus individual) goals (Dryzek 1997).

From the popular democratic perspective, participation “makes people more aware of the linkages between public and private interests, helps them develop a sense of justice, and is a critical part of the process of developing a sense of community” (Laird 1993, 345). In environmental policymaking, the popular perspective has focused attention on the role of communities in environmental protection, spawning, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) efforts at “community-based environmental protection” and the National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee's Model Plan for Public Participation (NEJAC 1996).

What Society Expects from Public Participation

Although one can chart a historical progression from managerialism to pluralism to popular democracy, all three perspectives continue to compete in contemporary debates about how environmental policy should be made and implemented (Reich 1985).

What have evolved are society's expectations about what public participation should accomplish. Throughout the managerial era, the main justification for public involvement was accountability: to ensure that government agencies were acting in the public interest. With the ascendancy of pluralism and popular democracy, participation has been seen as a necessity for establishing what that public interest really is. The purpose of participation has shifted from merely providing accountability to developing the substance of policy.

The change in expectations is apparent in the proliferation of public participation activities in federal environmental programs in the 1990s. Federal departments and agencies have introduced much more complex forms of public participation than the traditional approaches of public comment and public hearings. The rise in the use of consensus-based participation (in which interest groups are expected to negotiate and agree on policy outcomes) has been particularly noticeable. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has used consensus-based advisory committees in making cleanup decisions at its contaminated facilities around the country (Bradbury and Branch 1999). EPA's Project XL and Common Sense Initiative programs have relied on consensus-based committees (Yosie and Herbst 1998). Consensus-based grassroots stakeholder councils have sprung up around the country to decide how to manage natural resources, and participation has become integral to resource management at the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service (Weber 2000). Reflecting the ascendancy of stakeholder negotiation in developing policy, in 1990 Congress passed the Negotiated Rulemaking Act, which allows agencies to use formal negotiations among interest groups to develop proposed regulations.

One reason that participation has become more central to environmental decisionmaking is an expectation that it can temper the confrontational politics that typify environmental policy. Modern environmental policymaking has been described as beset by a group of “wicked problems,” meaning “problems with no solutions, only temporary and imperfect resolutions” for which there are no “narrowly defined technical definitions and solutions” and no “clear-cut criteria to judge their resolution” (Fischer 1993, 172–173). In short, such problems are ill-suited to a managerial approach and rife with the politics that participation can address.

One example of Fischer's wicked problems is the siting of hazardous waste facilities. Greater participation in decisionmaking has been viewed as a possible remedy for NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) syndrome, which has bedeviled governments and industries seeking to build industrial facilities across the country (Rabe 1994). Another example is the massive cleanup of cold war–era nuclear weapons facilities, in which DOE has instituted participation to stem a crisis in public trust and confidence that is undermining the department's ability to perform complex environmental management and cleanup operations (SEAB 1993). In these and many other examples, public participation is being used not only to keep government accountable but also to help agencies make good decisions, help resolve long-standing problems of conflict and mistrust, and build capacity for solving the wicked problems of the future.

What is Public Participation?

The public participates in society's decisions in countless ways, from voting to violence and from “letters to the editor” to lawsuits. Only some of these ways are covered in this book. We define public participation as any of several “mechanisms” intentionally instituted to involve the lay public or their representatives in administrative decisionmaking. Such mechanisms range from town meetings at which citizens express their opinions to formally mediated negotiations in which parties write regulations; they also include advisory committees, citizen juries, and focus groups.

Our definition excludes some methods of participation that are important in their own right and have extensive traditions as well as legal foundations. For example, we exclude voting for elected officials, referenda, and initiatives as well as lobbying and citizen lawsuits. We also exclude less regulated methods (such as striking and picketing) and extralegal ones (such as violence). We focus on organized bureaucratic processes, not individual actions or power politics.

Although our definition is narrower than it could be, it is broader than some. In particular, many analysts and practitioners distinguish between public participation and stakeholder involvement. The former term generally connotes a popular democratic notion of lay citizens’ involvement in local issues and the latter term a more pluralist notion of interest group involvement in policy-level questions. We make no such distinction here and use public participation as an umbrella term that encompasses diverse definitions of who the public is, how the public is represented, why the public is involved, and what the public is involved in.

Evaluating Public Participation: Overview

We evaluate public participation on the basis of contemporary claims about what it can accomplish in environmental decisionmaking. These claims can be summarized as five “social goals” for public participation (Beierle 1999):

Goal 1: Incorporating public values into decisions
Goal 2: Improving the substantive quality of decisions
Goal 3: Resolving conflict among competing interests
Goal 4: Building trust in institutions
Goal 5: Educating and informing the public

In this book, success is defined as the extent to which public participation efforts achieve these social goals. To evaluate the success of public participation as practiced in the United States over the past 30 years, we turn to the case study record and synthesize data from several hundred published studies covering 239 cases of public involvement in environmental decisionmaking. (The process of selecting cases is described in Appendix A, and the list of cases is presented in Appendix E.) Case studies were published in journals, books, dissertations, conference proceedings, and government reports. They cover diverse planning, management, and implementation activities carried out by citizens and agencies at many levels of government. Each case involves a participation process specifically designed to engage people outside of government in helping to make decisions concerning the environment (e.g., public hearings, advisory committees, negotiations, or mediation).

In preparation for our study, we coded each public participation case based on a standard conceptual model composed of more than 100 attributes that describe the context, process, and results of the particular case. This conceptual model, the social goals used to evaluate the results of each case, and the methods used to select and analyze the case studies are described in Chapter 2.

In Chapter 3, we explain how the cases measure up against the social goals and illustrate the results with specific examples. The view of public participation derived from the analysis is quite positive. In most of the cases, public values and knowledge made important contributions to the quality of decisions; the participation processes often also resolved conflict, increas...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About Resources for the Future and RFF Press
• Resources for the Future
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptual Framework and Methodology
• 3 The Social Goals of Public Participation
• 4 The Context of Public Participation
• 5 The Process of Public Participation
• 6 Public Participation and Implementation
• 7 Designing Public Participation Processes
• 8 Conclusions and Areas for Further Research
• Appendix A: Case Survey Methodology
• Appendix B: Details on Data and Aggregation
• Appendix C: Technical Analysis
• Appendix D: Examination of Potential Bias
• Appendix E: Citations for Cases in the Final Data Set
• References
• Index
• About the Authors