1. DEMOCRACY IN PRACTICE Thomas C. Beierle and Jerry Crayford Presentation by Priyanth Manjooran, Amanda Gilbert, Eli Wade-Scott and Jordan Smith

3. Brief History of Public Participation  New Deal of the 1930s provoked legislative action in the form of Administrative Procedure Act  Required the agencies to provide public notice, information, and opportunity when making law through rulemaking.  What is public participation?  With regards to environmental issues, public participation is the public influence that determines how society will manage and protect the environment.

4. Is public participation valuable?

5. Methodology  Meta-analysis  Foundation of research is a database  239 cases of public participation in environmental decision-making  Derived data using a “case survey” methodology A case survey is a formal process for systematically coding relevant data for quantitative analysis from many qualitative sources.  Types of cases  Cases were coded and analyzed attributes that include aspects of the context of participation, the process of participation, and the outcomes achieved.

6. Types of Cases  Screening criteria used for selecting the types of cases  Public participation in environmental decision-making that occurred in the United States over the past 30 years  A discrete mechanism intentionally instituted to engage the public in administrative environmental decision-making, such as public hearings, advisory committees, or environmental mediation  The participation of nongovernmental citizens  The involvement of at least one public perspective other than the regulated community  Either an identifiable lead agency or a agency for which the output of the process would be immediately relevant

7. Potential benefits  Incorporating public values into decision  Improving the substantive quality of decisions  Resolving conflict among competing interests  Building trust in institutions  Educating and informing the public

8. Incorporating public values into decision 58% received high scores Whose values? — 60% of cases were not socioeconomically representative — 58% had interests “missing from the table”

9. Improving the substantive quality of decisions  68% had high scores  Fernald Citizens Task Force saves $2 billion

10. Resolving conflict among competing interests  61% received high scores  33% left an issue off the table or excluded a controversial participant

11. Building trust in institutions  Trust in agencies credibility or legitimacy, or respect for institution.  45% received high scores, 41% low scores.  Lipari Landfill  Circle of impact

12. Educating and informing the public  77% received high scores  Causes of low scores  Failures of outreach  49% received low scores  Some methods subvert outreach

13. Is public participation valuable?  Aggregate measure of success: 61% of cases were successful.  Most successful in education, least successful in building trust.  Caveats:  Who is represented  Circle of information

14. What makes some processes more successful than others?

15. Conceptual framework  Context  Process  Implementation

16. What is context?  “all features of a given situation that public participation confronts”  Examples  Groundwater contamination by a military contractor  Issue is highly technical and not well studied  Contaminant mitigation unfairly affects low income communities

17. What is context?  Type of issue  Pre-existing relationship between public and lead agency  Institutional setting

18. Type of issue  Policy level issues vs. site-specific issues  Natural resources vs. pollution  Issue categorization  Importance of issue type is limited

19. Pre-existing relationships  70% of cases involved high mistrust  42% of cases involved high levels of pre-existing conflict  Important of pre-existing relationships is limited  More significant impact when processes are less intensive  More intensive processes transform relationships

20. Institutional context  State and federal agencies both took the lead in 38% of cases.  Importance of institutional context is limited.

21. Does context affect public participation?

22. Process  Examples  Participatory mechanisms  Public meetings: Open meetings, information exchange.  Advisory committees: Either “seeking consensus” or “not seeking consensus”, defined and consistent membership, usually ends in specific recommendations to agency.  Negotiations and mediations: Participants are professional representatives, forms agreements binding organizations to courses of action  Intensity: The more intense the mechanism, the more successful it will be. However it won’t always engage the wider public.

23. Aggregate Measure of Success, by Type of Mechanism

24. Variable process features  Responsiveness of the Lead Agency  Motivation of the Participants  Quality of deliberation  Degree of Public Control  Take-away: The choice of mechanism can tell us if a process would successful or not but the variable process features tell us more.

25. Implementation  What is implementation?  The 5 stages of Implementation Output Agency Decision Change in law/regulation/policy Institutional action Environmental quality improvement

26. Forces Affecting Implementation  Public participation’s effects on implementation  Better participation leads to moderately better implementation  Other Forces that affect implementation  Disagreements Stall Implementation  Conflict Not Really Resolved  Political Intervention  Changing Circumstances  Links to Policies and Programs  Take-away: Public participation, even if done well, is no substitute for the regulatory power, political will, and money required to get things done.

27. Conclusions  Public participation helps agencies and the public meet concrete challenges that face the modern environmental management system.  Involving the public in the environmental policymaking process does (to some degree of success) produce socially valuable results:  Leads to decisions that are responsive to public values  Can resolve conflict among the participating groups and the public  It helps build trust in institutions  increases overall knowledge about environmental issues

28. Conclusion  Type of process is important to understanding what makes participation successful  To enable the public to take on more fundamental roles in decisionmaking, public participation processes need to effectively incorporate technical information, education, and analysis  Foundation for building an understanding of public participation is the case study record.

30. So…what’s the point?  Evaluating past cases provides guidance for designing effective public participation efforts for the future  It is impossible to create a blueprint for the public participation process, but it is possible to apply a methodological approach to process design, which could increase the likelihood of success.

31. Designing Public Participation Success  Determine the need for public participation  Identify the goals of the process  Answer design questions  Select and modify a process  Evaluate the process

32. Designing Public Participation Success  Determine the need for public participation  Decision makers need to be flexible, and need to recognize that public participation may lead to priorities and conclusions that agencies find wrong.  If the agency initiating the public participation process is not willing to make the necessary commitments that make the process successful, then public participation should not be part of the decision making process.

33. Designing Public Participation Success  Rationales for public participation  Instrumental Facilitates policy formation and implementation  Substantive Leads to superior decisions  Normative Right of citizens Route to a more healthy democratic society

34. Designing Public Participation Success  Identify the goals of the process  Will the process need to identify and incorporate public values into decisions?  Does the process need to resolve conflict?

35. Designing Public Participation Success  Answer design questions  Who should participate?  What kind of engagement is appropriate? Information sharing vs. deliberation  How much influence should the public have?  What role should government play?

36. Designing Public Participation Success  Select and modify a process  Mechanism types not set in stone  Cost considerations  Evaluate the process  Build information base of the approaches to public participation that achieve satisfactory results.