This paper explores citizen perspectives about different types of participation mechanisms. An enormous number and variety of citizen participation mechanisms exist, in domestic and global governance. In recent years, support for citizen engagement has made creation of new hybrid approaches a regular feature of the governance landscape. Our hope is that enhanced understanding of citizen preferences for different types of participation processes will lead to improved design of such mechanisms. The paper uses an empirical approach to focus on currently available citizen participation mechanisms in the field of environmental regulation. Through a questionnaire, we asked environmental activists about their preferences among different participation mechanisms, and about their preferences among different features of those mechanisms. We used insights from the procedural and distributive justice literatures in developing our menu of possible process features. The most important finding from the questionnaire responses is that context seems to be a key determinant of participant preferences. Offered a menu of eleven process choices for participating in situations involving non-compliance with the environmental laws, respondents preferred different processes depending on the situation involved. Similarly, respondents, when asked specific questions about two procedures, citizen suits under the federal environmental laws and the Commission for Environmental Cooperation's (CEC's) citizen submissions process, preferred the different procedures for different reasons. These responses highlight the need for more detailed exploration of the importance of context in process design; prospective process participants appear to prefer different types of processes, and different features, in different contexts. Consistent with earlier work in different arenas, our respondents also valued procedural justice features of processes (fairness, neutrality, etc.) in addition to considering distributive justice (e.g., the likelihood of a successful outcome) in assigning preferences among process options. Our fundamental argument is that this empirical governance approach (notably, using empirical research as a guide to designing legal procedures) is applicable throughout the realm of environmental use conflicts; more broadly, beyond this area of practice, it is a model, in our view, that will yield helpful insights for increasing citizen participation in procedures intended to promote such participation.