Public involvement on a regional scale

Abstract This article centers on public involvement conducted at a regional scale, using the U.S. National Assessment of Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (NACC) to ground discussion. Though it is a national program, NACC assessments are being conducted in 19 regions and across several sectors. NACC's environmental issue is intangible and long term. Its “assessment” orientation means that public participation has no clear decision or policy on which to focus. Our role was to provide guidance for, in the language of NACC, “stakeholder involvement.” This article discusses two major elements as they influenced our decisions about what guidance to provide the program and how to provide it effectively. The two elements are the institutional and organizational structure of NACC itself and existing theoretical and experiential “golden rules” or “lessons” of public involvement. We summarize our resulting guidance to NACC for its regional assessment teams and our limited knowledge of how that guidance has been used. We end by calling for research to take advantage of the natural experiment that constitutes NACC — multiple, linked, simultaneous cases of regional-scale, assessment-oriented, public involvement.

[1]  Lawrence Susskind The siting puzzle , 1985 .

[2]  Edmund M. Burke Citizen Participation Strategies , 1968 .

[3]  Oceans,et al.  Top 10 watershed lessons learned , 1997 .

[4]  Thomas A. Arcury,et al.  Rural-Urban Differences in Environmental Knowledge and Actions , 1993 .

[5]  S. Schneider Creating a Democratic Public Sphere Through Political Discussion , 1996 .

[6]  S. Krimsky Beyond Technocracy: New Routes for Citizen Involvement in Social Risk Assessment , 1982 .

[7]  J. B. Rosener,et al.  User-Oriented Evaluation: A New Way to View Citizen Participation , 1981, Public Involvement and Social Impact Assessment.

[8]  T. Webler,et al.  Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation , 1995 .

[9]  Toddi A. Steelman,et al.  Public involvement methods in natural resource policy making: Advantages, disadvantages and trade-offs , 1997 .

[10]  Robin L. Dennis,et al.  Citizen participation and judgment in policy analysis: A case study of urban air quality policy , 1984 .

[11]  G. Wilson Factors Influencing Farmer Participation in the Environmentally Sensitive Areas Scheme , 1997 .

[12]  B. Wynne Knowledges in Context , 1991 .

[13]  C. King,et al.  The Question of Participation: Toward Authentic Public Participation in Public Administration , 1998 .

[14]  Kurt Finsterbusch,et al.  Methodology of Social Impact Assessment , 1977 .

[15]  J. Durant,et al.  The relationship between knowledge and attitudes in the public understanding of science in Britain , 1995 .

[16]  Jennifer Caroline Greene,et al.  Stakeholder participation in evaluation: How important is diversity? , 1997 .

[17]  S. Arnstein,et al.  Ladder of Citizen Participation , 2020 .

[18]  R. Keeney,et al.  Improving risk communication. , 1986, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[19]  Frank N. Laird,et al.  Participatory Analysis, Democracy, and Technological Decision Making , 1993 .

[20]  J. Petersen,et al.  Citizen participation in science policy , 1988 .

[21]  Frances M. Lynn Citizen involvement in hazardous waste sites: two North Carolina success stories , 1987 .

[22]  J. B. Rosener Making Bureaucrats Responsive: A Study of the Impact of Citizen Participation and Staff Recommendations on Regulatory Decision Making , 1982 .