[PDF] Assessing Citizen Participation In Environmental Policy eBook

Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 15,5 MB
Release : 2008-11-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0309134412

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Federal agencies have taken steps to include the public in a wide range of environmental decisions. Although some form of public participation is often required by law, agencies usually have broad discretion about the extent of that involvement. Approaches vary widely, from holding public information-gathering meetings to forming advisory groups to actively including citizens in making and implementing decisions. Proponents of public participation argue that those who must live with the outcome of an environmental decision should have some influence on it. Critics maintain that public participation slows decision making and can lower its quality by including people unfamiliar with the science involved. This book concludes that, when done correctly, public participation improves the quality of federal agencies' decisions about the environment. Well-managed public involvement also increases the legitimacy of decisions in the eyes of those affected by them, which makes it more likely that the decisions will be implemented effectively. This book recommends that agencies recognize public participation as valuable to their objectives, not just as a formality required by the law. It details principles and approaches agencies can use to successfully involve the public.

Author : Ortwin Renn
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 40,2 MB
Release : 2013-12-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9401101310

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Ortwin Renn Thomas Wehler Peter Wiedemann In late July of 1992 the small and remote mountain resort of Morschach in the Swiss Alps became a lively place of discussion, debate, and discourse. Over a three-day period twenty-two analysts and practitioners of public participation from the United States and Europe came together to address one of the most pressing issues in contemporary environmental politics: How can environmental policies be designed in a way that achieves both effective protection of nature and an adequate representation of public values? In other words, how can we make the environmental decision process competent and fair? All the invited scholars from academia, international research institutes, and governmental agencies agreed on one fundamental principle: For environmental policies to be effective and legitimate, we need to involve the people who are or will be affected by the outcomes of these policies. There is no technocratic solution to this problem. Without public involvement, environmental policies are doomed to fail. The workshop was preceded by a joint effort by the three editors to develop a framework for evaluating different models of public participation in the environmental policy arena. During a preliminary review of the literature we made four major observations. These came to serve as the primary motivation for this book. First, the last decade has witnessed only a fair amount of interest within the sociological or political science communities in issues of public participation.

Author : Thomas C. Beierle
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 14,1 MB
Release : 2010-09-30
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1136528083

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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.

Author : Gregory Daneke
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 16,48 MB
Release : 2019-06-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000308588

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The participation of the public sector in assessing the socialimpact of a wide range of projects is the focus of this ground-breakingbook. Leading experts from the u.s. and canada have contributedoriginal articles based on their empirical research conducted in currentimpact situations. These are supplemented by the editors' analyticaloverviews. The book concludes with projections regardingfuture linkages between public involvement and social impact assessment.Dr. Gregory A. Daneke is associate professor of public affairsand business administration at Arizona State University. He has coeditedEnergy Policy and Public Administration (1980) and coauthoredPerformance Administration: Improved Responsiveness and Effectivenessin Public services (1980). Dr. Margot w. Garcia is a program analystwith the USDA Forest Service; as part of a .nationwide training programfor the Forest Service in land management planning, she taught publicinvolvement and land management planning. Dr. Jerome Delli Priscoliis senior policy analyst at the Institute for Water Resources, u.s.Army Corps of Engineers, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia.

Author : Richard Worthington
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 45,93 MB
Release : 2013-11-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1317972740

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On one day in 2009, in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process. This book – which analyzes the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event – marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global: the role of deliberation within global governance methodology and practice participant selection; policy impacts engaging the media how policy culture affects deliberation uptake capacity building and knowledge transfer process evaluation content and argumentation analysis gender, race and class aspects. The global aims of the 'WWViews project', along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale.

Author : Frans H. J. M. Coenen
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 12,50 MB
Release : 2008-12-12
Category : Science
ISBN : 140209325X

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Public Participation and Better Environmental Decisions is about a specific ‘promise’ that participation holds for environmental decision-making. Many of the arguments for public participation in (inter)national environmental policy documents are functional, that is to say they see public participation as a means to an end. Sound solutions to environmental problems require participation beyond experts and political elites. Neglecting information from the public leads to legitimacy questions and potential conflicts. There is a discourse in the literature and in policy practice as to whether decision-making improves in quality as additional relevant information by the public is considered. The promise that public participation holds has to be weighed against the limitations of public participation in terms of costs and interest conflicts. The question that Public Participation and Better Environmental Decisions seeks to answer for academics, planners and civil servants in all environmental relevant policy fields is: What restricts and what enables information to hold the ‘promise’ that public participation lead to better environmental decision-making and better outcomes?

Author : W. Michele Simmons
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 37,60 MB
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0791480623

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Participation and Power examines the ways in which citizens are allowed to participate in environmental policy decision making. Despite requirements that mandate public participation, institutional practices and current models of public participation often exclude citizens from anything other than a superficial role. W. Michele Simmons offers a firsthand look at risk communication and public participation practices through a case study involving the disposal of VX nerve agent. Arguing that a rhetoric for civic discourse in policy debates is needed, she constructs a theory of democratic and ethical public involvement that grants citizens more power in the decision-making process.

Author :
Publisher :
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 12,86 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Administrative agencies
ISBN : 9780309125437

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Advocates of public participation believe it improves environmental assessment and decision making; detractors criticize it as ineffective and inefficient. The term public participation, as used in this book, includes organized processes adopted by elected officials, government agencies, or other public- or private-sector organizations to engage the public in environmental assessment, planning, decision making, management, monitoring, and evaluation. These processes supplement traditional forms of public participation (voting, forming interest groups, demonstrating, lobbying) by directly involving the public in executive functions that, when they are conducted in government, are traditionally delegated to administrative agencies. The goal of participation is to improve the quality, legitimacy, and capacity of environmental assessments and decisions.. This book ... assesses whether, and under what conditions, public participation achieves the outcomes desired. Claims from all sides are considered and evaluated as a central point of the study, in order to provide an overall assessment of the merits and failings of participation. It also offers guidance to practitioners and identifies directions for further research.

Author : Janis L. Dickinson
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 22,23 MB
Release : 2012-04-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 0801464420

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Citizen science enlists members of the public to make and record useful observations, such as counting birds in their backyards, watching for the first budding leaf in spring, or measuring local snowfall. The large numbers of volunteers who participate in projects such as Project FeederWatch or Project BudBurst collect valuable research data, which, when pooled together, create an enormous body of scientific data on a vast geographic scale. In return, such projects aim to increase participants' connections to science, place, and nature, while supporting science literacy and environmental stewardship. In Citizen Science, experts from a variety of disciplines—including scientists and education specialists working at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where many large citizen science programs use birds as proxies for biodiversity—share their experiences of creating and implementing successful citizen science projects, primarily those that use massive data sets gathered by citizen scientists to better understand the impact of environmental change. This first and foundational book for this developing field of inquiry addresses basic aspects of how to conduct citizen science projects, including goal-setting, program design, and evaluation, as well as the nuances of creating a robust digital infrastructure and recruiting a large participant base through communications and marketing. An overview of the types of research approaches and techniques demonstrates how to make use of large data sets arising from citizen science projects. A final section focuses on citizen science's impacts and its broad connections to understanding the human dimensions and educational aspects of participation. Citizen Science teaches teams of program developers and researchers how to cross the bridge from success at public engagement to using citizen science data to understand patterns and trends or to test hypotheses about how ecological processes respond to change at large geographic scales. Intended as a resource for a broad audience of experts and practitioners in natural sciences, information science, and social sciences, this book can be used to better understand how to improve existing programs, develop new ones, and make better use of the data resources that have accumulated from citizen science efforts. Its focus on harnessing the impact of "crowdsourcing" for scientific and educational endeavors is applicable to a wide range of fields, especially those that touch on the importance of massive collaboration aimed at understanding and conserving what we can of the natural world.