Dave Huitema

Participation and Environment

The main subject to which this book seeks to contribute is the question of how and under which circumstances public participation can enhance the quality of environmental decision-making. This chapter outlines the issues addressed in the succeeding contributions. The core of the argument is that in the present age of ecology and in a society permeated by risk, ecological problems can wreak havoc with the social agenda. Environmental problems are not merely technical; they also raise inherently political questions and thus bear directly on long-standing challenges of democratic theory and practice. The theme of democratic governance is at the heart of environmental decision-making because the latter often requires a shift of resources and opportunities from some groups to others, and because finding solutions may necessarily require continuing and broadened participation — or so it has frequently been argued. Various solutions have been offered to deal with environmental problems, some stressing the need for a strong centralist state acting on the public’s behalf others favouring a more decentralised solution. In either case, the topic of public participation is central. Public participation is here approached from an analytic-functional perspective, meaning that the focus is on the maintenance of human society. This chapter introduces the criterion of competence to evaluate public participation processes. How well actual decision processes perform on this criterion can be assessed through the use of substantive and procedural considerations. Even if certain decision processes score well on the criterion in one setting or situation, it is important to assess carefully the cultural, institutional and physical circumstances under which the decision-making process is successful. In this fashion, a truly useful empirical theory of participation and environment can be developed.

Participation and environmental decision quality, an assessment

The contributions of this volume have focused centrally around the core questions of whether, how and under what circumstances participation in decisions regarding the environment influences the quality of choices being made. The chapters have been clustered around recurring issues and themes in environmental decision-making - the link between levels of decision-making and the scale of environmental problems to be dealt with, Local Agenda 21, decision-making on infrastructure, strategic planning, and environmental decision-making in developing countries — but they have all addressed elements of the core questions. This concluding chapter uses these analyses as bases for a review and assessment of the central theme: the relationship between participation and decision quality.

Hazardous decisions. The siting of hazardous waste facilities in Canada and the United States

Hazardous waste disposal facilities pose risks to their environment, and finding locations for them is a difficult task. Siting decisions have met much public resistance – sometimes referred to as ‘NIMBYism’ – and this has led to siting gridlock. This chapter explores the ways in which Canadian provinces and states in the United States have responded to the challenge posed by citizen resistance. A secondary analysis of six studies on the topic reveals interesting patterns. Researchers have identified three distinct approaches to decision-making: regulatory, market and voluntary siting. Regulatory siting centralises decision-making processes and places emphasis on expert knowledge and pre-empting local resistance. Market-led siting emphasises due process and compensation for negative impacts. Finally, voluntary siting processes highlight the role of local input and dialogue in decision-making. ‘Voluntary’ siting is the only approach that leads to siting success, and if it is assumed that facilities are actually needed, the ‘voluntary’ siting processes thus leads to better decisions. Four observations may tone down this optimistic conclusion. First, the few facilities that have actually been built after a voluntary siting process are being underutilised. Second, the success of ‘voluntary siting’ may not be exclusively linked to its voluntary character, but partly to compensation. Also, since only one community is involved other communities feel abused. Finally it is hard to motivate citizens to become involved in a highly participatory process and although they may understand the complex issues, they have difficulty is determining gaps in the information that is presented to them.

Introduction Part Five: Participation, Environment and Development: The Developing Countries’ Setting

The previous parts of this book dealt with participation in environmental decision-making processes in industrialised countries. The advanced nature of many of the participatory experiences in the earlier chapters reflects the more or less stable, democratic structures in which participatory (learning) processes in industrialised countries are taking place. The following three chapters deal with participation in a rather different setting. Participation in environmental decision-making is analysed in the context of developing countries, where structures are generally less stable and of a less democratic nature in than industrialised countries and where participation in environmental decision-making is often in an initial stage. In three contributions the relationship between participation, environment and development is explored, with each chapter referring to cases from a specific continent: Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Introduction Part Four: Infrastructure: The Road to Eternity?

The following three chapters examine questions of participation raised by infrastructure projects, taking for study diverse examples from the fields of waste and transport policy. Such projects are frequently controversial for policy-makers and the public who pay and vote for them. This is firstly because various policy rationales may conflict with each other. For example, high-speed rail may indeed be better for the environment than new motorways but is it really sustainable to travel so fast and far if it is based on nuclear sourced electricity? Secondly, infrastructure policies are intrusive in physical terms, as they will demand considerable intervention in the natural environment and they are nearly always doomed to be on somebody else’s ‘backyard’.

Introduction Part Three: Strategic Planning

The contributions in this part all deal with strategic planning processes or more fundamental decision-making processes that are undertaken along ‘interactive’ lines. One of the major problems with early environmental policies is that they led to ‘problem displacement’, shifting problems to other areas, other parts of the environment or to the future rather than resolving them. Strategic planning is a potential means to prevent such displacement and it may also offer opportunities to link together various environmental issues to prevent new problems being created when others are solved. Along similar lines, debates are needed every now and then about the fundamentals underlying environmental policies.

Introduction Part Two: Local Agenda 21

In Rio de Janeiro, June 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) agreed upon Agenda 21. This initiative, an international action programme for the next century, emphasised, among other things, co-operation between local authorities and groups in tackling environmental problems. About 2,500 actions were agreed upon in Agenda 21, two-thirds of which are to take place at the local level along the credo ‘think global, act local’. Taking this cue for action at heart, some 2,000 municipalities in 50 countries have started LA21 activities.

Introduction Part One: Interconnectedness, Participation and Problem Scale

As explained in the introductory chapter, a careful attempt to consider the link between participation and the quality of environmental decision-making — with particular concern for the functional perspective and thus societal survival – needs to deal with the issue of ‘level’, in the sense of the location, scale, and jurisdiction over which environmental decision-making is to be effective. Whether the issue is global warming, producing impacts over the entire planet, or a seemingly local matter, like the siting of a hazardous waste facility or the regulation of noise pollution in a municipality, effective decisions would seem to require a sensible connection between the scope and impact of an environmental challenge, on the one hand, and the relevant institutions and stakeholders – including the broad public –, on the other. There is no such thing as the problem scale for environmental questions. As mentioned in the first chapter, such issues can appear at local, regional, national, fluvial, continental, or global levels. ‘Thinking globally, acting locally’ is thus not a very helpful general action principle. Rather, it can be sensible only if the decision-making incorporates some strategy for associating local involvement and action with forces and actors that can have causal impact at the appropriate points on the real problems that demand attention. Otherwise, participation may be a sop, or a chimera, little more than a form of unintentionally symbolic politics. Efficacious participation requires more than appropriate motivation, tools, and involvement. It demands the right kind of articulation between the scale and methods of participation, on the. one hand, and the requisite causal levers, on the other.

The effects of policy making on the design of economic policy instruments: politics as usual

Three scientists are stranded on an uninhabited island. They do not have any food and they cannot return to the world of civilization. The engineer indicates that she is helpless: there are no tools available to build a boat. The political scientist is at a loss: she is not powerful enough to goad any others into action. The economist, however, cries out that he has the answer: let us assume we have the power to make the right equipment arrive, wouldn’t the problem be solved?