Thomas Webler

Public participation in decision making : a three-step procedure

This article introduces a novel model of public particpation in political decisions. Structured in three consecutive steps, the model is based on the view that stakeholders, experts, and citizens should each contribute to the planning effort their particular expertise and experience. Stakeholders are valuable resources for eliciting concerns and developing evaluative criteria since their interests are at stake and they have already made attempts to structure and approach the issue. Experts are necessary to provide the data base and the functional relationships between options and impacts. Citizens are the potential victims and benefactors of proposed planning measures; they are the best judges to evaluate the different options available on the basis of the concerns and impacts revealed through the other two groups. The three-step model has been developed and frequently applied as a planning tool in West Germany. We compare this experience with the models first application in the United States, and conclude that the three-step procedure offers a limited, but promising future for democratizing policy making in the United States.

A Need for Discourse on Citizen Participation: Objectives and Structure of the Book

More and more the decision makers and affected parties engaged in solving environmental problems are recognizing that traditional decision making strategies are insufficient. Often heavily shaped by scientific analysis and judgment, these kinds of decisions are vulnerable to two major critiques. First, because they de-emphasize the consideration of affected interests in favor of “objective” analyses, they suffer from a lack of popular acceptance. Second, because they rely almost exclusively on systematic observations and general theories, they slight the local and anecdotal knowledge of the people most familiar with the problem and risk producing outcomes that are incompetent, irrelevant, or simply unworkable.

Perception of Uncertainty: Lessons for Risk Management and Communication

The perception of risk among the general public is a rather complex phenomenon that cannot be described on the basis of a single theory or model. The major accomplishment in the psychological research was the discovery of the qualitative risk characteristics and the semantic images that serve as heuristic tools for classifying and evaluating risk sources or activities. The intuitive process of evaluating risk is governed by a multidimensional balancing procedure involving expected losses, situational circumstances, and associations with respect to the risk source. Communication programs need to incorporate these findings if they want to give people the opportunity to make prudent judgments about acceptability. The common prejudice, however, that lay people are unable to process probabilistic information is not true. As our case study demonstrates, people understand risk information and can integrate probabilities in their decision-making process. But this information is only one among others for them to form their own attitudes and judgments.