Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making

Summary: This is a study of public participation processes in environmental assessment and policy making. The first stage of the study examined the burgeoning case-study, theoretical, and practical literature on public participation and will develop preliminary lists of potentially critical variables, outcome indicators, and causal hypotheses. In the second stage, the panel will commission a small number of reviews of recent experience in order to better inform government agencies, giving particular attention to evaluation studies of past efforts, and adding a few new studies. In the third stage, the panel will write a consensus statement about the implications of current knowledge for public participation, practice and research. The panel will focus on: indicators of success and variables that may influence these indicators; lessons from experience concerning which approaches work well under which conditions; testable hypotheses that would allow veri-fication or refinement of such lessons; and ways that government agencies can learn system-atically from their own experience and the experience of others.