Final Report (all chapters)

Deliberation: This requirement has already been discussed at length, so we can keep this
discussion short. An institution of public consultation is deliberative in the following sense: It
encourages mutual understanding among the members of the general public, and it encourages
crafting broadly acceptable political compromises (i.e., it promotes group depolarization). What
deliberation is not expected to produce is consensus or unanimity.
Balance: A mechanism of public consultation should be designed to facilitate the
articulation of all views. This means that each view should be equally represented independently
of its actual political weight. Balance is required to prevent deliberative groups from
polarizing. 52
10.8 Institutional Options
Evaluating institutions of public participation presents a challenge. There have been some
efforts in the literature to identify universal evaluative criteria, but these efforts have been
hampered by a lack of attention for the administrative and legal context in which participatory
initiatives take place. 53 These works have proposed both substantive and procedural criteria that
would make a process of public participation effective, but since effectiveness can only be
measured against a specific goal, and the goal is not always clearly defined, these criteria are of
little help to our discussion. For this reason, the mechanisms of public consultation examined in
the remainder of this section are evaluated largely against the constitutive attributes of an
institution of public consultation as we envisage it in this report.
The mechanisms of public consultation we discuss in the next two sections are the public
hearing and the consensus conference. Other institutions of public consultation exist, including
citizens’ panels, 54 citizens’ juries, 55 and focus groups. 56 We discuss only public hearings and
consensus conferences for two main reasons. Public hearings remain by far the administrators’
52
53
54
55
56
A careful reader may point out that this and the first attribute are mutually exclusive. A closer examination
shows that this is actually not the case. It is always possible, at least in principle, to assemble a representative
sample of the general population in which each view is shared by an equal number of citizens.
Gene Rowe and Lynn J. Frewer, "Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation," Science,
Technology and Human Values 25, no. 1 (2000); Thomas Webler, " 'Right' Discourse in Citizen Participation:
An Evaluative Yardstick," in Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation: Evaluating Models for
Environmental Discourse, ed. Ortwin Renn, Thomas Webler, and Peter Wiedemann (Dordrecht, the Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic, 1995).
John S. Applegate, "Beyond the Usual Suspects: The Use of Citizens Advisory Boards in Environmental
Decisionmaking," Indiana Law Journal 73 (1998); Bradbury and Branch, "An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of
Local Site-Specific Advisory Boards for U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Restoration Program.";
Susan L. Santos and Caron Chess, "Evaluating Citizen Advisory Boards: The Importance of Theory and
Participant-Based Criteria and Practical Implications," Risk Analysis 23, no. 2 (2003).
David Dunkerley and Peter Glasner, "Empowering the Public? Citizens' Juries and the New Genetic
Technologies," Critical Public Health 8, no. 3 (1998); Wendy Kenyon, Ceara Nevin, and Nick Hanley,
"Enhancing Environmental Decision-Making Using Citizens’ Juries," Local Environment 8, no. 2 (2003); David
Price, "Choices without Reasons: Citizens' Juries and Policy Evaluation," Journal of Medical Ethics 26 (2000).
Gregor Dürrenberger, Hans Kastenholz, and Jeannette Behringer, "Integrated Assessment Focus Groups:
Bridging the Gap between Science and Policy?," Science and Public Policy 26, no. 5 (1999).
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