Openness in participation, assessment, and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health: a review of literature and recent project results
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This page (including the files available for download at the bottom of this page) contains a draft version of a manuscript, whose final version is published and is available in the Environmental Health 2011. If referring to this text in scientific or other official papers, please refer to the published final version as: Mikko V. Pohjola and Jouni T. Tuomisto: Openness in participation, assessment, and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health: a review of literature and recent project results. Environmental Health 2011, 10:58 http://www.ehjournal.net/content/10/1/58.
Title
Openness in participation, assessment, and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health: a review of literature and recent project results
Authors and contact information
- Mikko V. Pohjola, corresponding author
- (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio Finland, firstname.lastname@thl.fi)
- Jouni T. Tuomisto
- (National Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio, Finland, firstname.lastname@thl.fi)
Abstract
Issues of environment and environmental health involve multiple interests regarding e.g. political, societal, economical, and public concerns represented by different kinds of organizations and individuals. Not surprisingly, stakeholder and public participation has become a major issue in environmental and environmental health policy and assessment. The need for participation has been discussed and reasoned by many, including environmental legislators around the world. In principle, participation is generally considered as desirable and the focus of most scholars and practitioners is on carrying out participation, and making participation more effective. In practice also doubts regarding the effectiveness and importance of participation exist among policy makers, assessors, and public, leading even to undermining participatory practices in policy making and assessment.
There are many possible purposes for participation, and different possible models of interaction between assessment and policy. A solid conceptual understanding of the interrelations between participation, assessment, and policy making is necessary in order to design and implement effective participatory practices. In this paper we ask, do current common conceptions of assessment, policy making and participation provide a sufficient framework for achieving effective participation? This question is addresses by reviewing the range of approaches to participation in assessment and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health and some related insights from recent research projects, INTARESE and BENERIS.
Openness, considered e.g. in terms of a) scope of participation, b) access to information, c) scope of contribution, d) timing of openness, and e) impact of contribution, provides a new perspective to the relationships between participation, assessment and policy making. Participation, assessment, and policy making form an inherently intertwined complex with interrelated objectives and outcomes. Based on experiences from implementing openness, we suggest complete openness as the new default, deviation from which should be explicitly argued, in assessment and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health. Openness does not undermine the existing participatory models and techniques, but provides conceptual means for their more effective application, and opens up avenues for developing new kinds of effective participatory practices that aim for societal development through collaborative creation of knowledge.
Introduction
Stakeholder and public participation is undoubtedly one of the most central topics in contemporary discourse regarding environmental and environmental health policy and assessment. Environmental issues typically involve multiple interests regarding e.g. political, societal, economical, and public concerns and particularly in cases where they are known or perceived to relate either directly or indirectly to human health and well-being, the concerns often also become very personal. In such a setting of physical, chemical, biological, and societal complexity, it is widely accepted as important to include plural perspectives, particularly from the “affected parties”, in the processes of policy making as well as the processes of producing information to guide and support policy making. As the idea of participation mainly builds on the theories and practices of democracy [1,2], this is particularly the case in the so called Western democracies, but increasingly also in countries not generally considered as democratic by their constitution, such as the People’s Republic of China [3,4].
In addition to being founded on the principles of democracy, public participation is addressed in several intergovernmental agreements, e.g. the Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration [5], and the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision- Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters [6]. Also several laws on different levels of governance around the world, e.g. the EU Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive (2001/42/EC), the EU Public Participation Directive (2003/35/EC), The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Environmental Impact Assessment [4], and the Finnish Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Act (468/94) and corresponding EIA Decree (713/ 2006), explicitly consider public participation and describe legal frameworks for its application. The legal requirements provide, however, only one perspective to participation. Importance of participation is also argued for example based on ethical, political, pragmatic, and epistemological [7] as well as substantive, normative, and instrumental reasons [1], and participation is seen to have the potential to deliver e.g. substantive, procedural, and contextual effects [8,9]. Participation in assessment and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health has become commonplace.
This paper explores the following question: do current common conceptions of assessment, policy making and participation provide a sufficient framework for achieving effective participation? By effectiveness we mean influence on the outcomes, i.e. changes in values, attitudes, and behavior in the society (cf. [10]), of the processes that the participation relates to, e.g. participatory assessments or policy making.
Policy making is here understood as decision making upon issues of societal importance and assessments are considered as systematic science-based endeavors of producing information to support policy making. Public participation and stakeholder involvement are here seen as instances of the same issue which is mostly referred to as participation, meaning contributions from the parties, organizations or individuals that do not have formal roles as decision makers or experts in the assessment or policy processes in question.
These broad definitions allow inclusion of various types of participation, assessment, and policy making, practiced in and designed for several societal, institutional and geographical contexts by many different actors. For example, risk assessment, environmental impact assessment, and health impact assessment, whether practiced by consultants, federal agencies, or academic researchers, in Europe, USA, or China, are considered as just different manifestations of the fundamentally same process of science-based policy support. They are, however, clearly distinguishable from curiosity- driven research, ad hoc assessments, or assessments made to justify predetermined decisions. Here we focus on issues relevant to environment and environmental health, but the implications can be extended also to many other substantive contexts.
Answers to the question are sought for by discussing recent literature relevant to the question. That knowledge is complemented with some insights from recent research projects, INTARESE (Integrated Assessment of Health Risks of Environmental Stressors in Europe) [11] and BENERIS (Benefit-Risk Assessment of Food: an Iterative Value-of-Information Approach) [12].
INTARESE was an EU-funded research project running from 2005 to 2011, developing methodology and tools for integrated environmental health impact assessment (IEHIA), and testing them in case studies. BENERIS was also an EU-funded research project running from 2006 to 2009, developing a framework and tools for complicated benefit-risk situations, and applying them for analyzing benefits and risk of certain foods.
The review starts from purposes of participation and ends in consideration of openness. Overall it presents a new perspective to the relationships between participation, assessment, and policy making.
Review
Purpose of participation
The discourse on participation, involving both scholars and practitioners has primarily focused on implementation of participation while the multiple objectives and purposes of participation, particularly in relation to the objectives and purposes of the processes they relate to, have received much less attention [13]. This discourse has resulted for example in various guidance documents for stakeholder involvement [8,14,15], detailed presentation and discussion of various models for public participation, [16-21], and analysis of the applicability of participation techniques [22-24]. Although they are all important contributions to developing understanding about participation and its implementation, it is not always easy to identify how they link to the “outcome effectiveness of participatory processes in their societal context”, as Newig [25] put it in developing his analytical framework for evaluating the impact of participation to improved environmental quality. Many means for public participation exist, but the ends they serve may not always be explicitly identified (for more on the theory of means-ends relationships, see e.g. [26]).
Despite the theoretical stance that participation is generally viewed as highly desirable and its benefits are often assumed to be obvious and substantial [13], the practices of policy making and assessment do not always represent this view. For instance, in a Finnish environmental permit case on a waste treatment activity the decision-maker, the permit applicant, as well as the stakeholders all questioned the meaningfulness of participation in the process, although in principle participation was seen as important by all [27]. The inconsistent utilization of public’s contributions has also been seen as a general weakness in the Finnish environmental impact assessment system due to being strongly dependent on the developer’s attitudes towards participation as well as the weak links between the assessment and related decision making processes [28]. This can be assumed representative of many other environmental impact assessment systems conducted under the EU Environmental Impact Assessment Directive (85/337/EEC) as well. Also in Canada the record of project-based environmental assessment in delivering on the promise of meaningful public participation has been identified as less than promising [29].
A major source of the problem with participation is that it has been more focused on process and access, rather than on outcomes [29]. It appears that the issue of effective participation needs to be considered in terms of the different possible purposes of both participation and assessment as well as their roles in the related policy making processes. O’Faircheallaigh [13] has presented a nice characterization of ten specific purposes and activities, categorized under three broad purposes, for public participation in environmental impact assessment. The characterization is made in such a generic way, i.e. not bound to any specifics of contemporary environmental impact assessment practices, that we here assume it generalizable to all policy making and assessment regarding environmental and environmental health issues. According to
O’Faircheallaigh [13] the three broad purposes for participation are:
• Obtain public input into decisions taken elsewhere • Share decision making with public • Alter distribution of power and structures of decision making
These categories roughly correspond to 1) participation influencing assessments and (potentially) their outputs, 2) participation influencing policy making and (potentially) policy decisions, and 3) participation as a means for influencing policy making from outside the existing institutional policy making structures. Within the broad purposes there can be several more specific sub-purposes, many of which are identified and discussed by O’Faircheallaigh [13], e.g. according to the kinds of expected, desired or allowed participant contributions. It is important to note that the purposes for participation are not exclusive, but can, and in fact often do, co-exist and interact. Advancing of different purposes of participation is strongly dependent on the attitudes towards participation among those who control the policy making and assessment processes, but also the types of interaction between assessment and policy making. Particularly this becomes apparent when attempting to advance several specific purposes of participation across categories, for example simultaneously filling information gaps with local knowledge, inviting public to decision making, and especially empowering marginalized groups (cf. [13]).
The relationships between participation, assessment, policy making, and their outcomes are outlined in Figure 1 and discussed in following sections.
Role of participation in assessment
There are multiple kinds of assessment that serve different purposes and address different kinds of questions,