|
Article Excerpt
Introduction
Citizen participation has become an increasingly important component of public policy making in the United States. This is particularly true in the realm of environmental policy. Since the late 1960s, most federal environmental legislation has provided formal mechanisms that concerned citizens and organizations can utilize to become involved in environmental decision making. Congressional motivation for these provisions stems, in part, from a desire to avoid 'bureaucratic capture,' where a regulatory agency is more responsive to regulated entities than to overall public good (Rosenbaum, 1995). But in recent years, agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have gone beyond congressionally mandated participation provisions to increase citizen or stakeholder involvement in a variety of agency activities (Environmental Protection Agency, 2001, 2002). Public participation in environmental decision making can range from attending public hearings, responding to punic notices, serving on citizen advisory boards or stakeholder groups, and participation in collaborative decision-making bodies.
This rising tide of public participation has not escaped scholarly attention. Utilizing a variety of empirical settings, researchers have examined different dimensions of public participation and environmental decision making. The bedrock of this research stems from either democratic theory exploring the determinants and impacts of pluralism on democratic institutions (Dryzek, 1990; Pateman, 1970; Press, 1994; Williams & Matheny, 1995) and/or from the longstanding exploration of collective action dilemmas (Moe, 1981; Olson, 1965, 1982; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994). More recent work examines the impact of increased participation on actual environmental outcomes, such as water quality, air emissions, or natural resource management (Beierle & Cayford, 2002; Chess, 2000; Leach, Pelkey, & Sabatier, 2002; Lubell, 2004; O'Rourke & Macey, 2003; Scheberle, 2000; Teske, 2000), along with questioning the desirability of increased citizen input in highly technical areas (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004; Steelman & Ascher, 1997; Wood, 1989). This body of work is informative: providing insight into why individuals become civically engaged, along with providing information on the impact of citizen or stakeholder participation.
Comparatively however, we know less about the forces that shape agency decision making regarding the specific nature of public participation. This paper capitalizes on variation in state hazardous waste programs to examine why some states formally mandate public participation, while others informally provide participation mechanisms, and still others states do neither. State hazardous waste programs are designed to remediate existing hazardous waste sites. These programs not only support the implementation of their federal counterpart, the Superfund program, but they also address the large number of existing waste sites that do not merit inclusion into the federal Superfund program. Hazardous waste remediation tends to be a highly salient issue and has many of the ingredients that motivate citizen involvement (Beierle & Cayford, 2002; Fischer, 1993; Rabe, 1994). Therefore, this is an informative setting to explore why states develop formal and informal public participation mechanisms. Additionally, because state environmental agencies are quite diverse in their approaches to environmental protection, they provide an ideal venue to explore the conditions under which government institutions formalize public participation provisions.
Effective public participation can be an elusive concept, but researchers tend to gravitate toward two definitions: (1) altering outcomes of a decision-making process either by reducing conflict or achieving public goals, and (2) improved citizen satisfaction with the decision-making process. Citizens may not achieve their goals, however the participation results in increased appreciation for the decision-making process and improved overall satisfaction with government institutions (Beierle & Cayford, 2002; Irvin & Stansbury, 2004). This research takes a different angle on exploring participation; rather than examining participation from the perspective of the individual or community, it examines what factors motivate state environmental agencies to require the basic elements of public participation in their hazardous waste programs: public meetings, public comment periods, and public notice. While there are more innovative types of public participation, such as advisory groups or collaborative decision making, public meetings, comment periods, and public notices undergrid these more innovative strategies and therefore, provide the foundation for additional civic engagement. (1)
I use multinomial logistic regression to predict the likelihood that a state will develop formal regulations for public participation provisions, or informally practice participation compared to those states that do neither. This analysis is informed by both institutional analysis and design theory, traditional notions of pluralism, and diffusion of innovation theory. I model the formality of participation provisions as a function of state characteristics, including environmental conditions, citizen ideology, the composition of political institutions, and interest-group strength. The model also includes measures of external pressure, such as regional and top-down diffusion, that may influence state-level decision making. I utilize multinomial logistic regression analysis on pooled cross-sectional time-series data for the years 1989, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1998, and 2001 to examine the determinants of public participation in state hazardous waste programs.
The results indicate that formal participation mechanisms are more likely to occur in states with more liberal citizenry, more manufacturing activity, and a higher percentage of urban areas. Comparatively, states are more likely to informally provide participation opportunities when there are fewer Democrats serving in the legislature. The first section of this paper outlines the major theoretical approaches used to understand the adoption of public participation provisions. Second, I specify a model to test the relative influence of multiple state characteristics and external forces on the adoption of public participation provisions in environmental policy. Then, I present and discuss the results of the statistical model predicting participation provisions in state hazardous waste programs. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of this research for the broader field of comparative state politics and environmental policy in particular.
Theoretical Background
This paper explores the adoption of formal and informal participation provisions in hazardous waste programs; in essence, examining what factors motivate a state agency to utilize basic public participation mechanisms. Both public administration and bureaucratic behavior speak to why some state agencies are likely to value and practice public participation (Bevir, Rhodes, & Weller, 2003; Brehm & Gates, 1999; Durant, 2004). Moreover, there is a strong and vibrant literature in institutional analysis and design that examines institutional design, structure, and functioning (Becker & Ostrom, 1995; Ostrom, 1990; Ostrom et al., 1994; Young, 2003). This literature suggests that the nature of the problem and the composition or diversity of the institution will influence the structure of institutional rules, both formal and informal. This research relies in part on both of these fields, while also drawing upon insights from policy-adoption research.
Typically, policy-adoption research rests on two explanations of state-level behavior: internal determinants and diffusion of innovation. Explanations based on internal determinants suggest that decision makers respond to a variety of internal state characteristics when crafting policy (Dye, 1966; Erickson, Wright, & McIver, 1989; Ringquist, 1993, 1994; Williams & Matheny, 1984). Many...
|
