Environmental risk management decision making: evaluating the role of the public in the process

Abstract

Public involvement in public sector decision-making is often considered inadequate or ineffective. Including the public in formal decision-making procedures has traditionally been seen as easier to overlook than to adequately address. To be effective, it requires the difficult evaluation of what information the public can and should provide. Overlooking public input is supported, and in many cases is still advocated, by the idea that 'if you let the most competent do the job, then we will all be better off.' However, when the environmental risk concerns the public, then interested parties within the public feel they have a right to participate more directly in decisions that are being made. This research uses the case study organisation, the Department of Conservation, to investigate this issue of public involvement in the environmental decision-making process. A comparison of views among the public, DOC and previous literature in the three major areas of interest: risk, decision making and risk communication, will provide the basis for analysis in this research. The variables of concern in this study are: risk perception, risk acceptability, risk communication and ultimately successful risk management. The success of risk management will be directly related to the quality of the decision-making process, through its effect on each of these variables. This research provides a significant step towards understanding the public and their role, as perceived by themselves and the experts in the environmental risk decision-making process. It suggests that by involving the public through more effective communication, decision makers will be in a better position to attain universal risk acceptability and therefore more successful risk management.