Within the literature on environmental policy and planning, public participation
is usually considered an unalloyed good. This emphasis on the inherent desirability
of public involvement is part of a tradition which seeks to ‘open up’ planning
processes to democratic scrutiny and to expand the scope of public involvement
as an integral part of improvements in policy delivery. These claims over the
merits of participation have tended, however, to sit awkwardly with accounts of
the policy process which highlight a propensity towards special interest capture
and bureaucratisation as the reality of participation in practice. Consequently, it
is not always clear how expanding the scope of public involvement might
actually lead to improvements in policy delivery.
This paper argues that the failure to specify the conditions for successful
public participation stems from a neglect of some key insights derived from
institutiona l public choice theory and related rational choice work on social
capital. By examining participation as a collective action problem, the former