In Pursuit of Public Participation
Calls for greater public participation in environmental planning are found everywhere, from policy documentation at the central and local level to aca-demic literature, and from the publications of environmental groups to the pronouncements of the media. However, there are two very different rationalisa-tions of this stance, which imply two distinct approaches to such participation.
One rationalisation focuses on the democratic right to be involved in the public policy process and the importance of all barriers to such involvement being reduced or withdrawn. The emphasis here is on enabling access to the policy process, encouraging the take-up of that access and ensuring that such participation makes a difference to policy outcomes. The policy process is seen as a locus for the articulation of values and preferences on policy options, and public participation is a means of bringing the pattern of values and preferences represented within the policy process closer to that existing within society as a whole. Of course, many technocratic arguments have held that it is possible to use professional expertise to deduce societal values and preferences and feed these into the policy process. These have had particular emphasis within environmental planning with the application of valuation techniques derived from environmental economics (for example, Barde & Pearce, 1991). However, considerable doubts remain about these valuation methodologies, their inherent biases and assumptions and the scope for professional manipulation (see Foster, 1997) and, therefore, they cannot replace direct public involvement as a means of bridging the gap between values and policy. Furthermore, in this view public involvement is seen as a right and not just as a means to an end: people have a right to a say on policy and should not be by-passed by technocratic means. Public participation is a measure of the overall legitimacy of the policy process.