Notwithstanding the ambiguous mention of utilizing scarce resources, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be commended for its efforts to incorporate more citizen involvement in environmental protection programs (Fiorino 2000). With improved community relations as a motivating goal, the EPA pushed for national and regional enhancements in environmental decision-making throughout the latter half of the 1990s. This ambitious effort was not limited to the EPA, nor to just environmental management. At all levels of government, citizen participation programs were launched, beginning in the 1950s (Day 1997), with the underlying assumption that if citizens became actively involved as participants in their democracy, the governance that emerged from this process would be more democratic and more effective.
Arguments for enhanced citizen participation often rest on the merits of the process and the belief that an engaged citizenry is better than a passive citizenry (King, Feltey and Susel 1998, Putnam 1995, Arnstein 1969). With citizen participation, formulated policies might be more realistically grounded in citizen preferences, the public might become more sympathetic evaluators of the tough decisions that government administrators have to make, and the improved support from the public might create a less divisive, combative populace to govern and regulate. However, incorporating citizen input into agency decision-making is not a costless process. This article articulates not just potential benefits but also potential social and economic costs of community participation, so that policy-makers can better predict the usefulness of a citizen participation initiative.
The article first explores the potentially wide-ranging benefits of enhanced community participation. Drawbacks to community participation are evaluated next, including a brief discussion of relative costs of citizen participation versus representational decision-making. We then describe an attempt to incorporate community participation in a management program for a degraded urban watershed, and note the characteristics that made this project unusually challenging. We highlight place-based characteristics that serve as predictors for success or failure of community participation programs. In effect, we take a step back from the ‘how-to’ literature to determine ‘whether-to’ at all.