Public Participation:
Where It Stands; Where It Should Be Going
by William B. Shore
While politicians sometimes treat constituents as consumers of government, public administrators increasingly treat them as participants. People now expect to be asked their views on government projects, and there is increasing literature on civic involvement. Public participation is often mandated by law.
The U.S. Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) requires public participation in preparing long-range state transportation plans and state and metropolitan Transportation Improvement Programs (TIPs) that set priorities for transportation investment. A U.S. Department of Transportation case study of Little Rock's Metroplan reports that public involvement has "yielded positive results for the metropolitan transportation planning process and...fostered new levels of cooperation on regional planning and development issues....Agency representatives have begun to overcome their misgivings about giving up at least part of their control over the agenda and direction of capital programs....The community now has a greater appreciation of the complexity and tradeoffs of transportation planning....Recent efforts by communities to establish land-use controls...have been attributed to...the visioning process...," i.e., helping the public picture alternative futures. Because of public participation in Little Rock, priorities were raised for railroad grade separation, "an issue not easily identified in capacity analyses and other objective measures," bikeways, and pedestrian improvements. Public participation "required almost half the budget for the...long-range plan," but it is likely to save money from the capital budget because participants favored compact, less travel-dependent development.
Public participation has four streams:
Yankelovich observed about National Issues Forums on energy conservation, in which three-quarters of the participants surmised that Americans would agree to less driving and higher gas taxes, "When they begin to discuss [energy], they become interested in it and realize how much change is needed; if I've ever seen something that is ready for leadership, this issue is it." Susan Tanaka, for the Urban Institute, reported that 100-150 small group discussions in 10 cities on the U.S. budget "illustrate that members of the public can and will make hard choices, participate in serious discussions about difficult issues, and rise above narrow individual and local interests in favor of the national good."
In Oregon, extensive public participation has led to a state policy on health care finance, unique in this country. To move toward universal health insurance coverage, the legislature launched a project to prioritize health care services. This, the chief sponsor explained, shifted the question from who is covered to what is covered. The state's Medicaid budget draws a line separating the prioritized list of 745 medical services; above that line are the services that will be covered by the benefit package, and below are the services the State will not pay for. This year, the line comes after service 578. Those setting the priorities combined medical knowledge about outcomes and public input on values. High priorities include prevention, maternity care, reduction of public health risks, dental and mental health care, and chemical dependency treatment; low-priorities include cosmetic services. Did the result really reflect Oregonians' public judgment? The President of the Senate, most closely identified with this project, subsequently was elected governor. Last fall, voters approved a cigarette tax increase of $.50 per pack to fund additional health care coverage, reflecting the public's expressed preference for policies that encourage personal responsibility for health-related behavior and more extensive health coverage. Oregon's uninsured population is now down to 11%, third lowest among U.S. states.
But is public participation democracy? Public participation that brings people to public judgment and influences elected officials to act certainly is mainstream democracy. So is dispute resolution through negotiation, as long as all the stakeholders are represented. But what about public participation in planning and via neighborhood associations? If public participants are not a representative sample of the electorate, is it government by an educated middle class who has time to devote to civic enterprise, or special interests with resources to mobilize participation? In the highly praised Little Rock case, priority was placed on capital programs favored by people who bicycle and walk. Was that a middle-class result? Studies have established that political participants have disproportionately high incomes and socioeconomic status (SES), but the five-city neighborhood organization research showed that strong community-based organizations, generally recognized as responsive to their constituents and effective in influencing policy, increased participation of low and medium-SES neighborhoods. In any case, public participation is not government. Politically accountable public officials still make the decisions. People with high socio-economic status have always been influential, but it is encouraging that administrators are working hard to involve those who typically do not participate.
Progress in 35 years, but far from the goal. All of this is progress. In 1961, when Regional Plan Association (RPA) prepared The Second Regional Plan for New Jersey, New York and Connecticut with extensive public participation, that was a new approach among planners. An RPA chief planner was skeptical, claiming he could better predict what a desirable region would look like by modeling people's behavior than by asking them directly. RPA, though, wanted to give people a chance to change their behavior, not just continue past patterns. Over twelve years, RPA conducted large and small meetings and television presentations with organized listening groups and random viewers, presenting options in words, film and photographs, and gave participants a chance to discuss the options and complete written questionnaires.
While public participation is now much more broadly expected and accepted than it was 35 years ago, it does not yet fulfill the planning and policy formulation purposes that Regional Plan and Yankelovich had in mind. Two scholars surveying public participation in 1995-96 concluded that "citizens, administrators, and scholars appear to be in agreement that higher quality public participation is needed to improve decisions, broaden issues, and improve the implementation of decisions. However, there is considerable evidence that most participation efforts, to date, have not been effective, successful, or satisfying for either administrators or public participants." Often, officeholders try to 'educate the public,' assuming that they are the experts. What gets lost is that everyone is equally expert on values, and it is values that should emerge through public participation.
What are values in public policies and how can they be isolated? A massive transportation plan proposed in the 1960s for the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area illustrates. Professional planning staff presented a network of new expressways, based on a complex traffic model, to the National Capital Regional Planning Commission - citizens. While the Commission was not competent to question the model, they were just as expert on its inherent values. The model assumed that commuters would be able to drive 35 miles per hour (mph) during rush hour. A member of the Commission asked what the expressway network would look like if commuters averaged 32 mph. The whole system would be different, with far less cost and disruption. Why 35 mph? That was the speed that would allow people living on one side of the metropolitan area to get to work on the other side in "reasonable" time. This is a value decision that should have been unearthed and decided after public comparison of the costs in dollars and disruption and the expected benefits.
Two public participation changes are needed: (1) dig out the assumptions behind proposals and pose alternatives, don't just ask for comment on a government proposal; and (2) enable people to discuss public policies in small groups. The typical venue for public participation is a hearing, in which everyone may express an opinion, but no one is required to listen to others. Only when people listen to each other can public judgment emerge from public opinion. It is expensive to expose hidden assumptions and present just enough expert information in non-expert language so the public can properly consider options. Organizing discussions in small groups and considering the judgment that emerges is also expensive. But it is hard to think of anything more expensive than today's public cynicism about government and the automatic NIMBY blocking of any government proposal. Little Rock's transportation plan, Oregon's health care finance achievement, the observations of Daniel Yankelovich, and Lawrence Susskind's dispute resolution successes suggest that skilled public participation would be a bargain.
Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment, Syracuse University Press, 1991.
Lawrence Susskind and Jeffrey Cruikshank, Breaking the Impasse, Basic Books, 1987.
J.M. Berry, K. E. Portney and Kenneth Thomson, Public Participation: The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, Brookings Institution, 1993.
Cheryll Simrell King & Bridget O'Neill, "Improving Public Administration and Public/Private Lives: Putting the Public(s) into Public Decisions," July 1996, paper for the ASPA National Training Conference.
Regional Plan Association reports: Public Participation in Regional Planning, 1967; Listening to the Metropolis and "The Metropolis Speaks," 1974; The Second Regional Plan, a draft for discussion, 1968; William B. Shore, "What Do the People Want?" in Lowell Harriss, ed., The Good Earth of America, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
From IPA Report, Spring 1998
William B. Shore is a Senior Associate of IPA, where he is organizing a Regional Research Consortium and trying to formulate a new approach to democratic leadership training. Mr. Shore pioneered approaches to public participation in planning during his 35-year career at Regional Plan Association. This article is an abbreviation of papers he delivered this year at meetings of the American Society for Public Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration.