Anticipating Conflicts: Public Participation in Managing the Solid Waste Crisis

A major problem of environmental policy making is to anticipate potential conflicts among the major participants and to reach a suitable understanding or compromise that meets both competence vis-a-vis the decision problem and fairness vis-a-vis the affected population.

This paper introduces a novel model of public involvement in decisions about solid waste disposal in specific and environmental management in general. Structured in three consecutive steps, the model is based on the philosophy that stakeholders, experts, and citizens should each contribute to the environmental planning effort their particular concern and experience. In a first step, the research team elicits the values and criteria for assessing and evaluating policy options from all relevant stakeholders; in a second step, experts are asked to provide performance assessments for each option on each criterion; and in a third step, randomly selected citizens are given the opportunity to evaluate each option on the basis of the concerns and impacts revealed in the previous two steps. This involvement process is illustrated with an example about sewage sludge management.