This paper discusses a successful public involvement effort that addressed and resolved several highly controversial water management issues involving environmental and flood risks associated with an electrical generation facility in British Columbia. It begins with a discussion of concepts for designing public involvement, summarizing research that indicates why individuals and groups may find it difficult to make complex choices. Reasons for public involvement, and the range of current practices are discussed. Next, four principles for designing group decision process are outlined, emphasizing decision-aiding concepts that include "value-focused thinking" and "adaptive management." The next sections discuss the Alouette River Stakeholder Committee process in terms of objectives, participation, process, methods for structuring values and creating alternatives, information sources, and results. Discussion and conclusions complete the paper.

Public participation in environmental decisions has become commonplace. A favored model for public input is to use the tools of dispute resolution to seek consensus among members of a multi-party stakeholder group. The authors believe that a focus on dispute resolution and consensus building can pose impediments to the creation of insights for decisionmakers and lead to the adoption of inferior policy choices. Instead, they advocate an alternative approach to stakeholder participation characterized as “decision aiding” through a structured process based on constructive, multi-attribute techniques and value-focused thinking. In this paper some of the major difficulties posed by a dispute-resolution approach are articulated, the principles of a decision-aiding process reviewed, and this alternative approach illustrated by describing a stakeholder consultation involving water-use planning for a hydroelectric facility on the Alouette River in British Columbia, Canada. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.