Decision Aiding, Not Dispute Resolution: Creating Insights through Structured Environmental Decisions

Abstract

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

Making a difference: On the constraints of consensus building and the relevance of deliberation in stakeholder dialogues

“…In other words: in consensus-building processes the ultimate goal shifts away from reaching a quality decision and moves it towards reaching an agreeable one (Coglianese, 1999: 4). One of the reasons for this is that there is little in the consensus-building approach that distinguishes premature consensus, in which important issues or facts are ignored and important differences in values are suppressed, from a true consensus, in which all the participants find a new option that they all value more than the one option they preferred when entering the process (Gregory et al, 2001). In this respect, there is another serious criticism to a consensus orientation, which is that it may lead to a bias in the selection of participants, as it runs the risk of mainly attracting stakeholders who are willing to, and who benefit from, reaching a consensus, and discouraging more skeptical stakeholders who feel they may be forced into a consensus they do not like (Coglianese and Allen, 2004;Coglianese, 2001).…”

“…Two such methods, repertory grid and the dialectical approach, will be discussed later on in this article and are applied to a case (Section 4). Other methods that can be used to articulate rival views and underlying assumptions are for example: value-focused thinking (Arvai and Gregory, 2003;Gregory et al, 2001;Keeney, 1994), Q Methodology (Brown, 1986;Webler et al, 2001), and Semantic Differential (Osgood et al, 1957;Heise, 1970). It goes beyond the scope of this article to go into the details of these methods, but we will give a short description of the methods to illustrate how they work.…”

“…In consensus-building processes, stakeholder dialogues seek to develop joint policy recommendations that meet the needs of all stakeholders involved in the process. Although consensus building is the dominant approach in environmental policy making, a key question is whether it actually is the best alternative to traditional (non-participatory) policy making (see also Coglianese, 2001;Gregory et al, 2001).…”

Learning as an Objective within a Structured Risk Management Decision Process

“…In these contexts, individual, small group, and organizational barriers all come into play, within an informal organizational context that is not well defined in terms of how to proceed and that may involve substantial conflicts. Community-based multistakeholder initiatives, such as the National Estuary Program in the U.S. (17) or the Water Use Plan process in Canada (16,24), often have builtin impediments to learning in that each consultative table is encouraged to view itself as an island, with few links to the ongoing consultations in other communities. As a result, each table may view benefits of learning that do not directly help themselves as low, even though from a system-wide perspective the benefits would be high.…”

A multi-channel stakeholder consultation process for transmission deregulation

“…He worries that ''more participation may lead to information overload, encouraging poor analysis, superficial examination of alternatives'', and, in the extreme, having ''bad information drive out the good'' (p. 216). Finally, consensusdriven processes cannot accommodate stakeholders with significant differences or deep-seated conflicts (Gregory et al, 2001).…”