Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a survey of five institutional mechanisms for allowing the lay public to influence environmental risk decisions: public hearings, initiatives, public surveys, negotiated rule making, and citizens review panels. It also defines democratic process criteria for assessing these and other participatory mechanisms.

Scientific and technological policy issues are not and should not be exempt from the norms of democratic governance. This article examines two major theories of democracy, analyzes their commonalities and differences, and derives criteria for evaluating various forms of public participation in policymaking. The author argues for a new category of participation, participatory analysis, that includes forms of participation that satisfy democratic criteria and emphasizes the importance of learning among participants. Different types of participatory analysis may be best suited to (...) different kinds of policy problems. (shrink)