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Topics: Environment

Civic Environmentalism

by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland
Copyright © 1995 by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland

Authors' note: This essay represents one way of understanding the development of civic environmentalism and the challenges facing it. It does not represent the official position of CPN or its Environment Editorial Team. We welcome other perspectives on these issues, and will periodically revise this essay as part of an ongoing dialogue that responds to questions, criticisms and suggestions, as well as to other case studies that you might wish to provide on CPN and other online networks, or in printed form. Our aim is to be as inclusive and pluralist as possible, and to create a space for mutual learning. We are grateful to those who have commented on previous versions. Our most recent revision is dated July 1995.

This essay is part of a larger work, Participatory Democracy in America, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland serve on the Managing Editorial Team of CPN as editor-in-chief and research director, respectively.

Index

A Introduction
B. Citizen Participation in Environmental Regulation: the First Decade

The Origins
Who Represents the Citizens?
Social Learning and Capacity Building: the Challenges

C. The Emergence of Civic Environmentalism

Alternative Dispute Resolution
Risk and Democracy
Estuaries and Ecosystems
Sustainable Development

Emergence of a Grassroots Anti-Toxics Movement
Community Relations in Superfund
NIMBY and Beyond: the Paradox and Promise of Democratic Participation
Community Empowerment and Public Policy for Democracy

E. References

Contents

A Introduction
B. Citizen Participation in Environmental Regulation: the First Decade

The Origins
Who Represents the Citizens?
Social Learning and Capacity Building: the Challenges

C. The Emergence of Civic Environmentalism

Alternative Dispute Resolution
Risk and Democracy
Estuaries and Ecosystems
Sustainable Development

A. Introduction

Civic environmentalism has emerged in recent years as the limits of top-down regulation have become increasingly apparent, and as citizens have continually refined the practices of participatory democracy and collaborative problem solving. In 1970, when the National Environmental Protection Act went into effect, the problems of command-and-control styles of regulation were not well understood, nor did there exist significant institutional capacities for an alternative civic approach. By the 1980s, the problems were quite well understood and, indeed, had become highly contentious in American politics.

At the same time, citizens and environmental groups, along with agency officials and some in industry, gained valuable experience in programs with broad mandates for citizen participation. Such mandates accompanied most environmental legislation, and were the product of intense pressure from public interest groups, as well as recent rulings by the courts. The actual programs of the 1970s were generally as disappointing as the ideas of participatory democracy were vague and diffuse. But valuable learning began to occur, and networks of practitioners refined their techniques and sought fresh perspectives.

In addition, adversaries began to build relationships of greater trust once it became clear that environmental regulation was here to stay and that collaboration might prove to be in the self interest of each side. New citizen rights, while often a blunt instrument for solving environmental problems, gave citizens and public interest groups the power to impose significant costs on polluters, and thus created added incentives for the latter to cooperate and negotiate. NIMBY ("Not-IN-My-Backyard") responses by local citizens often had the same effect on government officials attempting to site unwanted facilities for hazardous, nuclear, and solid wastes.

By the 1980s, in short, the limits of top-down approaches, especially in dealing with nonpoint sources of pollution, ecosystem management, and pollution prevention, had become increasingly apparent. The skills and organizational capacities of actors at the state and local level—both environmental groups and agency officials—had grown considerably, and stalled federal policy and cutbacks created a vacuum into which they stepped. Practitioners, especially those with previous participatory commitments and experiences, refined their methods of actual problem solving, and developed many of the insights that can today loosely be grouped under the perspective "civic environmentalism."

After reviewing the earlier period when citizen participation rights became widely mandated, and the limits of the "public lobby regulatory regime" started to become apparent, we will examine the emergence of civic environmentalism in a variety of arenas ranging from alternative dispute resolution and ecosystem management to sustainable development and environmental justice. We will also hotlink our discussion to case studies and other materials on the Civic Practices Network and other online networks.

Civic environmentalism is an emerging approach, with a variety of different emphases and methods. We would include among these the following:

• collaboration among various communities, interest groups, and government agencies, often initiated by a period of adversarial conflict;
  
• deliberation among and within various communities, interest groups and levels of government about relative risks and costs, democratic and just ways of allocating these, and common values and interests that might help reframe them;
  
• learning communities that share information and best practices horizontally;
  
• federal government role that catalyzes local problem solving within a broader regulatory framework, and policy designs that encourage civic education and responsible action;
  
• extensive use of nonregulatory tools;
  
• a focus on improving the real places and ecosystems in which people live and work, rather than mere statistical risk; on pollution prevention; and on the challenges of nonpoint sources of pollution.

This list could undoubtedly be expanded and refined. We hope that the discussion and cases that follow enrich the sense of possibilities for civic approaches. We do not offer these as a full blown alternative to national regulatory tools and top-down controls. As Dewitt John (1994) has argued in his important book on this topic, civic environmentalism makes sense as a complement, not a substitute, to regulation, and a strong federal role is often required to trigger civic approaches.

B. Citizen Participation in Environmental Regulation: The First Decade

The Origins
Who Represents the Citizens?
Social Learning and Capacity Building: the Challenges

B.1. The Origins

Nonetheless, the tension between environmental and public interest group representation, on the one hand, and grassroots community empowerment, on the other, has been a very significant one in environmental regulation since 1970. The creation of a more openly pluralist and legalist regulatory regime with citizen participation was a response to the crises of legitimacy and representation of the New Deal regulatory system, but it did not fully resolve these crises. Nor should we expect it to have, since many of the issues of the new social regulation are extremely complex and uncertain, and requisite social learning and capacity building would inevitably take time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s citizen participation was only at the beginning of what has proven to be a long and complex process of learning that has been driven by various factors in the larger political environment, as well as by its own internal dynamics and conflicts over representation, as we shall see, in particular, when we examine the environmental justice movement.

B.3. Social Learning and Capacity Building: Early Legacies and Challenges

If we view this early period as the beginning of an extended period of social learning and capacity building, rather than as a decisive test of citizen participation, as many scholars initially tended to do, we can see the challenges in a different light. Several of these, in particular, are most relevant for understanding the emergent possibilities for civic environmentalism:

a) legislative mandates. First of all, the legislative basis for participatory democracy in administration has been weak from the beginning. Congress never debated or deliberated over the purposes of citizen participation, and its mandates have generally been vague, thus leaving considerable discretion to administrators in the design of programs. Even the stronger participatory legislation often has only a sentence or two sketching the broad goals. And mandated funding for staff development and citizen support services has generally been modest or completely lacking.

The reasons underlying this go deep. Vague and symbolic mandates have clear benefits to legislators in terms of shoring up legitimacy in the face of public clamor, and they avoid the risks entailed in specifiying forms of participation, groups to be included, and resources to be deployed. These risks include publics alienated by perceived underrepresentation, or by delay and disruption of favored programs, including those programs passed with strong support from the environmental movement and mandated deadlines for meeting specific goals (Rosenbaum 1978, 90-91; Haefle 1973, 118). Lawmakers have had to work within the constraints of a temporal paradox that characterized Community Action Programs as well: the need for quick and visible results to motivate continued grassroots participation and public support, and the much slower processes required for meaningful community deliberation and collaboration.

In addition, lawmakers simply did not have an adequate knowledge base available to permit them to be very specific about which forms of citizen participation might work to solve problems, and which might exacerbate these and/or create heavy political costs. This knowledge deficit was compounded by the more general uncertainty of new regulatory techniques and strategies for environmental protection. Environmental and public interest groups themselves never coordinated their efforts for specific types of citizen participation programs (Berry, Portney, and Thomson 1993, 35). Indeed, they lacked even moderately well defined ideas about participatory models that might serve as a guide for congressional deliberation.

This was the beginning of a period of innovation, and everyone was on unsure terrain, even if under much pressure to involve the public. While it seems clear from contemporary democratic theory (Dahl 1970, 1989), as well as comparative and historical analysis (Sirianni 1983), that participatory democratic forms must be complemented by representative and administrative forms to be effective, innovators in the 1960s and 1970s were only beginning to comprehend the challenges that this might entail. Participatory practice would have to become educative not just for ordinary citizens, but for Congress and other legislatures as well.

b) executive support. Citizen participation programs began with weak executive support under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and they remained an issue of political contention in ways that disrupted learning and capacity building. This was manifest in pitifully small initial budget requests for staff training and support, the impounding of funds by Nixon, and the passing over of those with significant experience in participation programs under the 1967 Air Quality Act to head the Office of Public Affairs at EPA. Instead, public relations people with clear political agendas were initially chosen, and this alienated those career civil servants most predisposed to participatory program development and caused some to leave the agency.

In th early years none of EPA's six major water pollution programs had a full-time staff member to facilitate citizen participation. William Ruckelshaus, its first administrator, lent official support to public participation in EPA "as essential for citizens to decide the kind of life they wish to live" (Ruckelshaus 1971-72). But he chose a law enforcement strategy over a participatory strategy as the primary way to legitimate the agency under a Republican administration viewed suspiciouly by environmentalists. Indeed, he came from a law enforcement background, and was the protege of Nixon's controversial Attorney General, John Mitchell. The EPA administrative structure itself was pieced together from other agencies, and its very creation was the product of compromise among political actors, virtually none of whom were strong environmental advocates, not to mention participatory democrats (Sabatier 1975; Rosenbaum 1978b; Gottlieb 1994).

Support and funding for citizen participation in EPA and other programs increased substantially under President Carter, though this did not resolve some fundamental problems, as we shall see when discussing the origins of Superfund. And while greater support during these years spurred much learning within local programs, the overall approach during the Carter administration was constrained by the dominant public philosophy of a rights-based liberalism. Its most vocal public interest advocates, such as Ralph Nader, stressed forms of participation—initiative and referendum, and constitutional rights for consumers, workers and communities to take direct action in the courts—which had limited potential for deliberation and collaboration in solving problems, or transforming agency cultures in a more participatory direction (Pertschuk 1982: 131). The proposed Consumer Protection Agency, which was conceived as a watchdog over other agencies, also had limited potential, as many participation practitioners recognized at the time.

Support and funding for public participation was radically cut back in Reagan's first year (Berry 1981a), again causing many participatory practitioners within the federal government to resign. Those most active in the Interagency Council on Citizen Participation, a voluntary forum of several hundred agency staff to share best practices across various environmental and other federal programs, reported great pressure not to attend any more meetings, and described this first year as a "purge" (Delli Priscoli 1994). Only in 1983, with the return of Ruckelshaus to restore the legitimacy of EPA, was there again some visible support for citizen participation, though this was never manifest in substantial budgets to support this.

As our discussion below will show, subsequent EPA administrators have placed progressively greater emphasis on citizen participation and community involvement. These include Lee Thomas in Reagan's second term, William Reilly in the Bush Administration, and Carol Browner in the Clinton Administration. Today, the ideas of civic environmentalism are actively discussed within various of the offices at EPA, and seminars and trainings often emphasize these. Whether the Clinton administration will make civic language and best practices a more central focus of the reinventing government efforts, or continue to limit the latter to the themes of serving the consumer and streamlining government, still remains to be seen, however.

c) state and local government support. State and local governments were initially often quite resistant to citizen participation programs that were mandated by federal environmental law and initiated by regional offices of the EPA and other agencies (Cohen 1979; Godschalk and Stiftel 1981). Such programs could upset bureaucratic routines, delay or derail public works projects, and make it more difficult to meet federal deadlines. They could also challenge the complex jurisdictional boundaries and arrangements that characterize local authority in the environmental arena.

It now appears increasingly clear that effective environmental programs require complex partnerships among diverse government, civic and business actors at the local and state levels, and that states have become quite innovative in areas such as waste management, land protection and water quality that lend themselves to civic approaches (John 1994). But it is also quite apparent how limited the institutional capacities for this were in the 1970s, and how little these approaches were understood by those very actors.

d) capacities of state and local environmental groups. Environmental constituencies were not well organized at the state and local levels in the early years, and tended to be overshadowed by national organizations. Those groups that had state and local chapters, such as the Audubon Society or the Sierra Club, were not well equipped to support effective participation in the myriad of jurisdictions that might be involved in water pollution issues, for instance, and thus tended to focus on the simpler jurisdictions of state and national forests where their impact promised to be greater. Grassroots toxics groups did not begin to form until the early 1980s. And while an important core of local practitioners from groups like the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club did gain valuable experience and develop useful networks through their participation in water pollution programs, this became evident only towards the end of the first decade.

e) capacities and perspectives of national environmental groups. National groups entered the era of the new environmental regulation without coherent ideas about participatory democracy, even if there was much enthusiasm for the general concept among younger members. In 1970, when the EPA was established, six of the nine national environmental groups had been founded before 1937, and all had distinctly technocratic perspectives (Pollack 1985: 368ff.). The newer groups established during the second wave of environmental organizing, two of which had been founded only months before, provided neither a coherent vision nor a general strategy for citizen participation, and their leaders could be found arguing for participatory democracy on some occasions and for the primacy of insular technical expertise on others.

In addition, the costs of developing and maintaining grassroots networks capable of participating in local environmental planning were substantial, and the opportunities for influencing national and industry-wide rulemaking through lobbying and litigation were far more favorable. For groups whose annual budgets were modest, the choice to emphasize the latter was quite rational (Berry 1977; Berry, Portney and Thomson 1994, 42-43), and made even more so by threats of regulatory gridlock in the face of industry opposition and conflicting signals on enforcement from the Nixon and Ford administrations (Gottlieb 1993: 129).

f) bureaucratic routines and priorities. In the face of vague congressional mandates, mixed signals from the White House, and a variety of risks (public dissensus exacerbated, resistance by local and state agencies, relations with key congressional supporters strained if favored programs were delayed or disrupted), federal agencies tended to accord citizen participation programs low priority. They developed slowly, even haphazardly. Their budgets were very modest and tended to be cut at the first sign of general fiscal tightening. They were assigned few staff, and these were poorly integrated into core agency missions and authority structures. Much of the citizen support work was farmed out to consultants who, even when committed and skillful, had little impact on agency routines. Programs tended to be recommended rather than required, and the Guidance issued to field staff was often further watered down. All this helped maintain bureaucratic discretion in the face of the risks of the new regulatory environment (Rosenbaum 1976). In an important survey of a broad range of programs, the attitude of administrators to citizen participation proved to be the most important factor determining success, and not the particular designs and techniques utilized (Berry, Portney, Bablitch and Mahoney 1984).

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In the absence of sustained administrative support for local program development, citizen participation in the first decade often found itself associated with relatively rigid and counterproductive regulatory strategies that relied on legalism and confrontation. This was, however, largely the result of an array of challenges that would inevitably require an extended period of learning to meet effectively. Not the least of these would simply be building the knowledge base and staff competence in the face of enormous uncertainty about which regulatory techniques would work, and which would produce unintended, even perverse consequences (Rosenbaum 1989; John 1994). In addition, regulators at first needed to build strong constituency bonds with previously excluded public and environmental interest groups if they were to be at all effective.

But if participatory rights in the environmental arena manifest many limitations, they nonetheless established the context in which increasingly collaborative skills and capacities could emerge at the local level, and in which broader regulatory cultures could begin to transform themselves. Those who sat on various local and regional citizen advisory committees in the 1970s, such as local League of Women Voters members, gained important experience that they later brought with them to more innovative and effective forms of community dispute resolution, policy dialogue, and collaborative partnerships for civic education and action on groundwater, solid waste and other issues (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990, 106-107; League of Women Voters Education Fund 1994). As federal environmental policy stalled in the early 1980s, state and local government agencies began to develop collaborative relationships with citizen groups and nonprofits, as well as shadow "learning communities" that could advance the approaches of civic environmentalism (John 1994).

Mandated public participation in the 1970s also provided the context for the development of national networks of practitioners, who progressively refined their skills, wrote increasingly sophisticated manuals for citizen representatives and for other practitioners, and continually developed innovative techniques. Our review of training manuals and conference proceedings, as well as interviews with leading practitioners during the 1970s, shows that they became ever more vocal and astute in their criticisms of the weaker forms of participation, such as public hearings that occur late in the process of decision making, and often have more symbolic than substantive value, and of advisory committees with few powers and limited citizen representation. They urged early and continuous public involvement, increased resources and training to empower citizens in independent organizations, greater inclusiveness and accountability, and more emphasis on techniques, such as workshops, which enable citizens to become informed and to engage in genuine dialogue and collaborative search. They also also took important steps to institutionalize participatory learning and share best practices.

And while early legislation paid little attention to the theoretical bases of citizen participation, and most practitioners sought practical solutions to everyday problems of involvement and empowerment, it is striking how much political theory came to inform analyses among important segments of this network of practitioners. Not a few had done advanced graduate work in political theory, had become acutely aware of the limitations of interest group pluralism, and had begun to explore more deliberative and collaborative conceptions of citizen participation ( e.g. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 1979; Interagency Council on Citizen Participation 1976; Langton 1978; 1979; 1994; Delli Priscoli 1994; Topper 1994; Fiorino 1994).

And the participatory rights of the 1970s helped greatly to establish the power of environmental organizations to impose costs on corporate managers, which was a precondition for developing forms of collaboration based on trust within regulatory communities (Ayers and Braithwaite 1992; Meidinger 1987). Corporate managements were politicized in ways that accepted the basic legitimacy of social regulation and that led to greater mutual respect between them and the public interest groups with whom they had to interact on a regular basis. The Reagan administration's frontal assault during its first two years in office on the new social regulation and its participatory fundamentals was defeated not only by the environmental and public interest movement. It was defeated also by politicized corporate managers who had made important investments in responding to regulatory requirements, which they did not wish to see devalued or disrupted, and who had developed more collaborative and respectful relations with other actors in the regulatory communities in the process of negotiating more flexible responses (Harris 1989).

This interrelated set of problems that confronted citizen participation at the beginning of contemporary environmentalism would inevitably have required an extended and multi-sided process of policy-oriented learning, skill development, trust building, and organizational capacity building, even if initial ideas had been more coherent and political support more consistent. In the following sections, we examine some of the processes of learning and capacity building that have begun to lay the basis for civic environmentalism in the 1980s and 1990s.

As an emergent phenomenon, civic environmentalism is still fraught with many problems and uncertainties—in policy development as well as modes of grassroots empowerment. But enough experience has been gained over the previous years, and many promising models developed, to permit citizens to craft practical forms of participatory democracy and community problem solving, and to sustain civic innovation. It is to these that we now turn in the next section, C. The Emergence of Civic Environmentalism.

C. The Emergence of Civic Environmentalism.

C.1. Environmental Dispute Settlement

The Snoqualmie River: the First Environmental Success for ADR
Dispute Resolution in the National Forests
Can Environmental Dispute Settlement Empower Citizen Groups?

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), or environmental dispute settlement (EDS), as it is also called, aims to engage parties with varied and often opposing interests and perspectives in a collaborative search for areas of mutual gain and possible win-win solutions. It employs face-to-face joint problem-solving and consensual decision-making techniques. Some environmental theorists and practitioners are deeply suspicious of these techniques, seeing them as largely cooptive and demobilizing for citizen groups (Amy 1987), or as merely perfecting the pluralist game of interest group bargaining without facilitating broader public discourse (Landy, Roberts and Thomas 1990:13).

From our perspective, however, alternative dispute resolution is an essential part of the broader panoply of techniques available for empowering citizens and enabling public discourse. Some of its most prominent practitioners and theorists, such as Lawrence Susskind (1976, 1979, 1987), have long been engaged in exploring a variety of ways of expanding public participation, enhancing citizen capacities through active learning, and enriching public discourse through open debate about values and the framing of problems. And the movement promoting dispute resolution has become increasingly alert to some of the pitfalls, and has attempted to provide citizen groups with the practical and analytic tools to manage these processes in their own interests, and in ways that enhance their power resources (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990; Bidol, Bardwell, and Manring 1986).

The Snoqualmie River: the First Environmental Success for ADR

Alternative dispute resolution techniques emerged in the late 1960s to respond to urban disputes, and the Ford Foundation soon began to propagate them more widely. An opportunity arose in the early 1970s to apply them to an environmental dispute in Washington state, on the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River, an hour or so outside of Seattle. The use of ADR in this dispute built upon several years of innovative participatory planning in the Army Corps of Engineers. We present a brief case study based on a more detailed analysis by Daniel Mazmanian and Jeanne Nienaber, as well as several other scholars and practitioners involved. To read this case, click on Fishbowl Planning on the Snoqualmie River: An Early Case of Environmental Dispute Settlement, or continue to the next section.

Dispute Resolution in the National Forests

The U.S.Forest Service, with public involvement in almost all aspects of forest management today and arguably the most extensive public participation programs of any federal agency over the past several decades, also began encouraging greater use of dispute resolution techniques in the 1980s and 1990s. The Forest Service first developed ambitious participatory initiatives in 1970, and extended these with its Inform and Involve program in 1972, which was designed by an especially innovative team whose influence helped energize a network of practitioners in other federal agencies.

The National Forest Management Act (NFMA) of 1976 built upon these experiences in its attempt to enfranchise historically underrepresented user groups and relatively neglected environmental and preservationist interests, and specified at least ten points during which public participation would be required in the preparation of its mandated long-term forest plans, which were to be completed over the following decade. And Rupert Cutler, President Carter's newly appointed Assistant Secretary for Conservation, Research, and Education in the Department of Agriculture, in which the Forest Service is located, was committed to refining participatory mandates contained in NFMA and other laws to ensure genuine two-way communication and independent citizen capacities to generate analyses and alternatives (U.S. Forest Service 1970, 1972; Hendee et al. 1973; Cutler 1972, 1978).

As a result of these efforts over the course of the 1970s, some forests developed programs characterized by genuine dialogue and consensus seeking among various user groups, and staff began to nurture deliberative regulatory cultures to complement and modify a professional ideology based on the scientific management of the land. Deliberative, consensual and other face-to-face techniques included intensive workshops to clarify and classify different user values, weekend retreats to build trust and empathy among traditional opponents, and Trade-Off Evaluation Processes in which interdisciplinary management teams questioned specialists for days before a public audience about the trade-offs entailed by various policy alternatives and the principles and evidence behind various choices.

Some forest managers encouraged citizen groups to articulate their own coherent vision of what they wanted the forest to look like for years to come, and local rangers and engaged citizens carried in their back pockets dog-eared "public involvement summaries" that sketched an array of alternatives to inform ongoing everyday conversations and interactions. These various techniques of public dialogue sometimes formed the basis of environmental impact statements through which divergent user interests could be reframed. And court rulings on the inadequacy of public comment and considered alternatives in a draft EIS could prompt more intensive local deliberation. Some forest managers facilitated the development of citizen groups where none existed, generated lists of contacts, and laid some of the essential foundations for the kind of town meeting civic culture that was more common in the national and state forests of the Northeast. And they helped build networks of communication among groups with different interests in the use of forest resources—timber harvest, mineral extraction, grazing, light and heavy recreation, wilderness preservation, wildlife management and species protection (Shannon 1989; Culhane 1981).

Yet, on the great majority of national forests, Cutler's theoretical premise that increased participation would reduce litigation was not borne out, and this eventually spurred official support for the use of formal EDS techniques within the Forest Service. As Julia Wondolleck (1988) argues compellingly, the earlier hopes were disappointed because participation had not altered an essentially adversarial paradigm, in which groups with often quite divergent perspectives and interests competed in a very political process that had no objectively correct solution, but did so under the guise of perfecting the scientific land management model. Staff were expected to provide information, facilitate and analyze public inputs from hearings and surveys, and explain the basis for decisions that, after careful analysis of all relevant data, they determined to be in the public interest. Despite all of the participatory opportunities, affected interests did not feel represented adequately by the process unless their substantive concerns were accomodated to their satisfaction. This problem was made no easier by the peculiar combination of regional ecology and national significance of forest disputes, and the resulting complexities and tensions of local and national interest group representation. See also Shands et al 1990.)

The participatory process established on most forests, however, was not based on mutual inquiry among competing groups or attempts to resolve disputes collaboratively. Thus, for instance, the RARE-II (Roadless Area Review and Evaluation) wilderness review process, a participatory showpiece, involved fifty thousand people in providing input into the scope of the EIS, seventeen thousand in workshops to structure the review process, and 264,000 more comments on the draft EIS. And still the document was attacked by environmentalists, timber and mining groups, and other backcountry users as providing too much or too little wilderness protection. Formal hearings were often highly polarized, with all contending groups projecting their hostilities onto agency staff. The general participatory process was not designed to be sufficiently informative or convincing to groups with different interests, and it built in incentives for strategic behavior and escalating protest in anticipation of administrative appeal, court review, and Congressional intervention.

By the early 1980s, however, the Forest Service began to explore formal dispute resolution as a way of complementing its participatory programs, and it contracted with ACCORD Associates to provide EDS training for agency staff. And as the subsequently released draft forest plans were soon met with typically hundreds of appeals, a growing number of forests began to employ formal dispute resolution techniques involving various citizen and interest groups, the Forest Service itself, and the participating states' Congressional delegations. In some cases, it was these elected representativesof who initially spurred the use of EDS because of the serious political fallout of continued adversarialism on federal lands. In fact, several such dispute settlements have become the basis for specific wilderness legislation as a result of initiatives of prominent Senators from Northwestern states.

And while EDS cannot be expected to resolve fundamental conflicts on values, as Wondolleck (1988: 212) argues,

"Many national forest management disputes fit the description of disputes amenable to resolution. The different parties having a stake in the decisions to be made are well known and organized. The issues of dispute are well-defined. Power between these parties has become well-developed and balanced through lawsuits, administrative rulings, and Congressional mandates. These management and planning decisions inevitably must be made. The different parties to the disputes have exhausted other avenues by which to obtain representation to their satisfaction. It is costly to all parties to continue in an adversarial process, never focusing on or resolving the real issues of concern."

Collaborative methods have not remained restricted to ADR, and innovations in open decisionmaking and ecosystem management are proceeding ahead in a good number of national forests (see Cortner and Shannon 1993; Simon, Shands and Liggett 1993, and the case studies in the July 1993 issue of the Journal of Forestry).

It is important to keep in mind that, while earlier participatory reforms within the system of pluralist legalism did not of themselves end adversarialism in the interests of collaborative deliberation, they did establish the external conditions for balanced power and interest mobilization that has made participatory innovation more possible, and they did help transform internal regulatory cultures in an increasingly deliberative direction. In short, they fostered a process of social learning within the arena of forest management, and helped build networks of communication to sustain and expand this.

Can Environmental Dispute Settlement Empower Citizen Groups?

There are various dangers to citizen groups that enter into EDS. The process can be very demanding on their time and resources, and divert them from other projects, including some that may have greater mobilizing potential, especially when framed as fundamental issues of principle that are not open to compromise. Many practitioners promote the view that environmental disputes are simply the result of misunderstanding and miscommunication, rather than recognizing deeper underlying conflicts of interest and perspective. Citizen groups, especially at the community level, often do not have as much relevant substantive expertise, as well as process skills for complex multisided negotiations, as do those in industry and government with whom they are often negotiating. And the potential for representatives to lose touch with their constituencies as agreements are being worked out are considerable (Crowfoot and Wondolleck 1990; Bidol, Bardwell and Manring 1986).

But experience increasingly shows that there are a variety of strategies that can addreess these and other problems, and help make EDS serve to empower community and citizen groups. Skills tend to be learned relatively quickly by engaging in the process itself, and facilitators can contibute to this. Many facilitators adopt a forthright posture of protecting the weak, and community groups often employ a shadow strategist to help them through the process. Some programs exist to provide training for citizen representatives beforehand, such as the EPA's eight-hour training sessions for its Negotiated Rulemaking project. And the latter provides a fund of 50,000 dollars for each rulemaking procedure, which is managed independently by the American Arbitration Association to defray the costs of participation and provide technical assistance. Community groups that have access to sufficient resources are much more capable of negotiating as relative equals.

Developing strong coalitions with as many other concerned citizen interests before entering into the process also enhances negotiating power. Groups that can agree upon common interests and a limited number of common representatives have the best chance of making EDS serve their broader purposes. In this sense, EDS can become an important occasion for dialogue and coalition building among independent community groups with varied perspectives and interests. It challenges them to be as pluralistic as possible, since important stakeholders left out can undermine the legitimacy of the final settlement, while at the same time encouraging them to define enough areas of common citizen interests so that they can enter EDS with a coherent voice. The informal dialogue among community groups is, in many ways, as important as the formal dialogue that occurs within the EDS process itself, and helps to constitute them as a pluralistic community seeking common ground.

And groups that choose not to join the process itself can develop creative ways of complementing it. In a state groundwater dispute, for instance, Wisconsin Environmental Decade decided that it could not switch from its adversarial posture, but it did coordinate its activities with a group on the inside of the process, observed the sessions, lobbied various participants, and was an active voice in the legislative debate that followed the consensual proposal that was worked out through EDS. With this division of labor, EDS did not diminish but enhanced the envirinmental movement's capacity to constitute itself as an effective yet pluralist voice (Edgar 1990).

Groups also confront this pluralist challenge in the accountability process. Representatives in the EDS need to check back with their groups if the agreements they work out are to have democratic legitimacy, but groups themselves define different forms and limits of each representative's decision-making authority. For instance, the Common Ground Consensus Project convened fourteen representatives of groups dealing with environmental and agricultural interests in the state of Illinois, and although they were all nongovernmental organizations, their purpose was to influence the legislative process, and they thus kept close contact with legislators and state agency staff. They included groups such as the Great Lakes Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Audobon Council of Illinois, and the state chapter of the League of Women Voters—the latter two of which had gained much relevant experience in Section 208 Water Quality programs—as well as farm groups such as Illinois Women in Agricultue, the Illinois State Grange, and the American Agricultural Movement in Illinois. Participants met every two months over a two-year period, and thus had ample opportunity for ongoing communication with their members.

Each group's representative had different requirements for checking back with staff and membership before they could commit to an agreement, however. One group was represented by the organization's president, who felt that he could speak for the group on 70 percent of the issues, but had to check back with the board of directors on the rest. Another representative was given full authority during the EDS process. Two groups had to submit all agreements for full review, one by the entire staff and the other by the entire membership. The process itself developed respect for these varied internal communication and accountability requirements, and thus realistic timelines and expectations for coming to agreement (Nelson 1990). Such arrangements also promote mutual visibility of the democratic procedures of different groups, and thus could strengthen the norms of accountability within the larger field of citizen organizing.

The Common Ground project is also instructive in the way that it configured the relevant public, or answered the question "what demos?" Organizers wished to convene a broad range of groups with grassroots membership among environmentalists and farm interests, which had had a history of intense conflict with one another. They made the assumption that many of these groups had the potential for a policy dialogue that could develop consensus on some important issues. Thus, the initial organizers from the Illinois Environmental Council, after consulting with a supportive contact within the state department of agriculture, developed a set of criteria for inclusion and exclusion. These criteria represented a relatively expansive conception of the relevant public, yet clearly still a delimited one: in the interests of a fruitful dialogue, only those would be included whose participation might yield consensus, who were committed to influencing the political process with workable policies, and who had the capacity to educate the broader public. The criteria thus limited the total number to about fourteen, with those invited to cover a broad philosophical spectrum, but to have some common ground already. They would have to be active in the political process, be nongovernmental, and have capacities for communicating with a larger constituency.

This clearly excluded some groups from consideration. And two groups were invited that turned down the offer, and thus were given the option of self-exclusion. The Farm Bureau, a large grassroots organization of 300,000 members, rejected the offer in each of the two years of the program (the other group accepted in the second year) on the basis of its complex decision-making structure and its history of conflict with other farm interests. But what is most instructive is that organizers assumed that pragmatic criteria of inclusion and exclusion could be justified on the basis of the quality of dialogue that might occur and the end product that might result, as well as on the basis of it being a voluntary nongovernmental effort.

Practitioners of EDS, of course, have various perspectives on criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and related criteria on internal process and the like. Susskind and Cruikshank (1987: 21-25) , for instance, apply an ambitious checklist of criteria to determine the fairness of the process, including openness to public scrutiny, inclusion of all groups who want to participate, universal access to technical information, opportunities for all to express their views, accountability to constituencies ostensibly represented, due process complaint procedures, and the option to continuously modify the ground rules of the process. Yet ultimately, they argue, a pragmatic test of whether the participants perceived the process as fair is more important in achieving and implementing workable agreements and building trust for future efforts than is the application of an abstract decision rule by an independent analyst.

The quality of deliberation that occurred in the Common Ground project was quite substantial. Groups that admitted wasting enormous resources in the past battling each other in the legislature, even at times when they knew there were similar values, began to understand the perspectives of the others and define shared interests as they built up trust through the EDS process. Participants developed a soil erosion program that was sent to the legislature and was felt to be far more sophisticated than the solutions produced by interest group bargaining, or what they called "hall lobbying." They also developed the beginnings of a wetlands protection program, which instituted a citizens advisory committee whose most experienced members were the six who joined it from the Common Ground project itself. And while there were some disappointments, the new lines of communication, networks and trust that were built up enhanced the fund of social capital available for future deliberative efforts.

Common Ground held a very innovative final conference that was designed to educate agency staff, legislators and grassroots members about the nature of consensus-seeking policy dialogue by engaging participants in using the actual problem-solving techniques that project members themselves had employed over the previous two years. In other words, they sought very self consciously to diffuse and institutionalize these deliberative techniques within the range of different kinds of organizations that would be compelled to interact with one another on policy decisions and implementation for years to come. And during these final EDS exercises, they discussed new ideas from the grassroots, and thus prepared the ground for further collaborative learning.

Dispute resolution has also been used to resolve difficult issues of stalled Superfund cleanups (Gilbert 1989) and unwanted waste treatment facilities. A case of the latter occurred in the city of Metropolis (a pseudonym), when the city council's proposal for a solid waste "resource recovery plant" met with fierce NIMBY opposition from neighborhood and environmental groups. Experts were deeply divided over whether the proposed plant, the first of eight sites designated throughout the city to handle the ten thousand tons per day of garbage produced by city residents, would release dioxin, a cancer causing agent, into the air in the process of controlled burning of wastes. The process, which in turn generates electricity, is used in dozens of U.S. and European cities. Unable to evaluate the evidence on dioxin release, the city council turned to the local Academy of Sciences, which agreed to mediate only on condition that it host a public dialogue, conducted in layperson's terms, on the scientific merits. Representatives from thirty neighborhood and environmental groups, including many residents from the surrounding area, attended eight hours of discussion among three panels of experts (environmental scientists, engineers, and public health specialists), each of which had opposing views represented.

City council members, in turn, prepared written queries for the panels and asked follow-up questions, while the facilitor displayed all major arguments on posters around the academy's auditorium and interrupted the speakers periodically to insist that they phrase their main points in "plain English." Thus, public health experts were prodded to compare cancer risks from dioxin leaks to those of a nonsmoker living with a smoker —the latter were greater—and to clarify underlying differences in analytic methods. By the end of the discussion, the main scientific opponent whose criticisms of the Department of Sanitation's environmental impact statement had helped spur the controversy, proposed several very stringent conditions for monitoring, shutdown and liability. And when the Depatment of Sanitation surprisingly agreed to build the plant itself under such apparently unattractive conditions, the city council moved to approve an agreement (Susskind and Cruikshank 1987: 66-70, 157-61).

The broader EDS movement has, indeed, been quite self-consciously committed to organizational and social learning. As Susskind and Cruikshank (1987: 247) argue from extensive experience, "unlike most reforms, consensus building has the great advantage of built-in learning. The `reformed' become the reformers." Environmental and other citizen groups, despite the fact that they are often outnumbered and enter the process with fewer resources, have generally been able to hold their own and to have considerable influence on final agreements. They have been able to use the process to build new alliances and richer collaborative relationships, including among groups with whom they have had antagonistic relationships in the past. They have been able to develop new skills and confidence, utilize their organizational resources more effectively, and establish broader legitimacy among the public, especially where conflict has often led to patchwork compromise or unproductive gridlock.

And they have been able to use EDS as a way of opening up formal decision making to more permanent citizen participation. As Daniel Lueke, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who participated in the Denver Metropolitan Water Roundtable that grew out of the Foothills negotiated dispute, later noted, "the environmental community was enfranchised in a way they never would have been able to be. We were at the table with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Denver Water Board with our own experts and our own ideas on the table. We wouldn't have had that opportunity in any other forum" (Wondolleck, Manring and Crowfoot 1990: 254; see also Susskind and McMahon 1985; and Buckle and Thomas-Buckle 1986).

Citizens groups have been best able to achieve these gains when they have been alert to the various dangers of EDS, remained attentive to where such issues fit within their broader goals, and when they have utilized EDS as one among other approaches for empowerment and public discourse. Groups that learn how to switch between collaborative and adversarial strategies tend to have more success in EDS.

And a key source of their bargaining power is their capacity to use other strategies (legal, mobilizational, educational, and legitimative) to improve their BATNA, as the lingo goes, or their Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, if citizen groups can credibly demonstrate that they have other strong options available —and, conversely, that their opponents' options are limited if they choose to become adversarial—their chances of using EDS to serve the needs of their organizations and constituencies are considerably enhanced. And while much remains to be done to improve EDS for a broader range of citizen empowerment projects and deliberative processes, it is clear that EDS can serve to complement other participatory strategies and designs, and that it provides ways of enriching pluralist representation and dialogue in search of common interests and workable solutions.

C.2 Risk and Democracy

Risk raises many practical challenges for communities, as well as for our larger understanding of how democracy should work. We will examine some of these in detail in section D. Environmental Justice and Community Empowerment. And we will provide a series of case studies and other resources from various scholars and practitioners active in the field of risk communication.

Here we begin with a case study that was very important in EPA's first attempts to reframe the problem of risk explicitly in terms of participatory democracy. In a famous dispute that deeply divided the community of Tacoma, Washington in the early 1980s over jobs and environmental health, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus decided to bring the hard choices and uncertainties over controlling arsenic emissions to the public. Regional EPA staff convened public workshops in which smelter workers, local residents, and environmentalists discussed their values and fears face-to-face. The process helped to build community capacities for workforce retraining, more diversified economic growth, and environmental dispute resolution in subsequent years. It also triggered a process of learning within EPA itself.

To read this case, click on The Tacoma Smelter and EPA.

C.3. Estuaries and Ecosystems

Next we present a case study from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. This is a program within the National Estuaries Program that has had a vibrant civic environmental organization, Save the Bay, at its foundation. We will soon add other cases, from Watershed Councils in the Pacific Northwest to an innovative community-wide toxics reduction program sponsored by the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics at EPA. Again, we welcome any suggestions on further cases.

Save the Bay Develops Civic Approach to Estuary Protection.

The League of Women Voters Education Fund has also developed a very useful, 60-page action manual for civic approaches to groundwater protection. It is based on best practices of 18 state and local Leagues around the country. The following story provides an example from one of these local Leagues, as well as further information on how to order the manual, Protect Your Groundwater, 1994.

Rockford LWV Educates Public for Groundwater Protection.

Index

A Introduction
B. Citizen Participation in Environmental Regulation: the First Decade

The Origins
Who Represents the Citizens?
Social Learning and Capacity Building: the Challenges

C. The Emergence of Civic Environmentalism

Alternative Dispute Resolution
Risk and Democracy
Estuaries and Ecosystems
Sustainable Development

Emergence of a Grassroots Anti-Toxics Movement
Community Relations in Superfund
NIMBY and Beyond: the Paradox and Promise of Democratic Participation
Community Empowerment and Public Policy for Democracy

E. References

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