Procedural and Substantive Fairness in Risk Decisions: Comparative Risk Assessment Procedures1

Abstract

The issue of fairness often is central within environmental policy debates. The recent proliferation of state and local comparative risk projects for informing the selection of environmental policy priorities offers an appropriate setting to explore the issue of procedural fairness in risk‐based decisionmaking. This paper describes and evaluates the process by which one of the initial state comparative risk projects, Washington's “Environment 2010,” attempted to include a broader range of participants in identifying, assessing, and generating preferred management strategies for a wide range of environmental hazards. The Washington case study suggests that comparative risk projects can be fairer procedurally, but that significant barriers remain. Noting that greater procedural fairness does not necessarily produce greater substantive fairness, the paper concludes that more attention needs to be directed at the process by which comparative risk projects translate their consensus upon risk priorities into subsequent actions.