Public Involvement Activities Research Articles

Methodology and the Effects of the Public Involvement Activities on the Local Transport Plan in the U.K.

Methodology and the Effects of the Public Involvement Activities on the Local Transport Plan in the U.K.

The Effects of Public Involvement Activities and Information on Citizen's Consciousness of the Master Plan Process

The Effects of Public Involvement Activities and Information on Citizen's Consciousness of the Master Plan Process

People’s Opinions and Road Policies: Effects of Public Involvement Activities by the Road Council in Japan

The Road Council is the adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Construction (MOC) on matters of road policy at the national level. To be more responsive to society’s needs, the council implemented public involvement (PI) activities to solicit people’s opinions about the New 5-Year Road Improvement and Management Program. The council issued a series of reports that provided information to the people and solicited their opinions before it made its final recommendations to MOC. The focus was on the effects that people’s opinions have on the road policies contained in the reports. The relationship between road policies set by the Road Council and MOC and people’s opinions was analyzed. A document-analysis methodology for extracting key words representing policy measures and identifying policy fields was developed. The study assumed that the number of key words indicates the degree of emphasis in the report. Frequency of opinions for each policy field also was determined. Relationships between the number of key words and the frequency of opinions were analyzed using Kendall’s correlation coefficient. Causal relations within each policy field were analyzed. The results clearly established the influence of people’s opinions on the resulting road policies. The findings also showed two kinds of changes in the documents: ( a) changes initiated by people’s opinions and ( b) changes initiated by the Road Council. So far, PI activities have been applied only at the national planning level. These activities also can be applied to other levels and aspects of planning.

Can Organizations Change? Environmental Protection, Citizen Participation, and the Corps of Engineers.

As the title suggests, this work concerns itself with our assessment of the environmental movement's impact upon the procedures, organizational structure, and objectives of the Corps of Engineers. The authors have selected four measures of organizational change-setting new goals, reorganization, changes in output, and open decisionmaking-as important factors in the assessment of bureaucratic change in the 1970s. With these factors in mind, the authors provide five case studies of the Corps of Engineers project planning process, and a survey data analysis of the attitudes of citizens who took part in Corps public involvement activities. The methodology is innovative and sophisticated. The reader is allowed the richness of detail and insight that only case studies provide, and empirical generalizations derived from survey data analysis, upon which conclusions about the overall effectiveness of Corps planning strategies on citizen attitudes can be based. The conclusion? Not much change, either in citizen attitudes about the Corps, or the Agency's organizational accommodation to citizen demands through citizen participation. The book, therefore, represents a missed opportunity. Instead of considering a wide scope of decision making in order to define the changing constellation of political support, opposition, and the Corps' organizational responses, the authors chose to focus on a rather minor component of decision making and public relations, the public involvement process. Thus, the work stands primarily as a technical analysis of citizen participation strategies, rather than a political study of the Corps of Engineers. However, the book may be testimony enough to this agency's political strength. The environmental movement of the last decade gave us sweeping anti-pollution legislation, unprecedented federal authority to regulate many sectors of society, wholesale governmental reorganization, and billions for anti-pollution control technology. The authors admit that this social movement led only to what amounted to organizational fine tuning within the Corps: brief experimentation with open planning and decision making, a small increase in environmentally-oriented personnel, and the creation of environmental units in District Planning and Engineering Divisions. These modifications

Water Plan Ranking and the Public Interest

The public interest, which often serves as the basis for ranking alternative Federal water resources plans, is defined in terms of the following: What factors should be considered, and how should the factors be weighed relative to one another in ranking proposals? Answers to this question provide the framework for an analysis of several approaches that have been used in ranking alternatives, (e.g., economic efficiency, weighted sum of objectives). In the course of examining these approaches, an argument is made in support of trends toward the direct involvement of citizens in the determination of factors and weights. The approaches examined, as they are commonly employed in practice, are shown to be less than satisfactory in terms of involving citizens in determining factors and weights. A process is outlined which integrates public involvement activities into the ranking of alternatives and which has been found useful in the context of Corps of Engineers' water resources studies.