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Nicholas Dewar

User Profile Image Nicholas Dewar
Member since : May-22-2009 (Verified)
1 Ideas, 10 Comments, 19 Votes

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Ideas Posted

NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) was designed with an unusual attention to public participation (unusual for 1970 that is!). Web 2.0 provides more ways to distribute information and to involve affected communities in the NEPA process. This gives us an opportunity to increase public participation in the NEPA process and improve the outcomes.
NEPA requires public review at 3 specific points in the preparation of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Because of the length of time required for many EISs, these public review points (scoping, draft EIS and final EIS) can be separated by many months, and, in cases where the project is controversial, lots of pressure can build up in the intervening months that can make the public meetings confrontational and unproductive.
Instead of restricting public input to these three events, what if the EIS was compiled as an open book? How would it work if, for example, the drafting process started with a published frame-work, published draft chapters as and when they were written, received and displayed comments as the drafting progressed and reflected the comments in the text, inserted research results as they become available, etc. etc? I've seen some of this already (e.g. research results published as soon as they are available, an additional public meeting inserted between the DEIS and the FEIS, public comments accepted after the close of the comment periods, etc.) and this seemed to add to the sense of involvement and certainly reduced the tension and drama of the public meetings. So why not write it in the open?
I'm sure that this will present some substantial challenges. I've never had to write an EIS, and would like to hear from you if you have. What would the challenges be?
What do others think?
Displaying 1 - 25 of 4205 Ideas

Comments Posted

Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Kirk, thanks for your encouraging comment. I believe you're right about the need for "strong and imaginative leadership". That sort of leadership is, I'm happy to say, implied by the process that we are in today. Another important aspect is the need to match the openness of the "open-book EIS" to the degree of collaboration that the agency wants to work with. It is, of course, not a simple binary question of "open" or "closed". I can think of a range of ways that the openness of the EIS writing process could be calibrated to suit the agency and the particular project.
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Stephen, this is a good idea.
For ideas of how to compose the checklist, have a look at the posting "Ask Federal Agencies to Adopt the Core Principles for Public Engagement". If these principles are being followed, the meeting is probably on-track.

Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Carie/Philip: very good points. I also enjoyed your 2-page paper at the link you provided.
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
@ Thurst: a significant difference between this idea and the idea posted by GOPLeader is that the GOPLeader's idea only refers to funding bills, whereas this one (more appropriately I think) refers to all proposed legislation.
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Really! Public participation always seems to be treated as a "bolt-on" item. And you may be able to get away with that as long as we don't need to deepen the degree of public involvement. However, when we try to achieve "collaboration" there's no way to consider this as a "bolt-on". It's more useful to think of collaboration as an "emergent quality" that will manifest in a policy-development process if you have designed the process with the appropriate features. So you're right.
BTW: also interesting to see that the Organizers omitted any subcategory for Collaboration between Agencies and the public. Is there some sort of message there?! *Sigh*
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
The effect of collaboration on complex public policy disputes has received quite a lot of study over the years. Recently the US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution has been compiling and analyzing info from their case-load. I don't know how much they have on their website, but if it interests you take a look at ecr.gov
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Deliberative councils are very interesting and can produce interesting, sound outcomes. I helped facilitate something like this that was organized by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford last year. It produced a significant shift in the opinions of the participants. The tricky part of this seems to be what to do with the outcome of the deliberative process. Building a policy recommendation (no matter how good it is) that hasn't been requested by authorized "Policy makers" is like pushing on string. The key seems to be developing an interface with the existing policy-making system that ensures the outcomes will go somewhere. Another problem is cost: if the council is going to be statistically representative (especially in a heterogenous population) it has to be quite big, and providing the council with well-developed properly balanced information is time-consuming.
It's promising.
Nicholas Dewar 9 months ago
Stephen, I have worked on public participation for EISs but never had to write one. Thanks for your NEPAtown recommendation. I'll check it out.
Nicholas Dewar 10 months ago
Joe, You're right-on. Which gov agencies do you believe have particularly restrictive regs re public involvement in NEPA?
Nicholas Dewar 10 months ago
I like the idea of developing deliberative processes specifically for the on-line environment. But, if we're looking for ways to support "collaboration" (along with transparency and participation), I believe that we'd be better off if we develop alternative processes for helping participants develop agreement. Roberts Rules emphasize maintaining order rather than providing the best way to collaboratively develop solutions. Collaboration can be messy, and we need to be ready to accept that, to let go of the emphasis on a well-ordered process, to take our attention away from the formality of procedure and work together in an informal environment where rules are not the issue, but where the focus is on collaboratively solving the problem.