Statement on Differential Social Access and the Development of A Participatory Equity Principle

[John V. Stone <jvstone@umd.umich.edu;jvstone@glerl.noaa.gov;;;;;;;>]

I'm so happy to see this discussion taking place, as I think the issues pertaining to boundary definition, constituent population identification, and local knowledge access and utilization are central to all other aspects of the participation process.

I noted yesterday that I recently completed an EPA-sponsored environmental anthropology project through the Great Lakes Commission Fellows Program. That research was funded to specifically address the issues comprising today's topic, so I'ld like to take several paragraphs to describe and offer it as a conceptual and methodological tool for the public participation practitioner. 

The project was titled the "Risk Perception Mapping Demonstration Project," and its purpose was to demonstrate an ethnographic approach to public participation. This approach, called "Risk Perception Mapping" (RPM), was developed largely in response to differential social access to public participation in environmental decision-making. Differential social access, it is argued, can result in potential discrimination in environmental management outcomes/impacts. In the context of Great Lakes environmental management, RPM presented a social scientific mechanism for developing equitable population-specific information and education exchanges through which more culturally sensitive indicators of Great Lakes ecosystem integrity may emerge.

RPM uses social-perceptual data to define the boundaries of a locally affected population, and it employs ethnographic methods for identifying constituent populations and their relevant social contexts, and for accessing in locally appropriate and culturally sensitive ways the typically detailed environmental knowledge of local populations. To the extent that the RPM method seeks to access this information directly from all segments of an LAP -- on their terms and in locations and social contexts that are familiar to them -- it stands to provide them with a more equitable social access to public participation in environmental management.

Essentially, RPM is a way of obtaining culturally sensitive input and participation from culturally heterogeneous populations. RPM rests in part on the assumption that the knowledge possessed by local people is equally as valuable to the environmental management equation as is the strictly scientific information of "the experts," although both must be present for meaningful educational exchanges to occur. Bottom line: it's about diversity, respect, and equality of access to the public participation process. 

In the following paragraphs I will further describe the method's conceptual development and practical utility, as well as some additional considerations that may help inform future efforts at culturally sensitive and locally appropriate outreach and participation.

AT ISSUE: DIFFERENTIAL SOCIAL ACCESS TO PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Large-scale projects can have significant impacts on the natural and social environments in which they are located. Impact assessments can help to guide decisions regarding whether or not to proceed with a project, and if so, to identify appropriate mitigation strategies to minimize its potentially adverse consequences. Two key components in the assessment process are the definition and identification of the local populations potentially affected by the project, a collectivity commonly referred to as the "locally affected population," or LAP. Consultative relationships are typically established among the LAP, project proposers, and relevant environmental management agencies. Thus, the LAP provides the geographic and sociocultural framework for public participation programs in environmental management.

LOCALLY AFFECTED POPULATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISCRIMINATION

LAPs have been defined by a variety of measures, such as: (1) pre-existing political jurisdictions; (2) pre-determined distance-from-site criteria; (3) various ecosystems approaches at levels ranging from macro-systems, to regional, to local; and (4) extent of known contamination. These definitions have proved problematic from a participatory standpoint because they have not been grounded in the social data necessary to identify the geographical extent and distribution of the LAP and to document its unique sociocultural characteristics that may predispose some populations to particular types of impacts.

Consider the example of "specially affected" populations in the preparation of project-specific impact statements. The International Association for Impact Assessment (http://www.iaia.org) notes that just as the biological sections of impact statements devote particular attention to species having special vulnerabilities, the socioeconomic sections must also devote particular attention to potential impacts on vulnerable segments of the human population. These "vulnerable segments" -- variously referred to as "specially affected populations," "marginalized communities," "groups of isolated individuals," and "vulnerable subpopulations" -- may include the poor, the elderly, adolescents, or unemployed women; members of minority or other groups that are racially, ethnically, or culturally distinctive; or occupational, cultural, political, or value-based groups for whom a given community, region, or use of some component of the biophysical environment is particularly important.

Specially affected populations are often socially isolated from the larger communities within which they are embedded and typically are unaware of and therefore implicitly excluded from environmental decision-making processes. Not surprisingly, these same groups often bear the greatest environmental and social impacts of projects, such as nuclear power plants, that require environmental management at potentially extensive geo-political, sociocultural, and ecosystem scales. "Environmental discrimination" can be said to exist to the extent that such impacts are born consistently and disproportionately by the same groups across numerous projects.

At issue are the procedures used to define the boundaries of the LAP, identify its socially relevant constituent populations, and access the knowledge these people possess regarding their local environment and how they stand to be affected by deliberate changes to it. Public hearings, for example, are notoriously self-selective and frequently fail to incorporate important population-specific issues into environmental management decisions. Environmental discrimination is a product of, among other things, consultative procedures that do not provide equitable social access to participatory processes. I use the term "participatory equity" to refer to a principle that I think should guide public participation in environmental management, and I think ethnography is the appropriate methodological approach for implementing it.

TOWARD A 'PARTICIPATORY EQUITY PRINCIPLE' IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Participatory equity derives from a predominantly egalitarian philosophical perspective. Broadly speaking, philosophical perspective may be viewed along a continuum on which, at one extreme, individual liberty and "free will" are held in highest regard. This position, often referred to as "libertarianism," emphasizes the right of the individual to control his or her destiny, unfettered by collective group constraint. The other extreme of the continuum, often referred to as "egalitarianism," is marked by individual acquiescence to group maintenance and emphasizes an equality of outcome in which individuals will sacrifice autonomy should it result in an unequal distribution of outcome.

These contrasting perspectives can profoundly influence how public participation programs are conceived and implemented in environmental management. The libertarian model, for example, is structured around the assumption that people have free and equal access to the decision-making process. Participation is the civic responsibility of those who have a potential stake in the environmental management issues over which decisions are being formulated. It is assumed that potentially affected individuals are equally aware of these issues, and that they all have equal opportunity to participate in environmental decision-making. Whether or not one actually does so, -- or perhaps more importantly, any potentially undesirable outcome related to not having done so (i.e., inequitable social distribution of environmental risks) - is the individual's responsibility, with whom participatory accountability must ultimately reside. The egalitarian model, on the other hand, emphasizes participatory equity over participatory liberty, the responsibility for which necessarily resides with the agency(s) that control the decision-making process. That is to say, the scope of participatory equity involves numerous variables that are necessarily beyond individual control. In this model the relevant agency is responsible for implementing a participation process that is sensitive to, and to the greatest extent possible compensates for, sociocultural and geo-political conditions that differentially restrict social access to decision-making processes.

THE PARTICIPATORY IMPORTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RISK PERCEPTION

Social Impact Assessment (SIA) studies have documented that a project's social effects occur to the extent that local populations perceive themselves to be at risk from the project. "Project awareness" is a necessary criterion for project-specific risk perception, and it has been used successfully to define the LAP in project-specific SIAs. Risk Perception Mapping is an ethnographic method of public consultation that derives from an egalitarian philosophical perspective. It was developed explicitly to identify and map the geographical extent and socio-perceptual characteristics of an LAP and to document the impact and mitigation issues raised by its various constituents. To the extent that the RPM method seeks to access these issues directly from all segments of the LAP, on their terms and in locations and social contexts that are familiar to them, it stands to provide them with a more equitable social access to public participation in environmental management.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR LOCALLY APPROPRIATE PARTICIPATORY DESIGNS

Social scientists generally accept that people organize themselves into multiple and potentially overlapping social groups. As a long-time member of the International Association for Public Participation (http://www.iap2.org) I can attest to the considerable challenges that this ostensibly elementary social science principle poses to the public participation practitioner. For example, one person - that is, one potential participant from the LAP consulted in an environmental management project - will belong to multiple social groups at the time his or her input is sought. It is neither unlikely nor uncommon that these groups will have competing interests vis-à-vis the project in question. How does the individual participant balance these potentially conflicting interests, and how can the public participation practitioner best account for them when establishing consultative relationships with the LAP?

THE PARTICIPATORY IMPORTANCE OF ETIC VERSUS EMIC CHARACTERIZATIONS OF THE LAP

Anthropologists have long used the concepts of "emic" and "etic" to deal with problems such as these. From a participative standpoint, an etically conceived public derives from human organizational definitions imposed from the outside, which may or may not have any basis in social reality. An emically-conceived public, on the other hand, derives from human organizational definitions based on social interaction in cultural context. Demographic criteria such as age, gender, race, income, and the like are prime examples of etically defined social groups. For the most part, people do not organize themselves into behavioral units that correspond to these etic group definitions. Although such groupings can provide valuable information for describing the demographic characteristics of an LAP, they provide little in the way of understanding much less utilizing for participatory purposes the behavioral aspects of the human groups potentially affected by a given project.

By contrast, emically defined groups are self-defined by group interaction and always have their basis in a group's social reality. For example, I was the ethnographic field manager on an RPM study of a proposed radioactive waste facility, and during that project our research team encountered several emic groups self-defined as "milksheds" - extensive collection zones for milk harvested by dairy farmers in the area. Members of the project area milkshed expressed a different level and type of concern than did members of adjoining milksheds, even though many lived much farther away, because their milk was being mutually collected and processed with milk harvested from farms located next to the proposed radioactive waste storage facility. These people responded to this project not as occupationally defined "dairy farmers" but rather as members of their respective milksheds. Without this emic understanding subsequent participation programs would have homogenized the LAP by presuming that its members' behavior was dictated by etically derived categories, such as in this case, the occupation "dairy farmer."

THE PARTICIPATORY IMPORTANCE OF BEHAVIORAL GROUPS IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

It is also important to recognize that members of the LAP belong to multiple emically defined groups and embody numerous and even potentially conflicting responses to a given project. Continuing the example above, ethnographic interviews were conducted among several Amish enclaves near the study area. As members of the emically-defined milkshed these people opposed the project because they feared its technology. However, as members of the larger Amish community, these same people suggested that the rumored drop in property values associated with the project would benefit their community by curbing the rising property values that contributed to Amish cultural dislocation. Rising property values may bode well for the upwardly mobile suburbanite, but they forced these Amish community members onto ever more agriculturally marginal lands at increasingly greater distances from each other. The project, although feared and unwanted, was viewed as the lesser of two evils. Depending on the behavioral hat one was wearing, the same people in these two social contexts presented different impact concerns and mitigation issues.

Anthropologists and other social scientists now recognize that group affiliation and social context can create differential social access to public participation in environmental management, and that this constitutes a participatory link to the phenomenon of environmental discrimination. For these reasons, I have argued that participatory equity, rather than liberty, ought to be the guiding principle for public participation in environmental management. If participatory equity is to occur in environmental management, participation programs must be conceived from a predominantly egalitarian rather than libertarian philosophical perspective; that is to say, participation in environmental decision-making should not be a function of sociocultural or geographical circumstances that differentially restrict access to the process. Ethnographic Risk Perception Mapping provides a field-tested means of defining the geographical extent, socio-perceptual contexts, and unique behavioral characteristics of an LAP and documenting the impact and mitigation issues raised by its constituent populations. To that end, RPM can be used to develop equitable population-specific information and education exchanges through which more culturally sensitive indicators of ecosystem integrity may emerge.

Further information on Risk Perception Mapping methodology, as well as on the EPA Great Lakes Commission RPM demonstration project my be obtained directly from me at jvstone@umd.umich.edu or jvstone@glerl.noaa.gov as well as at the following websites:

http://www.glc.org/about/scholarships/jvstone-report.html

http://www.sfaa.net/eap/eappapers.html

http://www.scirus.com/search_simple.php  (keywords: Risk Perception Mapping)

Thanks again for the opportunity to share our perspectives and insights with each other; I'm really gaining quite a bit from the dialogue thus far and am looking forward to the rest of the discussion.

Respectfully,

John V. Stone