Costs and Benefits

[Chris Bruce <cjbruce@ucalgary.ca>]

If I read the postings up to this point correctly, much of the discussion has taken the form of: "How do we get more members of the public to participate in EPA decision-making?" Yesterday's and today's discussions provide one answer: provide more information, more cheaply to potential participants. In short, the suggested solution takes the position that people are more likely to participate, the less costly is that participation to them.

But once you put the issue that way, a second solution immediately becomes apparent (at least to an economist, like me). If reducing the costs of participation will increase participation, might not increasing the benefits do the same? 

By increasing benefits, I don't mean increasing the benefits of the outcome - for example, the benefits of cleaning up a superfund site. Rather, I mean increasing the benefits that will result FROM participation. There are only benefits of this type if the participation improves the outcome relative to what it would have been had the individual not participated. 

For example, assume that EPA guidelines were so strict and so tightly worded that there was almost no room for variation in the possible outcome. In that case, the benefits from participation would be negligible and you would expect little or no involvement from the public, no matter how cheap that involvement was. Only if the public thinks that its participation might alter the policy selected, and in a manner that provided significantly improved benefits to them, could you expect the public to get very interested. 

In short, I think that if "public participation" is to be a goal, (i) EPA has to write its regulations in such a way that local committees have some flexibility in choosing local policies; and (ii) EPA has to give local committees a significant amount of say in the selection of those local policies. Just holding "open houses" or "advisory roundtables" isn't going to do the trick in most cases. Some kind of consensus-building process is going to be needed.