Public Involvement as a Negotiation Process

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Abstract
The burgeoning public involvement literature has resulted in a series of criteria being developed by many authors as to how the process “should” be conducted (e.g., public involvement should be instituted early in the planning process). A representative list of such criteria is evaluated in the context of three Western Australian case studies. It is concluded that such lists are not sufficient to describe or interpret the case studies presented, and that understanding of the role of public participation in environmental planning will be enhanced if it is viewed as a negotiation process. Eccles' two‐dimensional classification of negotiations may provide a valuable template for this view of public involvement by labeling environmental negotiations along “ideological‐distributive” and “internal‐external” dimensions. This approach also encourages application of social psychological methodology and theory to research questions such as why individuals participate, what negotiation procedures are preferred, and how the social contexts of environmental problems are defined by the public.

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