Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a survey of five institutional mechanisms for allowing the lay public to influence environmental risk decisions: public hearings, initiatives, public surveys, negotiated rule making, and citizens review panels. It also defines democratic process criteria for assessing these and other participatory mechanisms.

Regulatory agencies in the United States have relied increasingly on consensus-based decision processes to build public support for their policies. If they are well-designed and managed effectively, consensus-based processes may increase support for an agency’s policies and enhance its institutional legitimacy. But poorly-designed processes may lead to a consensus trap, in which an agency commits to making decisions based on a consensus the participants will never be able to achieve. Two recent initiatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - negotiated (...) rule making and the Common Sense Initiative - suggest factors that may be associated with more and less sucessful consensus-based processes. (shrink)