Citizen participation is a process which provides private individuals an opportunity to influence public decisions and has long been a component of the democratic decision-making process. The roots of citizen participation can be traced to ancient Greece and Colonial New England. Before the 1960s, governmental processes and procedures were designed to facilitate "external" participation. Citizen participation was institutionalized in the mid-1960s with President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (Cogan & Sharpe, 1986 p. 283).
Public involvement is means to ensure that citizens have a direct voice in public decisions. The terms "citizen" and "public," and "involvement" and "participation" are often used interchangeably. While both are generally used to indicate a process through which citizens have a voice in public policy decisions, both have distinctively different meanings and convey little insight into the process they seek to describe. Mize reveals that the term "citizen participation" and it's relationship to public decision-making has evolved without a general consensus regarding either it's meaning nor it's consequences (Mize, 1972).
Many agencies or individuals choose to exclude or minimize public participation in planning efforts claiming citizen participation is too expensive and time consuming. Yet, many citizen participation programs are initiated in response to public reaction to a proposed project or action. However, there are tangible benefits that can be derived from an effective citizen involvement program. Cogan and Sharpe (1986, p. 284) identify five benefits of citizen participation to the planning process:
All of these benefits are important to the Forest Service in its planning efforts, particularly the last three. Recent forest management decisions have led to prolonged court cases and a general lack of trust among many people with respect to the Forest Service.
Decision-making StructuresIn discussing the theory of public participation, it is useful to review broad theories of decision-making structures. DeSario and Langton, in their book Citizen Participation in Public Decision Making explore the role of technology in public policy decisions (DeSario and Langton, 1987). They conclude that public decisions are increasingly being influenced by technology. Two broad decision-making structures are defined and analyzed: the technocratic approach; and the democratic approach.
Technocracy (or the technocratic approach) is defined as the application of technical knowledge, expertise, techniques, and methods to problem solving. Democracy, as defined by DeSario and Langton, refers to citizen involvement activities in relation to government planning and policy making (DeSario and Langton, 1987 p. 5). These approaches are described in more detail below.Technocratic Decision Making The technocratic approach to decision-making has historically been applied in most Forest Service decisions. Strong arguments can be made in favor of a technocratic decision approach. A key argument is that trained staff "experts" are best suited to make complex technical decisions. Experts are increasingly becoming a part of our decision-making structures in both the public and private sectors (DeSario and Langton, 1987. p. 7). However, Nelkin concluded that scientific and technocratic approaches "not only failed to solve social problems but often contributed to them" (Nelkin, 1981. p. 274). The notion that the "cure is often worse than the disease" becomes increasingly important as the technology provides alternative solutions to public policy issues.
Techniques and methods applied by experts are most effective when considering technical decisions as opposed to value or mixed, decisions. Kantrowitz (1975) identified three separate types of policy decisions: (1) technical decisions that are based solely on the application and extrapolation of scientific issues; (2) value decisions are concerned with the resolution of important normative or societal issues; and (3) mixed decisions that have both technical and value components.