Difference between revisions of "Participating in assessments"

Revision as of 07:51, 20 February 2008

<accesscontrol>Members of projects,,Workshop2008,,beneris,,Erac,,Heimtsa,,Hiwate,,Intarese</accesscontrol> Why allow open participation?

"History shows us that the common man is a better judge of his own needs in the long run than any cult of experts." ^[1]

The reasons behind open participation has been identified e.g. by Fiorino ^[2] as either normative, substantive or instrumental and by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (^[3] as either ethical, political, pragmatic or epistemological. Building on these categorisations, the reasoning behind stakeholder involvement is discussed in this text under three headings as follows:

1. Normative and ethical reasons
2. Instrumental, pragmatic reasons
3. Epistemological, substantive reasons

Fulfilling the normative requirements and addressing ethical concerns is the minimum level that must be done in a risk assessment. In many case the minimum level of participation is legally enacted in order to ensure the rights of stakeholders to participate in the societal decision making processes.

An example of the basis of normative arguments is the Aarhus convention, which aims at access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters ^[4] Aarhus Convention. Open participation is also a means to manage the legitimacy problem, which is caused by uncertainty about the evidence of harm and owing to the Liberal foundation of the regulatory system, evidence of harm is the key to justifying regulatory interventions ^[5]. Another ethical reason for open participation is that government should obtain the consent of the governed (^[6].

The instrumental, pragmatic reasons for open participation are mainly related to increasing the sense of ownership, trust and acceptance of the decisions and the information that they are based on. In relation to risk assessment, the pragmatic reason for open participation is that it increases the effectiveness of the risk assessment in terms of increasing the applicability of the assessment output. For example, open participation may increase the usability of the assessment output by making the assessment product more comprehensible to non-specialists. Open participation most often also increases the acceptability of the assessment output, by allowing all interested parties to contribute to it. For example, the U.S.EPA has actively used public participation and dispute resolution in its work to facilitate the process and improve the acceptability of outcomes.

Probably the greatest potential of benefiting from open participation lies in making use of the diverse knowledge and plurality of views of stakeholders. Stakeholders may possess some local or other special knowledge about the phenomena being assessed that is not held by the specialists or that is not available in any official databases or information sources. Maybe even more importantly stakeholders represent their values and are thus a crucial source to be considered when identifying the public perceptions towards risk related phenomena and other value judgments. In brief, non-experts see problems, issues, and solutions that experts miss. More inclusive procedures enrich the generation of options and perspectives, and are therefore more responsive to the complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity of the risk phenomena ^[7] and more intensive stakeholder processes tends to result in higher-quality decisions ^[8].

Overall, the reasons behind open participation in risk assessment are basically very practical: it can be used as a means of improving the quality of the content of the assessment product, the applicability of the assessment product and sometimes even the efficiency of the assessment process. Collection and synthesis of the knowledge and views of a diverse group of people tends to lead to better outputs than just relying on the knowledge and views of a single or few individuals. Also, inclusion of diverse groups to contribute to the work tends to increase the acceptability of the outputs and can help to improve the usability of the outputs. Even the efficiency of the work process can be enhanced by open participation, although the effect of unsuccessful or badly managed collaboration can also turn out counterproductive in this sense.

What does open participation mean?

Open participation means allowing a large group of unorganized people to participate, share information and questions, and utilise the products of others. It means more than just dividing tasks within a group into pieces that belong to someone. It is a way of working together on a shared set of tasks for a common goal. It makes use of the collective knowledge of groups and plurality of views in order to improve the output of the work. Its best properties can be seen in situations where there is a diverse (and possibly unknown) group of potential participants who possess different kinds of knowledge and represent a variety of value judgments about the issue that is being worked on.

Open participation can be seen as an approach building on group communication which results are manifested and explicated in the product of the work. The product also serves as a platform or a medium for communication between the contributors. This means that the contributions to developing the product are messages that are sent by the contributors in form of manipulating the object that is being worked on and received by other contributors through observing the product. Through this communication by contribution the product thus develops into an explication of the shared understanding about the issue that is being worked on. In essence, allowing open participation means adopting mass collaboration as the way of working.

The concept of openness is an important issue in risk assessment. It defines the way the interaction between the contributors is organized and managed. Important dimensions of openness are at least:

• openness of participation
• openness of access
• openness of influence
• openness of temporal presence

Openness of participation refers to who, and on what basis, are allowed (or inversely not allowed) to contribute to the assessment. Openness of access refers to what parts of the assessment are available for different participants to contribute to. Openness of influence refers to what extent may a particular contribution have influence on the target of work. Openness of temporal presence refers to the when is it possible, e.g. in what phases, to make ones contributions. The overall openness is a product of all these dimensions.

The level of openness in terms of the above-mentioned dimensions should be organized in relation to the purpose and goals of the assessment taking into account the situational practicalities, such as e.g. legal requirements, public perceptions on the issues to be assessed, available resources etc. The level of openness can be adjusted separately for different (groups of) participants as needed and the level of openness may also vary in time as well as from assessment to another.

Challenges of open participation

Open participation creates requirements for the process of the assessment. The methods applied must be able to accommodate an unknown number of people who work with the assessment at the same time. In addition to the expected benefits in improving the outputs of risk assessments, open participation also brings about challenges, which need to be addressed and managed. These are e.g. disputes rising from different perceptions and values among the participants and balancing openness and efficiency of the assessment process. Anyhow, the potential benefits of openness in improving the effectiveness of assessments are so substantial that it is worthwhile to take the pain of dealing with these challenges.

Open participation is expected to work best when a) the object of production is information or culture, which keeps the cost of participation low for contributions; b) tasks can be chunked into bite-size pieces; c) the cost of integrating these pieces into a good-quality product is low ^[9]. In the light of these three properties, risk assessments are promising objects for mass collaboration. However, the assessment must be divided into small, fairly independent pieces that can easily be combined.

Based on three case studies from different continents, Fraser and co-workers concluded that the process of engaging people provides an opportunity for community empowerment; that stakeholders and decision-makers consider participation irrelevant unless it formally feeds into decision-making; and that the assessment and risk management should not be too much restricted by political boundaries, because the problems do not follow them ^[10]. These findings emphasize the importance of participation but also clarifies its challenges. It seems that a method that makes wide participation possible is a priori better, as it is not exhausted even if there is a need to widen an assessment outside the originally intended group of participants.

Pyrkilo method follows the conclusions by Fraser, the method can be used for community empowerment. Participation and the resulting contribution does formally feed into a content-specific point in the assessment. If the contribution changes the value of the variable, it has an impact through the causal chain on all downstream variables, including the outcome indicators, and finally conclusions. Thus, this approach should be attractive to the stakeholders who want their knowledge or opinions heard.

To facilitate such synthesis of diverse knowledge and plurality of views, carrying out risk assessments needs some kind of a collaborative workspace which functions as the platform for mass collaboration. A collaborative workspace serves the purpose of providing e.g. the following functionalities:

• facilitating communication between participants
• facilitating documentation and representation
• dealing with disputes
• managing openness

The methods for managing open participation should ideally be flexible enough to allow any level of openness in any dimension as needed. Since the common contemporary approaches to risk assessment have rather restrictive than open strategies to participation, it in practice means that new methods should be developed with the aim of being able to allow and tolerate more openness.

References