On Monday I discussed what it means to say “public participation legitimizes agency decisions.” (Not much, unless you get more specific.) I promised the next post would address the idea that public participation supports better agency decisions. But in writing about wisdom-enhancing processes I realized there is an important step that has to come first.
Exactly who do we think is leveraging all this wisdom?
It makes a big difference whether we are supporting the wisdom-enhancing activities of gladiators, of the agencies as they prepare for public participation or of the unaligned public.
A gladiator would be someone who happily uses the threat or reality of procedural lawsuits to chase substantive and procedural outcomes. The gladiator may not care about wisdom. But when the legal hook is “the agency’s process wasn’t wise,” that is what the gladiators focus on. When they get their objectives met by hooking agencies’ wisdom failures, they give agencies an incentive to at least improve the appearance of wisdom, and when the agencies improve the appearance of wisdom–shazam!–sometimes wisdom ensues. In this scenario, wisdom is a by-product of legal theater.
Ok, not perfect, but not ridiculous either.
The thing is, do gladiators really need our help to engage in their sometimes-incidental wisdom-seeking? I think enhanced public participation is as likely to be a distraction as a help. It gives the gladiators one more thing they have to birddog.
For instance, consider the claim that good public participation supports wise decisions by properly framing uncertainty. By discriminating between epistemic and stochastic uncertainty and presenting each in a digestible manner, we facilitators create a frame within which the public can think as insightfully–perhaps more insightfully–as agency experts.
Sierra Club staff understand uncertainty pretty well. They probably don’t need a facilitator to help frame the issue for them. Even if we facilitators get to the point where we are actually are proficient at framing uncertainty to support the public as they support the agency in making wise decisions (phew!), the truth is that the Sierra Club usually still would be better off using in-house expertise or hiring an uncertainty expert rather than relying on us.
Sophisticated people with disposable time, or people closely aligned with a group that has paid staff, don’t need us much. 1940’s-style administrative procedures that provide for meaningful notice and comment probably give them the most useful leverage.
What about agency folk? The usual thinking is that public participation leverages the public to then leverage the agency to be wiser. But there is a more immediate effect, what I call the witness effect. You know this. You clean up for the inlaws. When you have to write something down for another’s eyes, you notice gaps in your own logic. When you are in front of a neighborhood mediator talking about the barking dog, you are particularly conscious of that shrill tone your voice can take on…
If an agency were to decide that the public, to provide wise input, must understand the difference between epistemic and stochastic uncertainty, they might find, as they prepare for the meeting or the website launch, that they themselves don’t really understand or agree about stochastic effects. They might be forced to talk internally about assumptions they had glided past for years. And that preparation might enhance the quality of their decision-making long before the agency open its doors or posts the website. I think in practice this is an extremely important benefit of ambitious public participation. But I want to put the wisdom effect aside for a little while because I don’t think it is what people usually mean when they say public participation improves the quality of agency decisions.
So now, focusing on the un- or weakly-aligned public: Do they provide anything towards wisdom that the gladiators cannot do? Do they only add value by being like the inlaws that make you clean your house?
What do facilitators contribute to un- or weakly-aligned citizens so that the citizens may more effectively promote agency wisdom?
Ok. That’s the question. Now I am ready for the wisdom post.
Next up.
Really.
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Related posts in this Series:
- Purpose of Public Participation (Intro to the Series)
- Agency purposes
- Examples of what we think the public‘s purposes are when they show up to a meeting or invest time in a website
- “Legitimacy“
- Wisdom through whom?
- Wise decisions
- Wisdom as an Emergent Property
- Building Community
- Wrap Up
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