Performance Measures for Evaluating Public Participation Activities in the Office of Environmental Management (DOE)
Public participation in Office of Environmental Management (EM) activities throughout the DOE complex is a critical component of the overall success of remediation and waste management efforts. The challenges facing EM and its stakeholders over the next decade or more are daunting (Nuclear Waste News 1996). Achieving a mission composed of such challenges will require innovation, dedication, and a significant degree of good will among all stakeholders. EM's efforts to date, including obtaining and using inputs offered by EM stakeholders, have been notable. Public participation specialists have accepted and met challenges and have consistently tried to improve their performance. They have reported their experiences both formally and informally (e.g., at professional conferences and EM Public Participation Network Workshops, other internal meetings of DOE and contractor public participation specialists, and one-on-one consultations) in order to advance the state of their practice. Our research, and our field research in particular (including our interactions with many representatives of numerous stakeholder groups at nine DOE sites with diverse EM problems), have shown that it, is possible to develop coherent results even in a problem domain as complex as that of EM. We conclude that performance-based evaluations of public participation appear possible, and we have recommended an approach, based on combined and integrated multi-stakeholder views on the attributes of successful public participation and associated performance indicators, that seems workable and should be acceptable to diverse stakeholders. Of course, as an untested recommendation, our approach needs the validation that can only be achieved by application (perhaps at a few DOE sites with ongoing EM activities). Such an application would serve to refine the proposed approach in terms of its clarity, its workability, and its potential for full-scale use by EM and, potentially, other government agencies and private sector concerns.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- OFFICE OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, DOE (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-96OR22464
- OSTI ID:
- 777617
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL-6905; TRN: AH200118%%9
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 15 Feb 2001
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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