Description

Based on a comprehensive review on the current research on public participation in environmental policy-making, this paper proposes an important extension to the evaluation model of Germain, Floyd, and Stehman by inclusion of the social learning dimension. The revised framework, this paper shows, is more comprehensive to evaluate public participation in environmental policy-making. The paper applied the proposed evaluative framework in a case study of roundtable discussions in the Department of Environment Protection of Pennsylvania with the conclusion that policy-makers could be informed about the method of evaluating this public participation technique based on the revised framework.

Keywords: public participation, roundtable discussions, evaluation

Paper