scholarly journals “All this Regulatory Uncertainty in the Air”: The Indispensability of Public Hearings in Guarding and Guiding Public Deliberation

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Carroll ◽  
Pete Bsumek
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Environmental Communication ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
Field Analysis ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Regulatory Uncertainty ◽  
Public Hearings ◽  
Public Decision ◽  
Public Decision Making

The field of Environmental Communication has often critiqued the shortcomings of public hearings, noting their limitations in bringing about effective and equitable public decision making. While this work has been significant, it has tended to limit the deliberative field to public hearings themselves, sometimes going so far as to assume that public hearings are the only spaces in which significant deliberations occur. Using a field analysis of the “No Coal Plant” campaign in Surry County, Virginia (2008–2013), the authors illuminate some limitations of existing literature. Their analysis suggests that while public hearings can be extremely limiting, even “failed” public hearings can play a critical role in constituting, organizing, and pacing formal and informal deliberative spaces, which are necessary for communities as they manage the stresses and strains of the decision-making process.

scholarly journals Testing the open government recipe: Are vision and voice good governance ingredients?

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Ingrams ◽  
Wesley Kaufmann ◽  
Daan Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Interaction Effect ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Open Government ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Two Component ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Public Decision ◽  
Public Decision Making

Existing research shows that open government can result in better governance outcomes. However, there remains a gap in our understanding of how open government’s two component dimensions of transparency and participation – “vision” and “voice” – affect governance outcomes, and how they relate to each other within public decision-making. We use a survey experiment to test the impact of transparency and participation on a range of governance outcomes (satisfaction, perception of fairness, and trust) in a municipal decision-making process. The findings show that both transparency and participation positively affect these governance outcomes. However, we do not find support for an interaction effect of transparency and participation. Implications for research and practitioners are discussed.

Collective Reason or Individual Liberty

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-67
Author(s):  
Assaf Sharon
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Normative Framework ◽  
The People ◽  
Collective Deliberation ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Public Decision ◽  
Public Decision Making

Can a government of the people and by the people also be a government for the people? In this chapter, Assaf Sharon questions the deliberative democratic attempt to bring democracy and liberalism into a unified normative framework. On the standard view, democracy and liberalism are distinct ideas that give rise to competing normative demands. Democracy is the institutional realization of sovereignty by the people. Liberalism is committed to the protection of individual liberties. Deliberative democrats claim that liberal commitments are entailed by their democratic ideal; to deny an individual’s liberties would be to exclude her from public decision-making. Sharon raises concerns by pointing out that public deliberation requires a widely shared democratic ethos, the creation and maintenance of which might require suppressing intolerant, non-egalitarian, and anti-democratic sensibilities. Given that such suppression stands to violate individual liberties, Sharon concludes that government by collective deliberation might be incompatible with a robust commitment to individual liberties.

Analysis of farms characteristics related to innovation needs: a proposal for supporting the public decision-making process

2021 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
pp. 104892
Author(s):  
Andrea Arzeni ◽  
Elisa Ascione ◽  
Patrizia Borsotto ◽  
Valentina Carta ◽  
Tatiana Castellotti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Decision ◽  
Public Decision Making

scholarly journals Asymmetric decentralization: distortions and opportunities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Fiorillo ◽  
Michele G. Giuranno ◽  
Agnese Sacchi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Lower Cost ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
The Public ◽  
Optimal Degree ◽  
Public Decision ◽  
Public Decision Making

AbstractThis paper studies the interplay between central and local governments in defining the optimal degree of decentralization in terms of public goods supply. The choice between full centralization and asymmetric decentralization implies a trade-off between the possibility to provide public goods at a lower cost, wherever this is possible by decentralizing, and the possibility to fully internalize spillovers by full centralization. We find that asymmetric decentralization introduces distortions into the public decision-making process. We also demonstrate that the power to interfere in the central government’s ruling mechanisms should be reduced for the jurisdictions that have decentralized, in order to make their decentralization choice convenient even for the citizens in the less efficient jurisdictions. Finally, we find the conditions under which asymmetric decentralization can be simultaneously advantageous for both rich and poor regions through the design of appropriate equalization transfers.

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