Administering Public Participation

Abstract

Participation and administration have long had an uneasy coexistence. On one hand, public participation in decisions that affect citizens is consistent with citizenship and democracy; on the other hand, much of what government does is complex and requires some level of technical understanding to make decisions. In this article, we report on public administrators’ perceptions of public participation and the ways that they understand the participation process. We find that public participation is managed by public administrators; they determine the extent of participation, shape the ways that the participation takes place, and decide whether or not participation is valuable for their work. In some cases, the process is rather democratic, whereas in others, it is not. We find that it is up to administrators to shape the spaces for participation and select the participants in a manner consistent with their understanding of the task to be accomplished. We explore this process in the context of Environmental Impact Analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Keywords

public participation administrative discretion environmental management

Introduction

The notion of self-government connotes participation. Working out the extent and substance of participation within self-governing institutions has long been a matter of contention for democratic theory, and it is no less important for matters of administrative theory and the legitimacy of the bureaucratic state (Kelly, 2004; Vigoda, 2002; Waldo, 1952; Wilson, 1975). Balancing effective government action with sufficient cause and claim for such actions is at the heart of the concern over legitimacy. During the 1970s, activists heralded democratic participation to improve outcomes and to strengthen the legitimacy claims of government as administration managed increasing responsibilities and expectations, and as a means through which to ensure that citizens had access to administrative decision makers to share their expectations and concerns (Bingham, Nabatchi, & O’Leary, 2005; Frederickson, 1971; McSwite, 1997). The reality is that participation had to occur within the existing confines of government action—action that is typically framed with some instrumental end in mind (Moynihan, 2002)—namely, within administration (Cupps, 1977). Although many advocates of participation saw the operations of administration as a space to be opened for participatory work, actually doing participatory work required the use of administration.

Consequently, administration finds itself in the paradoxical position of having to open its own work to participatory input to gain legitimacy but doing so within the confines of the increasing responsibilities and accountability expectations of the administrative processes (Arnaboldi, Lapsley, & Steccolini, 2015; Connelly, Zhang, & Faerman, 2014). The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, one of the first pieces of legislation that promoted participation in broad (and ambiguous) terms, exemplifies this complicated operation. Participation under NEPA was intended, at least in part, to empower citizens in environmental policy (Hanks & Hanks, 1969), but it has essentially become legalized and formalized in such a way that it becomes another facet of administrative decision-making rather than a catalyst of genuine dialogue between citizens and their government (Eckerd, 2014; O’Faircheallaigh, 2010; Shepherd & Bowler, 1997). In many respects, participation has become an administrative issue rather than an issue of democracy (Durant & Ali, 2013), but public participation literature is largely silent on how administrators actually manage public participation.

In this article, we aim to fill this gap in our knowledge by asking how public administrators understand public participation and the ways that they manage the participation process. Given the long-standing tension between administration and democracy (Blau, 1956; Meier, 1997; Urwick, 1936), we consider two distinct, but not mutually exclusive processes: the extent to which public participation opens up and changes administration and the extent to which administration formalizes and systematizes public participation. We do this in the context of NEPA.¹ The purpose of this research is to build our understanding of how administrators view public participation by doing the simple act of asking administrators to talk about participation in a specific sense. In the sections that follow, we describe the tension between administration and participation, and elaborate on participatory and instrumentalist perspectives on public participation. We describe our interviews with public managers to understand how they view public participation and explain our interpretations of their perspectives. Finally, we conclude with the observation that if the intent of public participation is to open up administrative decision-making, then we may need to reconsider not just process of public engagement but also the existing institutional processes that formalize it.

Administration and Public Participation

The tension between administration and democracy is reflected in research on participation in administrative decision-making. Bureaucratic organizations are seen as sealed off from the people, and, in line with calls to democratize administrative processes, research has often focused on identifying processes that can result in meaningful democratic participation (Bryson, Quick, Slotterback, & Crosby, 2013; King, Feltey, & Susel, 1998; Nabatchi, 2012). However, others have questioned the efficacy of the efforts to promote participation given the needs to achieve administrative goals (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004; Yang & Callahan, 2005; Yang & Pandey, 2011). Broadly, the utility of participation, both for supporting and improving administrative decision-making and for fostering citizen access, has been critiqued because of the often formulaic nature of participation processes and the apparent lack of influence on the decisions that are made (Fung, 2006). The problem is frequently framed as a matter of process—common approaches to and practices of public participation are not substantively participatory, and to be so, the process must be made to be more genuine, deliberative, and inclusive (Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012), that is, administration must adjust to democratic norms to improve participation as a practice (Bingham & O’Leary, 2014; Deleon & Deleon, 2002).

But what if the problem is not the processes of participation, but rather the processes of administration, specifically the ways that administrators manage public participation? This is not simply a question to rehash the debates around bureaucratic politics, specifically the idea that administration functions as a political or policy process (Appleby, 1949), or that administration is itself an enterprise whose lifeblood is power rather than simply a neutral activity of government (Long, 1949). Indeed, it is part of the premise of this investigation that these are accepted facets of administration, apparent problems to which the participatory turn itself was considered a solution. The idea that a democratic remedy be sought to realize both the promises of the administrative state without compromising the political values of democracy is certainly a theme of such scholars as Dwight Waldo, who sought to develop a less authoritarian form of bureaucracy and administration that did not dissolve into social chaos (Waldo, 1981).

This turn to participation was a theoretical response to the observations of bureaucracy as itself one of the spaces of political work in government. The idea of introducing democratic procedure into the administrative space was and remains a widely considered solution to the problems of a perceived unrepresentative bureaucracy. Today, much of the attention is upon the procedural attempts to achieve this. With more than half a century of practice, it is now worth considering the extent to which the participatory turn has democratized administration and the extent to which participation has been subsumed into administration. To consider this, an important first step is to consider the work of the public administrators themselves.

Our aim in this research is to suggest that, rather than just considering the ways that administration can be made more participatory, perhaps we should consider the ways that participation becomes administered. With this in mind, there appears to be a conceptual inconsistency. Participation is often intended to be democratic—or focused on the process of engagement—whereas administration is intended to be instrumental—or focused on the goals to be achieved. Democratic participation has been promoted as a way to institutionalize practices that fundamentally democratize administration. However, perhaps more attention should be granted to how administrative practices institutionalize participatory efforts so that they fit squarely in line with instrumental administrative norms. Simply put, participation in the context of administration could result in making administration participatory but it can also result in making participation administrative.

Laws such as NEPA require that administrators facilitate more participation, but these dictates are often vague on the details about how to achieve participation. Modes of participation are often formalized around the instrumental goals of the organization, within the confines of the legal requirements, and determined through the perceptions and actions of the administrator. It is, therefore, important to understand participation through the lens of the administrator. To this point, we do not really know how administrators view and manage participation, despite the acknowledged tensions between administration and democracy that date to the earliest discussions of public administration. Wilson, for example, insists that public opinion should reign in the context of policy formulation, but that it can also be a “clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling of delicate machinery.” Democracy is an important administrative value, but it is just one of several values. Thus, Wilson declares, it is the task of “administrative study [to] find the best means for giving public criticism” control over the matters of formative policy “and for shutting it out from all other interference” (Wilson, 1887, p. 215). The purpose of this article is not to assess the distinction drawn by Wilson between what he calls public opinion and administration but to explore it. We do this, first, by considering participation through theories of democracy. Second, we ask public administrators to describe how they employ participation in administrative practices. Thus, we intend to better grasp the challenges, identified from the start, of reconciling administration and participation.

Participatory Perspectives in Administration

The first Minnowbrook Conference in 1968 challenged the central basis of early administration theory by questioning the field’s focus on instrumental values such as efficiency (Durant & Ali, 2013). Parcel to this critique was an expression of the value of participation and democracy in administration, but the entrenchment of instrumentalism extended to the question of whether participation was sufficient. Twenty years later, Frederickson (1989) noted that “[e]ffective public administration has come to be defined in the context of an active and participatory citizenry” (p. 97), but it remained unclear whether participation was a value in itself, a mode to more effective public administration, or some combination of both.

Nearly 30 years later, this issue still resonates. Some advocate for participation as an end in itself (Bryson, Crosby, & Bloomberg, 2014). Participation adds value to administration, or at least to a democratic society, regardless of its specific implications for administrative goal attainment (Nabatchi, 2010). Participants may find participation to be of more importance than the actual decision (Kochskamper, Challies, Newig, & Jager, 2016). Much of the literature in public administration, though, is rooted in what Moynihan (2003) refers to as an instrumentalist perspective—that participation is good to the extent that it improves decision-making (Moynihan, 2003). Thomas (2010) represents much of the literature in explaining that whether the public should be involved depends upon how the involvement of the public furthers the ex ante goals of the agency. Thomas limits the “desirability of public involvement” to two instrumental factors. The first is whether the involvement will yield information that will improve the program or the planning involved in a program—that is, improve the chances of goal attainment. The second factor concerns the extent to which successful implementation requires public acceptance, in which case, public involvement is indeed desirable—that is, provide legitimacy for the decision (Thomas, 2010).

Public participation can facilitate these instrumental purposes (Fung, 2015). Participation can also foster legitimacy for decisions, improving both the likelihood of citizen support and program effectiveness (Beierle, 1999). Participation is sometimes understood as coproduction, as agencies, citizens, and third parties work together to produce public goods and services (Innes & Booher, 2004). Citizen engagement can improve social justice outcomes, providing groups that may not otherwise have access with a way to forge relationships with decision makers (Polat, 2011). It can engender trust between citizens and administrators, and facilitate faith in governing institutions by citizens that are both committed to and active in those institutions (Fung, 2015).

However, there are many potential hindrances to these positive effects of participation. In many cases, agencies minimize participation to what is legally required. The participation structures that are most commonly used, such as written comment–response periods or public meetings, adhere to the letter of the law regarding public inclusion, but discourage genuine discourse and often foment antagonism (Halvorsen, 2003). In addition, participation is not evenly distributed; participants tend not to be representative of the citizens who are affected by decisions, what Fung (2003) calls participation bias. Those who participate are more likely to be wealthy, older, and more educated (McComas, 2001), or to be beneficiaries of the status quo (J. W. Yackee & Yackee, 2006). When citizens do participate, they can feel frustrated at the effort, perceiving that administrators simply follow a formal process as required by law, but do not listen to them (Innes & Booher, 2004). This has the potential effect of reducing the likelihood of future participation (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004)—a negative outcome from a participatory perspective.

Realist and Participatory Perspectives of Administration

The discussions about participation in administration correspond with the ideas about participation in democratic theory. At the risk of oversimplification, we consider the debate to be between those who take a realist perspective and those who approach democracy through a participatory perspective. As we discuss below, we do not see these perspectives as mutually exclusive, but participants in the scholarly debate often take one side or the other.

A participatory perspective favors the broad process of developing citizenship over the outcomes of particular governance decisions. This is not to say that the particulars of any specific governance decision are not important, but rather that administrative practices should prioritize engagement, coproduction, and a definition of effectiveness rooted in citizenship to improve democratic governance overall. As Pateman (2012) explained in her American Political Science Association Presidential Address, deliberation is a necessary but insufficient condition for democracy. The effort to democratize democracy is how Pateman frames participation, which is substantively about “provid[ing] opportunities for individuals to participate in decision-making in their everyday lives as well as in the wider political system” (Pateman, 2012, p. 10). Fung (2006) similarly notes that beyond questions of the instrumental objectives of a decision, that democratic values of legitimacy and justice require some level of public involvement in administrative decision-making. Citizens ought to be viewed as partners in the coproduction of public values (Bryson et al., 2014), irrespective of their function as resources for legitimacy or goal attainment. According to this line of thinking, administration (and governance more broadly) will be more effective to the extent that it is reoriented around participation and coproduction (Bovaird, 2007).

Yet, there are justifiable reasons for early public administration study being premised on instrumental ends and technical expertise—much of what public agencies do is not particularly salient to public involvement and is often technically complex (Ringquist, Worsham, & Eisner, 2003). For many administrative tasks, there is no reason to expect the general public to have an informed understanding of what is to be done, and even if there are opportunities for participation, the decision may not be amenable to public preferences. The realist view of democracy maintains that most decisions relevant to modern governing require expert responsibility, and so, a democratic state must determine the matters that are appropriate for public participation rather than encourage it in all cases. This position is stated clearly by Schattschneider (1975):

The beginning of wisdom in democratic theory is to distinguish between the things the people can do and the things the people cannot do . . . At this point, the common definition of democracy has invited us to make fools of ourselves. What 180 million can do spontaneously, on their own initiative, is not much more than a locomotive can do without rails. (p. 136)

Schattschneider echoes Wilson’s idea that it is through administrative study that public opinion is given its proper role in governing (Wilson, 1887, see above). This argument also echoes Moynihan’s (2003) description of the instrumental perspective as “support[ing] participation on the basis of (and only to the extent that it produces) net instrumental value to public managers, rather than the proposition of increased involvement based on democratic rights and norms” (Moynihan, 2003, p. 175). Instrumental value is generally understood through an assessment of the costs of participation and the expected usefulness of any information received in the process.

The tension is between participation as a political good in itself and as good to the extent that it is useful. For public administration, this tension is at the heart of a cultural adherence to rationality in which expertise and doing things the right way are the goals. McSwite (1997) argues that in the United States, this adherence extends to the founding, claiming that while the Articles of Confederation were rooted in a democratic and cooperative impulse, the Federal Constitution established administration on a foundation of the norms of commercial enterprise, reason, and rationality. Stivers (1993) describes how during the Progressive Era, the nascent institution of public administration was required to be “tough-minded, rational, effective, and businesslike” (p. 117). Continuing to the present, ideas of businesslike rationality form the basis of new public management (NPM) and its focus on managerial efficiency (Terry, 1998), performance measurement (Bouckaert & Peters, 2002), market incentives (Gransler, 2011), privatization (Savas, 1982), and deregulation (Adelman & Augustine, 1990). Nothing about this efficiency-of-the-task orientation speaks to democracy (Perry, 2007), and in fact, the time delays and uncertainty that arise in democratic efforts run counter to the NPM aims of efficient government operation (Box, Marshall, Reed, & Reed, 2001; Hood, 1991).

In other words, while public administrators may feel a pull toward democracy and the promotion of citizenship, the culture of public administration prioritizes the comparatively narrow mission rather than broader citizenship concerns (Goodsell, 2011). In Table 1, we provide a schematic of how public administrators could think about how participatory and instrumental perspectives might coincide.

Table 1.

Perspectives and Outcomes of Public Participation.

		Participatory perspective
		High	Low
Instrumental perspective	High	Process promotes citizenship and program outcomes	Process favors program outcomes only
Instrumental perspective	Low	Process favors citizenship improvement	Process improves neither citizenship nor program outcomes

As illustrated in the table, it may be that participation improves citizenship, improves program outcomes, or improves neither. These are not hypotheses. These are four potential frames through which public administrators might conceive of public participation, making the reasonable assumption that instrumentality and participatory representation are both administrative values. The interest here is not the empirical matter of whether or not participation actually improves program outcomes or citizenship; those questions have already been investigated by others. The interest is how public administrators view public participation and what these views mean for public participation as a practice. Although we present Table 1 as a matrix, we assume that there are two continua regarding the extent to which administrators view the instrumental and participatory value of participation. They may view participation as instrumentally useful, as democratically meaningful, or as for both or neither purposes.

Given the potentially important role of administrators in participation, it is surprising that this question has received comparatively little attention. One exception is Yang (2005), who surveyed administrators at the state level and found that while administrators were willing to implement citizen engagement processes, they did not necessarily find the process useful. Moreover, administrators did not “trust” citizens, although they also did not distrust them (Yang, 2005). Yang’s findings complement a substantial literature illustrating the lack of, or marginal usefulness of, participation (Eckerd, 2014; Golden, 1998; Jewell & Bero, 2007; Nixon, Howard, & DeWitt, 2002; S. W. Yackee, 2006), but these studies focus on structures of participation and not how administrators make determinations about participation. With these considerations in mind, we decided to ask. To do so, we studied participation within the administrative context of the processes created by NEPA.

The Structure of Participation: NEPA

By virtue of the fact that we are investigating participation in public administration, we have already settled one of Pateman’s central concerns, namely that of structure. The participatory context is already constrained (although not dictated) by the administrative apparatus itself, a point indicated by NEPA. NEPA requires that any time a federal agency begins a project that will have an impact on the natural, social, historical, or economic environment, it must follow a prescribed procedure for making its decision. The text of NEPA and the subsequent implementation of the law tend to be vague on details. The law merely states that “ . . . the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, [should] use all practicable means and measures” to protect the environment. More detail is provided in the guidelines to NEPA from the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). CEQ’s guidelines are open to interpretation with respect to the details of public participation, and each particular agency must develop its own standards, and certainly, administrators must adhere to many other laws and regulations about public engagement such as the Administrative Procedures Act, privacy protections, and regulations governing the specific environmental issue being addressed (Bingham, 2010). Nevertheless, CEQ’s guidelines are clear that the public is to be involved early in the process, and have the opportunity to view project plans and comment on them later in the process (Schectman, 1977), as CEQ notes both in its regulations, “Agencies shall: (a) Make diligent efforts to involve the public in preparing and implementing their NEPA procedures” (40 CFR § 1506.6) and in its Citizens Guide to the NEPA, “[t]he environmental review process under NEPA provides an opportunity for you to be involved in the Federal agency decisionmaking process” (CEQ, 2007, p. 1).²

Like many mandated participation processes, despite rather strict regulations regarding what federal agencies are to do regarding environmental impacts (as described below), the law is unclear about how information is gathered, and even less clear about the extent to which that information is used. That said, while the experts must go through the formal processes of NEPA and other relevant laws, they still retain wide latitude about how to structure and use the participation activity, and how much activity takes place. For example, CEQ’s actual guidelines for participation primarily concern notification of the public. Many statements are qualified and deferential, such as holding public meetings “as appropriate” or mandating an open comment period only once a full draft plan has been developed (see 40 CFR § 1506.6). CEQ leaves much of the participation process to the discretion of each agency, which is then responsible for developing its own protocols. Given the diversity of different projects that fall under NEPA, agencies employ rather flexible protocols, allowing considerable discretion to the project manager (while also noting that decision authority resides with the agency). The Forest Service protocol offers a typical example (bold added for emphasis):

When developing opportunities for public participation, the responsible official shall take into account the discrete and diverse roles, jurisdictions, responsibilities, and skills of interested and affected parties; the accessibility of the process, opportunities, and information; and the cost, time, and available staffing. The responsible official should be proactive and use contemporary tools, such as the Internet, to engage the public, and should share information in an open way with interested parties. Subject to the notification requirements in §219.16, the responsible official has the discretion to determine the scope, methods, forum, and timing of those opportunities. The Forest Service retains decisionmaking authority and responsibility for all decisions throughout the process . . . The responsible official shall engage the public—including Tribes and Alaska Native Corporations, other Federal agencies, State and local governments, individuals, and public and private organizations or entities—early and throughout the planning process as required by this part, using collaborative processes where feasible and appropriate. (36 CFR § 219.4)

In general, when an agency proposes a project that will affect the environment in any way, NEPA requires federal agencies to follow a process that results in one of three outcomes: a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) when there are no expected impacts, an Environmental Assessment (EA) when there may be some minor impacts, or an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) when the impacts are “significant.”³ We focus our assessment mostly on the last possibility, although some FONSI and EA projects came up in our interviews. We focused on EIS projects for a few reasons. Practically speaking, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains a database of EIS projects because it is required to review final EISs. Neither EAs nor FONSIs are reviewed or maintained in one place, so identifying these cases would have been necessarily ad hoc and, as described below, we sought randomization in selecting our initial sample. Furthermore, the public is not consistently engaged in EAs, at least to the extent that they are involved in EISs. Although some agencies do invite public participation at the EA stage, it is not a formal NEPA or CEQ requirement. Finally, because we wanted to avoid banal responses from the administrators with whom we spoke, we began each of our conversations focused on a specific EIS and the specific engagement process. We wanted to have a discussion about the administrators’ actual experiences, and we believed asking about specific cases would be a more effective means for this than asking more general questions.

The EIS process would be recognizable to anyone familiar with policy analysis. Agencies are required to assess the potential impacts, propose a set of alternative project plans (including a no action alternative), and compare those alternatives on the basis of the expected impacts. Figure 1, which is provided in the CEQ’s Citizens Guide to the NEPA (2007), illustrates the full NEPA process.

Figure 1.

The NEPA process.

As seen in Figure 1, the public involvement occurs in at least two different stages of the process. First, the public is to be involved “to the [e]xtent [p]racticable” in the determination of the environmental effects of proposed actions. This “scoping” period takes place relatively early in the EIS development process, following the agency guidelines described above. As also noted above, there were formal requirements for public involvement during a review and comment period after the Draft EIS (DEIS) has been published. This occurs usually during a 30- to 60-day period in which the public can provide comments about the DEIS to which the agency must respond. The scoping phase is intended to provide the agency with information about the potential impacts of the proposed action, working with other agencies, technical experts, and the public to identify any and all impacts that a project may generally have on the social, economic, historical, or natural environment. The review and comment period provides an opportunity for the public to comment on the proposed alternatives under consideration.⁴

The instrumental perspective is designed into the structure of NEPA. The premise of NEPA and the CEQ guidelines are rationalistic and formalized, so it would seem unlikely that we would find a complete absence of an instrumentalist perspective from the people who manage NEPA projects. That said, administrators possess a great deal of influence over the ways of participation, particularly in the scoping portion of the process, including influencing what we call the spaces of participation. To ascertain some understanding of the construction of such spaces, we now turn our attention to the discussions with administrators.

Research Frame

We focus on the work of administrators who are in some way engaged with the demands of participation. Our approach was to go straight to the administrators and open a discussion with them about public participation in the context of their work. We have done this following the qualitative interviewing and analysis approach described by Luton (2015) and Kvale and Brinkmann (2009). Because we wanted to get a range of perspectives, we cast a wide net in identifying potential interviewees and did not restrict ourselves to any particular agency, policy, or geographic area. We randomly selected projects from the EPA database of EISs. The EPA is responsible for reviewing and managing completed EISs, which have been stored electronically since 2012. Therefore, as a first cutoff on our case selection, we opted to consider only EIS projects filed since 2012 both to ensure that we would have access to the project documents and to ensure that the projects were recent enough that agency officials would recall them. This restriction left 14,253 projects that had at least reached the stage where the DEIS had been filed as of March 1, 2016. We then used a random number generator to select 250 of these projects and attempted to find contact information for the project leader. We were able to locate contact information (or at least a general inquiry email address) for 221 of the projects. After contacting these 221 individuals and asking them to participate, we received responses from 64 (29%) people.

We invited participation in two ways. First, we asked respondents to reply to our email. We then encouraged them to participate in semi-structured telephone interviews. We were able to interview 22 people in this way. However, if the respondent preferred, we provided a link to an open-ended survey with the questions posed in our interview guide. We received a total of 42 responses in this manner. Respondents were nearly all project managers who were responsible for either the entire EIS process or the public engagement aspects of the process. Most were federal government employees, 12 of our respondents were state agency representatives, and two were representatives of a private organization contracted by federal agencies to manage the EIS development process.

We asked respondents to comment about the specific projects we found in our random sample to encourage a focus upon the actual public participation practices used in the project (although the respondents did speak at times about general ideas of public participation). Our interview guide/survey questionnaire is short, consisting of only five questions:

Can you please describe the nature and goals of (project)?

What attempts were made to involve the public during the scoping phase of the project? What was the general nature of the participation that occurred during this phase?

What attempts were made to solicit comments after issuances of the DEIS? What was the general nature of the comments that were received?

How was the project altered in response to public input, if at all?

Did you consider public participation to be essential to this project? Why or why not?

Interviews generally lasted between 30 and 60 min. They were conducted over the phone. Survey responses were highly variable, with some providing very basic information and others elaborating in lengthy paragraphs. Projects ranged from urban facility management and transportation to coastal issues and rural natural resource protection. The purpose of the interviews was to ascertain how the administrators attached meaning to public participation in practice. Our goal with the sample was insight and interpretation, not generalizability.⁵ Interviews are a particularly good way to study people’s understandings of the meaning of their lived world and experiences, which is why we preferred interviews over survey responses if possible. However, the survey responses worked as good validation and confirmation for what we heard during interviews. Interview responses tended to be deeper and more insightful than the survey responses (as would be expected) but the themes we describe below were clearly evident across our sample. Given this consistency of stories and the comments from the interviews and responses to our survey questions, and because we aim to make no claims with respect to generalizability, we concluded that the information received about these 64 cases was sufficient for drawing insights (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009).

Our analytical approach was interpretive, following Luton (2015). We assessed our data iteratively and collaboratively. We transcribed all interviews and independently read each interview and survey response. Our analytical approach follows the five steps of identifying meaning units described by Kvale (1996) as quoted in Luton (2015):

1. Reviewing the interview to get a sense of the whole,

2. Identifying meaning units,

3. Clearly stating the themes of each meaning unit,

4. Interrogating the meaning units with regard to the purpose of the study, and

5. Tying the themes together into a descriptive statement. (p. 42)

Coding was not done on specific word content but on identification of meaning units—or interpretations regarding how the respondent understood public participation. After documents were coded, we created a one- or two-page thematic memo summarizing each response, with each researcher creating a memo for each of the responses. Both researchers then read each memo and discussed the common themes, creating a descriptive statement and arriving at an agreed-upon set of interpretations about the frames that public administrators used to understand public participation.

Results and Discussion

We discuss our results below. Rather than describe specific proportional breakdowns, we describe the various themes that emerged from the interviews and survey responses. Although each conversation was distinct, the themes below are those that cut across, in at least some aspects, all of the interviews conducted. These frames are not mutually exclusive and each of the interviews encompassed various combinations of the presence of these themes. We present them in two sections—first, a section on the different frames that administrators used when discussing public participation, and second, a discussion of the nature of the spaces created for participation. In the first section, the frames we identified fit nicely in the matrix we developed in Table 1. In Table 2, we alter Table 1 to reflect what we learned from our analysis, illustrating four frames that public administrators we interviewed used to understand their relationship with the public.

Table 2.

Frames of Participation.

		Participatory perspective
		High	Low
Instrumental perspective	High	Public as partner	Public as informational resource
Instrumental perspective	Low	Public as student	Public as a hurdle

Frames of Participation

In short, we found evidence of three of the four frames in Table 2 that the administrators relied upon to understand public participation, all of which relate to instrumental uses: as an informational resource, as a student, with potential support as a political resource, and as a hurdle to instrumental purposes. These frames are not mutually exclusive, and respondents often relayed aspects of the first two together. It is worth noting the paucity of evidence for the public as a partner, despite this frame being the predominant one for the substantial literature on collaboration and coproduction. This theme did emerge in one of our interviews, but was not evident in any of the other 63 responses. We do not discuss this frame in our results section, but we consider the theme in our discussion to note the conspicuousness of its absence.

The public as informational resource

As would be expected from an instrumentalist perspective, administrators tended to see public participation as offering an opportunity for the agency to acquire more information (Nabatchi, 2012). This theme was the most commonly observed theme, as it was evident in almost every interview and survey. This could be a constructive exercise for an agency, so much so that even when projects did not require an EIS under NEPA, some agency officials reported using the process to learn more. At the same time, they recognized their own responsibility for the decisions to be made. Work was done in advance, typically, but several administrators valued the opportunity to receive information from the public:

So what we tried to share, to the extent possible, with the public: here’s the type of growth that we need to accommodate, here’s our early take on several alternatives, what do you think about them and do you have alternatives of your own or different refinements that you would like us to consider.

Some projects were more open ended than others, but in all cases, boundaries were placed on the role of participation. Even if the public was engaged early, input was still considered under some discrete purpose, and need that was decided by the agency. Participation was framed by that predetermined purpose and need:

What would you like to see? What programs that we’re doing would you like to see modified or changed or eliminated?

[The public participation process] was about everything from what they wanted their new homes to look like to what kind of parks, what kind of stores. There was total community involvement.

It was clear, however, that the goal tended to be information gathering and that decision-making authority remained with administrators. One official of a regulatory agency described how they would, through a snowballing collection of participants, develop an ad hoc advisory council to determine matters of relevance in their decision-making. He emphasized, though, that the decision was ultimately the responsibility of the agency:

I mean, there’s a lot of just little local groups [that we] may not be familiar with, but these other people are. And they tell us, “well have you thought about this group” and if we find, if we feel that it’s appropriate to have them, we’ll invite them. The reason we compile this group is to find out what is relevant and what is not relevant. We’re not looking for this group to make decisions or anything like that, because that’s our responsibility, but we ask—and we tell them up front, we’re getting you guys together so that you can help us determine what’s relevant for this proposal.

The public as a student

Administrators also tended to describe the public in educational terms—viewing public participation as an opportunity to educate the public about a project or to help them better understand a project to build support for it was evident in about three quarters of our responses. This theme was not unique to those agencies with intensely technical missions, although agencies with technical missions did tend to see the public as lacking needed expertise and information. For example, one administrator described the difficulty of designing and implementing policies to mitigate coastal degradation. His language is not dismissive. He almost laments the fact that the public does not have the knowledge to make sense of what he and his staff do:

And, and that’s that public engagement issue that we’ve always had, is a bunch of scientists and engineers trying to explain something to the average public. It sometimes doesn’t come across very well. So, we’re trying to make things a little bit simpler for folks to understand. But, there needs to be long-term kinda public education as well.

Of course, sometimes the public comes to the meetings expecting to learn about a project. Although an EIS is published in advance of a meeting, it can be a long, tedious document. Presentations are thus used to explain the project:

We’ll do a brief presentation of the project to make sure, some of these people that come to the public meeting, again, they haven’t read the EIS. The EIS is generally pretty large. And they don’t take the time to read it and they’re getting the perimeter aspects of the main project, so we make sure the people that are in the audience understand exactly what is being proposed.

Meetings are not always constructive; in fact, they were rarely described that way in our interviews. Administrators often anticipated opposition and would prepare themselves for the opposition in advance:

The other thing I think that’s really beneficial at public meetings is telling people, you may not like what the outcome is. You may not like it, but we’re going to go ahead and approve it . . . you can sit there and say ‘I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want’ all day long, and stomp your feet. That’s all great and fine and dandy but the likelihood of you getting anywhere with that is zero to none.

Some administrators could not see what real value was added from participation. Teaching the public about these matters is time-consuming, and the administrators see the ignorance of the issue as not even inviting much constructive dialogue on the matter. Sometimes, the administrator would be open about the matter and juxtapose a simple problem (selecting the location of a park) with a complex problem that her agency faces:

You know, we’ve made great strides I guess in bringing people on board, and making them part, you know, of the framework development team or community focus groups . . . But, but part of the, I guess, problem is that this is a very complex issue. It’s not like you’re trying to pick, you know, this is where you’re gonna have a road or a park or something like that.

Nevertheless, even in this case, the public provided some perceived value, and “bring[ing] people on board” was presented as a worthwhile endeavor, presumably for the support (or at least lack of time-consuming opposition) they could provide to the project moving forward. This may or may not be as instrumentally useful as receiving information to aid the decision-making process, but was valued as a means to improving project completion.

The public as hurdle

Whereas the first two views are fairly straightforward, this last view was the most difficult to discern and it was also less prevalent than the previous two frames, emerging in about one quarter of our responses. These administrators saw the public as a hindrance, with participation as a formulaic hurdle to be cleared offering little of value. Lending credence to the critiques by Fung (2003) and King et al. (1998), some administrators viewed the required participation as the ceiling for the participation they would enable. We saw this framing, however, as more nuanced than these critiques suggest—we note the negative connotations to terms such as hindrance or hurdle, but frequently, the delays and challenges of public engagement were not described in negative terms by our respondents. In fact, the framing was positive in some cases or at the very least neutral. In these instances, the hurdle was not explained as an impediment or barrier to making good policy decisions, but rather was understood to be a worthwhile challenge to undertake.

Certainly, there were some negative perceptions, although these perceptions were evident in only a handful of cases. Still instrumental in perspective, some administrators implied (or even stated) that the public obstructed the work of the agency rather than adding anything of value. This point was made in different ways, but these administrators expressed frustration that the people who participated tended to be those who opposed change. One administrator summed this up very simply: “But the reality is, people, people are averse to change.” This often came across as frustration because the people who do participate are those, according to a few managers, whose interests are to be obstructive. Generally, they arrive prepared to stop the project:

[Most] people don’t care. They don’t . . . The people that do understand are the people who try to stop projects.

However, this hurdle aspect was often much more nuanced. Some administrators had internalized the challenge into their administrative work, preparing for meetings by strategically discussing what kinds of responses to expect from the public to the proposed projects. Such efforts do not necessarily improve public participation, but clearly reflect an interest in considering public preferences and folding these considerations into the planning effort:

[W]e always try to anticipate that sort of stuff at the beginning of the project. The project team will get together, ok, what do we think, how do we think the public will react to it. What do we think are the issues that are really important to the public that we’re likely to receive comments on.

Sometimes, the meetings are platforms for expression, arguably a key democratic purpose, but often this was still framed in terms of the instrumental ends of the project. One administrator described how the format of participation—a formal presentation in this case—produces very little to help them achieve their objective of “tangible feedback”:

Our objective is to get feedback that we can use. We just really don’t get much. The folks just again give their opinions. We don’t really get any tangible feedback. I think if I’m correct the last few at least that I’ve been involved in when you have formal presentations that comment-form-to-number-of-participants ratio is even lower so you’re going to get even fewer comments that you can actually put into record and address when you have the formal presentation.

In some cases, the use of the meetings was of very little impact. The administrators had, in their description, done the requisite work in preparation and had more than enough information to proceed. But the participation requirement was necessary:

Most of the times, we know from [our analysis] and from our own work, we knew more about what was on the ground than the [public] did.

Occasionally, the delays and challenges posed by public participation were embraced by the administrators. The challenge of engaging the public was viewed positively—almost like putting a puzzle together and figuring out how all the different public preferences would fit together, in ways that clearly indicate a commitment to democratic engagement (Hoppe, 2011):

We got together and asked, how can we make all of this work? To me engaging the public was the most important aspect of this. Sure, I could have done the bare minimum of what’s in the CEQ regulations . . . but I see the benefit of when you really hear people . . . It’s great when you can surprise people and let them know that you’re really hearing and that you care.

The deliberate nature of the process was also viewed positively in several cases. NEPA gave administrators a ready-made structure for engaging the public, and several interviewees clearly used the discretion available under the law to go well beyond the mandated participation and facilitate broad agency goals beyond those specific to the project (Bryson et al., 2013):

There’s reasons to make sure that we’re serving our public, and that our public understands what we do. And is engaged just for our success, our general success as an agency. I don’t think that NEPA drives it, those are just particular rules that we need to be sure we’re following.

It also simply gave the administrators time to make what they perceived to be better decisions. Although a few of the respondents criticized the NEPA process for the time it adds to project approval, this was more commonly viewed as a positive aspect that enabled administrators to avoid rushing into suboptimal decisions. Even though we did not hear as much about litigation and lawsuits as we expected (the issue came up in five cases), these were usually described as worthwhile challenges to overcome rather than nuisances that held up projects:

The process of vetting those alternatives with the public helps, really, in slowing the process down and giving us more time to investigate things further.

We know we’re going to get sued. By whichever group is not going to like the decision. And therefore we do go through the extended comment period and make sure that we are really thorough. And knowing that a lawsuit might come helps us make sure that we do the best analysis that we possibly can.

In short, administrators viewed the public in a variety of different ways. There was a clear instrumentalist focus on the needs of the project and/or the agency, but in viewing the public as a resource, a student, or a hurdle, the public managers seemed to appreciate the potential instrumental contributions that the public could make to the projects. Even in the dozen or so cases where the administrators noted the importance of democratic engagement, they did so with a focus on the return that the agency could receive from having the public participate.

Shaping Participation Spaces

Our discussions with public administrators revealed how these views of public participation influence the spaces for participation. One clear theme is that administrators have significant influence over these spaces. The administrators’ narratives emphasized the instrumental uses of participation, either for information or support of the agency’s mission. Whether or not serving people was an integral part of the mission of the agency influenced how administrators described these spaces. In cases where people are not the focal service recipients, most of the administrators tended to view the public either as a potential resource of political support or as a hindrance:

We’re for fish and wildlife. Wildlife conservation is our mission. Even though we allow public uses, that’s not part of our mission statement. [But], it’s important for us to get public buy-in or public support for our refuges.

In other cases, particularly those agencies that serve people, administrators tended to be more open to receiving public input or even to taking a more collaborative approach:

So I think the two-way conversation is critical if you take this stuff seriously. I’m not sure it can be done the other way although I’m sure that you guys have run into situations where it’s one-way communication. I just don’t think it would work well for us.

A lot of our staff, all of us basically, come from the nonprofit world so we understand these needs. We’ve worked with these needs before.

These ways of viewing public participation are not particularly surprising. What may be surprising is the extent to which these views shaped the spaces for public participation. Although the expectation and rationale for public participation may be to provide the public with the opportunity to shape administrative decisions, our discussions suggest that this is rare. In line with existing literature, decisions were rarely described as having been changed by public participation. In the half-dozen cases where decisions were changed, they were changed only marginally. Instead, administrators shaped the spaces in which the public could participate, and we learned about a wide and diverse range of spaces. All utilized traditional public meetings and comment/response periods as required by CEQ guidelines, but others added workshop formats and advisory committees. Some reported working with community leaders to ensure a wide distribution of public participants, going to meet community residents multiple times, and even ensuring that information could be communicated in languages other than English:

Let’s come up with a plan to make sure that we’re not only reaching these groups, but . . . hearing what their concerns are. Rather than just holding meetings and expecting people to show up, going to where they are . . . We went to community leaders and let them know we want to hear your community’s voice. We want to make sure you’re involved.

However, in all cases, it was clear that participation was conditioned on the preferences of the agency and the administrators who were managing the project. We identified three ways in which administrators shape participation spaces—through the openness of the space, through the choosing of participants, and through a predetermination of the usefulness of the process.

Choosing the spaces

As noted above, the public is to be engaged in two general ways during an NEPA project: during initial scoping and after the DEIS has been issued. Although there is less discretion in shaping the comment and response period post-DEIS, there is considerable discretion about how to do scoping, and even how early in the process to do it. Thus, in some cases, the administrators tried to seal off participation spaces by doing as much analysis as possible up front to limit the scope of discussion:

Our idea was to frontload the process with as much analysis as we could.

Alternatively, others sought out public participation early and often. Some would involve affected stakeholders from the beginning, seeking out public input before even beginning any analysis, and even thinking longer term about the relationship with the community (see Bryson et al., 2013):

[C]oming consistently and building trust, [the public was] much more receptive to the plans and participating in giving feedback that I think will add value to the product. I also think that the trust that had been built and the level of investment in the process will yield some result in terms of the way that they interact with us in the future.

Choosing the participants

Another area in which agencies have considerable discretion concerns who ends up participating. If the public was viewed as likely to hinder the project, publicizing usually did not go far beyond minimal CEQ and agency guidelines, at least with respect to the general public. Specific audiences were often selected for inclusion:

It’s important to understand that that’s not a general open public meeting or workshop. That was very targeted, specifically to engage our own [technical experts].

These selected audiences were sometimes general citizens or interest groups, but more often, initial scoping was focused on technical audiences and, specifically, technical audiences from other government agencies, which arguably circumvents public engagement:

The planning team had representatives from the town, the county, the Park Service . . . the state obviously had a couple of agencies that were interested.

In other cases, participation was sought as widely as possible. In general, the more that the agency perceived public input as being valuable, the more willing administrators were to seek out participants (see Fung, 2006):

[W]e got invited to do a presentation at a lady’s bridge club, which we did, that actually was really useful so we basically said to the public, here’s the formal process, we read this stuff, we react to it, but if you need us to come to you we will.

Choosing the usefulness

It was evident through our discussions that the administrators considered determining the utility of the participation process to be their role. Public input was valued according to the perceptions of the agency and the administrators’ views of the project. Generally, administrators viewed participation and input according to the purposes of aiding them in making the decisions or supporting the decisions that were made. They placed the agencies central to the process:

NEPA is really for the decision maker and not for the public

[T]he protests were not factually correct and didn’t have any basis in reality, so we chose not to follow that process. That’s really up to the agency whether or not they want to entertain that.

Whatever the specific perception of the public the administrator held, it was clear that the managers viewed it as their role to engage the public in the terms most beneficial for their project or agency. They shaped the participatory design, the participants, and the usefulness of public participation (see Fung, 2003, 2006; King et al., 1998)

Administrators as Instrumentalists

Our main conclusion from this research is that the work of administrators predominantly reflects an instrumentalist perspective of democracy even where the participatory perspective is explicitly promoted, as it is in much of the regulation regarding NEPA. They often spoke of the technical complexity of their work and the fact that the public is, at best, underinformed. There is no novelty to this point. In fact, this concern over the technical complexity of government activity has always been an undercurrent of administrative work. Wilson (1887) clearly described a separation of democracy and administration, a sentiment carried on by midcentury theorists of democratic realism that challenged the pluralist hopes of modest participation through organized interests (Heidelberg, 2017). This view of democracy maintains that most decisions of modern governing fall into the realm of expert responsibility, which means that despite aspirations for participation, the mode to achieve it will inherit certain nonparticipatory elements.

An instrumentalist frame is not antiparticipation. Administrators viewed public participation nonnegatively, if not exactly positively. In only a couple of cases did we detect a measure of hostility toward public participation, but we also only had a couple of cases where the administrators were excited about engaging with the public, which likely explains why we had no real evidence of true coproduction or partnership with the public in these cases. Most commonly, it was a neutral aspect of the process, a taken-for-granted notion that the public should be engaged and have the opportunity to influence their decisions. For perhaps a third of the cases, public participation was an integral facet of how they did their jobs even if it did frustrate them. They recognized the value of public participation and democracy, but usually as a public value that informed their work rather than one that overruled their technical expertise. Administrators viewed their roles not as representatives who implement the will of the public, but rather as administrators who balance competing needs to create the best possible outcomes (see Freitag, 2010). In other words, administrators saw it as their job to administer public participation.

Conclusion

To point out that the work of administration is instrumentalist in its orientation—that the work of administration is less about fostering democracy and more about determining the boundaries through which things get done—is not a new finding. The idea that administrators are not solely loyal to democratic participation is not new, either. What our findings do suggest is that if participation is not formalized, it may well not occur, but when participation is formalized, it is shaped to fit within the administrative function. Although the formalization of participation is nominally about fostering norms of democracy, nevertheless, the obligatory laws that create spaces for participation are more likely to enable the discretionary work of an administrator who already has some preconception about what is required. The spirit of the involved citizen thought to be fostered through participation encounters an obstacle in the demands of administrative work. To the extent that the participatory work is useful and constructive for goal attainment, it will be celebrated. But it is important to note that this qualification of success is dictated by the terms of administration, not the terms of a democratic or participatory ethos.

Our findings suggest that the public participation literature, most of which is focused on the process of participation or the roles of the participants, may be missing half the story—and perhaps the more important half. Given the discretion that administrators have over not only how participation is carried out but also who participates and whether and how that participation will affect the decision, we need to understand more about how administrators use their discretion and what the implications are both for the instrumental goals of the program and also the implications for the citizenship of the participants.

Our interviews and survey responses suggest that administrative work has deeply internalized the importance of expertise. According to instrumentalist perspectives, wisdom in democratic theory is thought to be an understanding about what the people can do and what they cannot, as noted above. Our interpretation of interviews and surveys suggests that this is the perspective that administrators take. These findings should be taken with two clear limitations. First, our findings are limited to the participation that took place under NEPA. In settings outside of NEPA, these results could well be different. Second, our analysis was intended to be exploratory rather than generalizable, and although the themes we heard were consistent across our interviews and survey responses, it is possible that the themes we identified are particular to this nonrepresentative group. Nevertheless, the administrators we spoke to, limited though they are in scope, give us some idea about the context of citizen participation and administrative work. Democratic representation is important, but things still need to get done and agencies will still be held accountable for what gets done. Sometimes, people can help with that, but sometimes they hinder.

The administrators’ perceptions of the value of public participation may dictate the type of participation that takes place and the value of that participation. We might expect more technically oriented agencies to be less interested in engaging the public and more socially oriented agencies to be more welcoming. In either case, however, our findings suggest that public participation may be more likely to be shaped by administrative decision-making than administrative decision-making being shaped by public participation. Even when participatory perspectives are held by administrators, they are secondary to an instrumentalist perspective. We must emphasize that we view this as neither good nor bad, but rather the reality of modern administration. If one takes an instrumentalist perspective, then this situation, in line with Wilson’s perspective that experts ought to determine what to delegate to the public and make other decisions themselves, may be perfectly acceptable. If, however, one takes a participatory perspective, then perhaps a serious engagement with participation must invert this reality and invert Wilson’s admonition: Let the people decide the proper scope of what it delegates to experts and shut the experts out from all else.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Adam Eckerd

Roy L. Heidelberg

Notes

Author Biographies

Adam Eckerd is an associate professor with the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Roy L. Heidelberg is an associate professor of Public Administration at Louisiana State University.

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(2011). Further dissecting the black box of citizen participation: When does citizen involvement lead to good outcomes? Public Administration Review, 71, 880-892.