Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 47, Issue 4, April 2009, Pages 522-528
Safety Science

Can public participation help managing risks from natural hazards?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2008.07.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Most of the mitigation measures against natural hazards can not be perfectly allocated via the common market mechanism, given their principle character of being a public good. Thus, different instruments need to be applied to retrieve their values. Economic valuation tools are one alternative to estimate preferences of individuals towards these goods. These methods are often difficult to operationalise and are not a feasible task for every single project. An alternative is offered by direct preference representation through involving affected interest groups actively in decisions. A critical question is whether the decision on protection measures can be left to public participation or should remain in the experts’ decision responsibility. It can be observed that the latter mode shows inefficiencies. In this paper, it is argued that participation could be one way to bring about the desired goal of increasing efficiency. The present work offers a discussion of the relevant political economic concepts in order to introduce the idea that participation can increase efficiency through achieving the Pareto criterion claimed in the realm of constitutional economics. Furthermore it will be shown that decision aiding tools, namely multi-criteria analysis, can integrate participation into actual decision making processes in a structured way.

Introduction

The management of natural hazards poses numerous challenges to decision makers in developing as well as developed countries. Naturally, state budgets are restricted, thus full protection cannot be achieved by any means. Avoiding catastrophes by settling in non dangerous areas implies in most cases considerable opportunity costs: in less developed areas people are dependent on settling close to e.g. water catchment areas since they cannot afford other infrastructure arrangements. In more developed countries, potential resettling areas become more and more scarce. Relocation of housing and respective infrastructure, at least within the region, to less endangered areas is thus no option and in many cases, inhabitants would equally be reluctant to leave their familiar environment. The questions that arise in the latter case are: what protection level do we want to achieve? What remaining risk do we accept? How do we allocate our budgets? Above all, the question is: who is to decide on these issues?

Public sector decision making in democratic societies is very often in dispute. Inefficiencies do not result only from spending budgets lavishly and unnecessarily expanding bureaucratic structures, but also from people’s preferences being misaligned with their governments. Since privatisation can only be a solution for some state affairs, there is a strong need for the research of models and tools that can decrease these inefficiencies in public good provision. The theory of public choice centres its analysis, in contrast to traditional output-oriented concepts in economics, on the process of decision making (Mueller, 2003, Buchanan, 1987a, Brennan and Buchanan, 1985). The state is seen as a cooperative organisation between politicians and the governed people, whereby the latter have to decide on the way decisions should be taken in order to achieve effective outcomes. Public good decisions can be taken along different lines of decision making, e.g. by the market, by experts, by state representatives or the public itself, so for each decision context the most effective mechanism must be chosen.

Following this line of analysis, the present paper first reviews the applicability of the market and the state (through its representative bodies) as decision mechanisms for the installation of protective measures against natural catastrophes. The weaknesses of these two mechanisms that can be drawn from the analysis lead us to the hypothesis that direct representation of public preferences in the decision processes for protective measures could serve as an improvement in efficiency and effectiveness in their provision. Hence, the potential of direct preference representation in the form of public participation will be analysed. A decision aiding tool, namely Multi Criteria Analysis will be proposed as an integrative model for structuring direct preference representation in a democratically organised decision making framework.

Section snippets

How do we decide on protective measures against natural hazards?

On the one hand, decision rules need to enhance the outcome efficiency of allocation decisions for state budgets, especially for non-market goods for which prices are not readily available. Furthermore, decision structures are needed that best reflect people’s preferences within reason of decision making costs, which, among others, means finding the most adequate degree of centralisation and thus the number of federal levels in a democracy and/or decision rules that would ideally fit the fiscal

Theoretical foundations of participation

Public participation in many industrialised countries has seen a steady increase over the last decades. Especially for environmental issues, advantages have been recognised in many areas of public decision making in Europe. Public participation is mentioned in several high profile research reports and consequently national laws as well EU core directives (e.g. Dodgson et al., 2000, European Commission, 1998). Participation in this context is more than a mere voting procedure, e.g. in public

Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA): a synthesis of outcome and process oriented approaches

Economics can provide decision makers with results and advice in the form of decision support tools, such as Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). Extensively applied (i.e. measuring all effects for society), this outcome-oriented tool can indeed offer strong arguments for the prioritisation of allocation decisions. In practice, it often dispenses if valuation processes are found to be too time and money consuming, which makes the instrument less valuable since it can be methodologically flawed (see for

Discussion

As outlined in this paper, participation and respective structuring instruments such as MCA could serve as a decision mechanism, especially in situations, such as safety issues in the environment in general and natural hazard risks in particular, where uncertainty in decisions is coupled with a high degree of conflict among the affected interest groups. It can serve not only for conflict resolution, but also as an instrument complementing other decision mechanisms in terms of a win–win

Conclusions

Public participation in various government decisions, especially concerning the environment or future planning is nothing new as such. Nonetheless, analysing its suitability for certain decision contexts along the process analytic approach from political economics could increase its appropriate use and efficiency. We have deduced that, for certain public good issues, participation seems suitable. Among these are highly conflicting situations with a significant degree of uncertainty, where

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referee for valuable comments. Financial support by the Hypo Bank Tirol, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre SCK•CEN, Mol, is gratefully acknowledged.

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