Procedural and Substantive Fairness in Risk Decisions: Comparative Risk Assessment Procedures¹

Abstract

The issue of fairness often is central within environmental policy debates. The recent proliferation of state and local comparative risk projects for informing the selection of environmental policy priorities offers an appropriate setting to explore the issue of procedural fairness in risk‐based decisionmaking. This paper describes and evaluates the process by which one of the initial state comparative risk projects, Washington's “Environment 2010,” attempted to include a broader range of participants in identifying, assessing, and generating preferred management strategies for a wide range of environmental hazards. The Washington case study suggests that comparative risk projects can be fairer procedurally, but that significant barriers remain. Noting that greater procedural fairness does not necessarily produce greater substantive fairness, the paper concludes that more attention needs to be directed at the process by which comparative risk projects translate their consensus upon risk priorities into subsequent actions.

Comparative Risk Assessment: Where Does the Public Fit In?

“…Whether and how the public should be engaged in making these sorts of ethical judgments depends on fundamental philosophical commitments; for example, on the importance attached to either substantive or procedural considerations (Paterson and Andrews 1995). In the case of substantive justice, the concern lies with outcomes-namely, ensuring that they are just or that they maximize social welfare (in the present context, risk reduction is among the most important outcomes sought).…”

Déliberation et action publique

“…The conditions of what I call democratic siting justice are rarely examined on their own terms in the siting literature (but see Paterson and Andrews 1995). Democratic siting justice looks beyond the token appearances that questions of democracy and equity have made in debates on how best to resolve the contentious politics of hazardous siting.…”

Credibility and Relevance in Environmental Policy: Measuring Strategies and Performance among Science Assessment Organizations

“…interactions between scientists and policy makers (Farrell and Keating 2006;Selin 2006;VanDeveer 2006), stakeholder involvement in the assessment process (Cash 2000; Kwiatkowski and Ooi 2003;Martello and Iles 2006;Miller 2006;Van der Sluijs 2002), and initial buy-in from end users (Lund 2006). Other studies, however, highlight similar strategies in cases where success has been more elusive (Beck, Asenova, and Dickson 2005;Paterson and Andrews 1995). Such conflicting results make generalizations regarding how to conduct science assessments hard to come by.…”