This paper evaluates a new form of public participation in environmental monitoring and regulation advanced through local bucket brigades, which allow community members to sample air emissions near industrial facilities. These brigades represent a new form of community environmental policing, in which residents participate in collecting, analyzing, and deploying environmental information, and more importantly, in an array of public policy dialogues. (continue)

This paper concentrates on the black smallholder farming sector. Also, this paper makes recommendations for reorganisation of extension services, farmer involvement in research, land reform, incentives for soil/water conservation, NGO involvement, community participation, training, coordination. (continue)

Public participation has been increasingly recognized as one of the most important aspects of environmental impact assessment. However, the definition of adequate evaluative criteria for public participation, with a strong theoretical backing, the functionality of empirical best practice and the consideration of the country-specific context, has remained elusive. The evaluative framework developed here is an attempt to fill this gap. (continue)

Comparative risk assessment (CRA) is playing an ever-increasing role in environmental policy priority setting, as manifested in national and numerous sub national comparative risk projects. It is widely accepted that public values, interests, and concerns should play an important role in CRA. However, the philosophical basis for public involvement in CRA has not been adequately explored, nor have comparative risk projects always made explicit their rationales for public involvement. (continue)

Increasingly, environmental agencies are engaged in public participation activities. Unfortunately, the limited evaluation of public participation programs also makes improvement of such programs more difficult. To encourage further thinking about the evaluation of environmental public participation programs, this article discusses some of the basic issues raised by evaluators of social programs (e.g. unemployment and housing, etc.) that have served as methodological proving grounds for evaluation. (continue)

Placing women's knowledge of biodiversity and genetic resource management in an international policy context. In the past few years research institutions and development organizations have 'discovered' the relevance of men farmers' indigenous knowledge of genetic resource management and, after some delay, that of women farmers as well. At the same time, attention has been drawn to the global need to conserve biological diversity. This article argues that interest in women's knowledge and in biodiversity should be seen in the wider context of international economic and agricultural policies. (continue)

This is a case study of electronic public participation - dynamics of process, participants' attitudes about process, quality of communication and results of process. (continue)

This article challenges the current thinking by examining several of the main assumptions on which devolution and populist approaches to biodiversity conservation and forest management are based. The focus is on forest and/or forest-margin dwellers and their livelihood strategies in tropical forests. (continue)

The Public Policy Research Institute at the University of Montana offers a graduate-level program to help students negotiate the governance of natural resources through dialogue and problem solving. The only program of its kind in the U.S., The Natural Resources Conflict Resolution Program teaches students theories underlying collaboration, multiparty negotiation, consensus building, and deliberative dialogue as well as skills to prevent and resolve natural resources conflicts. (continue)

NEJAC was created in 1993 as a part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice. NEJAC helps the OEJ address environmental justice issues and integrate environmental justice into the EPA's policies, programs and activities. It does this by bringing community, industry and state/local government groups together to find solutions to environmental justice problems and by providing the EPA with independent advice and recommendations on matters related to environmental justice. (continue)