Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results – Albert Einstein

This week we read “Reframing Public Participation: Strategies for the 21st Century” by J. Innes and D. Booher. As you can guess from the title of this post the article by Innes and Booher discusses the current system of public participation, or lack thereof, in environmental conflict resolution (ECR). Many of the public participation procedures in government are legally required, but they just don’t work. Examples of public comment periods where less powerful groups are given little attention while those with power are given long responses on the spot are discussed in the article. This process isn’t working and doing it over and over again will not yield different results. However, a bigger dilemma appears: “do we consider citizens to be customers or owners of government?” (Innes and Booher).


Citizen participation and inclusion in defining the problem, analyzing the alternatives, and decision making is vital to show that citizens do in fact “own” the government and are not merely customers to be appeased. This inclusion can take time and slows the process, but just as the founders of our nation devised a way to share power between three branches of government the process of inclusion shares the power and is not intended to be a speedy process. Additionally, the five purposes of public participation are a good framework to begin our examination of the Money Point Corridor Revitalization project along the Elizabeth River in Virginia. The five purposes are: to find out public preferences, improve decisions by incorporating local knowledge, advance fairness and justice, get legitimacy for the decisions made, and lastly because the law requires public participation.

The Money Point Revitalization project provides an excellent example where the stakeholders, including private citizens, can be engaged to make a real lasting improvement to the environment. While the documents we read “Rediscover the Treasure: Money Point Revitalization” and “Money Point Corridor Revitalization Assessment” by UVA’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation and our professor Frank Dukes show an excellent example of the stars can aligning to provide great public, corporate, and government involvement to improve the environment and a surrounding community I hope to learn more from our conversation on Monday night. How was the process started? What made the stakeholders work so well together and what is the state of Money Point at present day?