Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Public participation is largely viewed as a positive feature in democratic societies because it provides an avenue for the public to engage in their own governance. As such, it has been institutionalized in a variety of policy decision-making venues in the United States from legislative hearings on proposed policy to public hearings on rule-making and regulatory processes. However, the literature on public participation in the United States broadly recognizes that there are disparities in the degree of public engagement and adequate representation of the public in these conventional participation processes. These disparities leave the public with little real influence over policy decisions and are believed to contribute to public distrust of government. This raises questions about how the participation and preferences of public actors and policy elite actors differ in policy debates involving conventional public participation and whether there is conflict between public and policy elite actors.

Environmental policy decision-making processes that incorporate conventional public participation often involve complex policy debates. These policy debates have varying levels of conflict intensity between policy actors. The Policy Conflict Framework (PCF) theorizes that variation in conflict intensity stems from the relative presence or absence of cognitive policy conflict characteristics among actors. Cognitive characteristics of policy conflict include divergence of policy positions, the extent to which actors perceive threats from opponents' policy positions, and unwillingness to compromise. Policy actors who engage in environmental policy debates may include governmental agencies, policymakers, experts, non-governmental organizations, industry firms, tribal governments, and members of the public. The content of these debates in processes with conventional public participation is reflected in public records from government venues and in some instances are also covered by news media.

This paper employs a case study on the Alaska Stand Alone Pipeline (ASAP) to address three research questions using the PCF and theoretical insights from public participation and discursive democracy literatures. First, what cognitive characteristics of policy conflict are exhibited by public and policy elite actors participating in each policy setting related to development and siting of ASAP? Second, how does the relationship of these cognitive characteristics between public and policy elite actors vary across policy settings? Third, does the news media coverage of this policy debate accurately reflect the participation of public and policy elite actors?

The policy debate surrounding development and siting of ASAP has manifested in two venues: the Alaska State Legislature, through legislative action to initiate pipeline development and clarify the purpose of the pipeline, and the Environmental Impact Statement process under NEPA as part of the federal permitting process. The debate in both venues over the past ten years has been covered to some degree by news media. This paper addresses the research questions using Discourse Network Analysis of text-based data spanning ten years from legislative hearing transcripts, public scoping meeting transcripts, written public comments, and newspaper media related to development and siting of ASAP.