THE PARTICIPATION PRINCIPLE

Bypassing public debate

Conflict often arises over resource use and development projects because every individual accords different values to the environmental benefits of clean air and water, unspoilt wilderness areas, ecological balance and biological diversity.

Depoliticising environmental issues

One of the attractions of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is that it turns a highly charged political decision into one that appears to be technical and impersonal, one that can be dealt with by the appropriate profes­sional experts - economists - in a calm and rational manner free from emotion and bias.

Value conflicts that should be resolved politically are concluded in what look like rational, neutral, objective calculations. This may appeal to administrators, but it hinders public debate of the policy issues and lessens the accountability of bureaucratic officials. Numbers carry an unwarranted authority when used to legitimate decisions that are basically political in character. (Barbour 1980: 170) Public debate over the options - a 'reasoned discussion of choices' - is therefore inhibited, and public participation is replaced by a technocratic process (O'Neill 1996: 100).

Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling (2004: 9, 213) argue in their book Priceless that using CBA as a governmental decision-making tool allows a 'small sample of nameless individuals who answer a survey' to dictate public policy, rather than politicians showing leadership and basing policy on rights and principles that they are willing to defend in public debate.

By proceeding as if its assumptions are scientific and by speaking a language all of its own, economic analysis too easily conceals the basic human questions that lie at its heart and excludes the voices of people untrained in the field. Again and again, economic theory gives us opaque and technical reasons to do the obviously wrong thing.

The benefits of public debate

Public debate and discussion is not only an essential part of public par­ticipation but it can also enable people to learn about an issue, reason together, change their positions, modify their demands, negotiate with each other and understand each other's positions. All this is curtailed when debate and discussion are replaced by surveys of individual unin­formed preferences or economic calculations.

Instead of people being able to form their values in a way that allows for give and take, for learning over time, and being able to express their values themselves - whether in a comprehensive, hesitant, impassioned or nuanced way - an anonymous surveyor demands that they convert their values into prices on the spot, often before they have had a chance to even think about an issue or find out more about it. The prices obtained from individuals are then translated by economic experts into a set of numbers that are aggregated with others. Members of the public have no chance to persuade others or be persuaded. They have no opportunity to explore compromises or alternatives that might suit several parties.

The outcomes of using methods such as willingness to pay are not influenced by reasons for people's choices or preferences. Whether their reasons are based on falsehoods, ignorance or prejudice, or are well founded, immoral, irrational or sensible, is not considered relevant. All that matters are the preferences themselves. Public debate, on the other hand, can uncover falsehoods and prejudice, enlighten ignorance and tease out moral and ethical issues. It ensures that people's views are more likely to be well informed and sensible.

Resource economists have found a certain reluctance by the public to co-operate with contingent valuation surveys. This is because

respondents believe that environmental policy - for example, the degree of pollution permitted in national parks - involves ethical, cultural, and aesthetic questions over which society must deliberate on the merits, and that this has nothing to do with pricing the satis­faction of preferences... (Daly and Cobb 1989: 91)

Individual preferences vs social good

Environmental questions have traditionally been determined by a polit­ical process that enables community influence through voting, cam­paigning and protesting. Yet some economists and market enthusiasts argue that the market is more democratic than the political process because individual consumers can express their preferences by choosing how they spend their money. They argue that it is only when a person puts a money value on environmental quality that economists can get a true measure of the strength of feeling and the degree of concern individ­uals have for an environmental asset.

However the market allocation of natural resources is not democratic because not everyone has an equal vote. The power of the consumer is not evenly distributed (the wealthy, businesses and bureaucracies have far greater consumer clout), and consumers do not get to choose from a full range of alternatives.

Economist Peter Self (1990: 9) claims the idea that markets rather than governments are more efficient at giving people what they want is based on the fallacious assumption that there is no such thing as the common good outside of individual wants and preferences. He disagrees with this proposition, claiming that when people vote they often con­sider wider interests than their own self-interest. They see themselves as part of a group - be it an occupational group, an ethnic group, a class, a nation or whatever. Politically, people are not only concerned about their self-interest, they also consider the 'good of society'.

This is why people support ideas such as public education when they do not have children, and environmental protection beyond their own life­times. 'As consumers they seek to maximise their own materialistic wants, whilst as citizens they are concerned with what constitutes a quot;goodquot; society' (Cooper amp; Hart 1992: 22). Clearly, asking people to treat the envi­ronment as if they are consumers of the environment does not clarify their views about whether it should be preserved (Corner House 1999).

Moreover, by reducing environmental debates to calculations of aggregate preferences, discussion of wider social goals is avoided. CBA 'completely obscures the underlying dispute about the nature of 'devel- opment' and 'environment' (Corner House 1999). By confining decisions to a comparison of costs and benefits, not only are broader policy and political issues ignored, but there is an underlying assumption 'that effi­ciency in allocation is the criterion that society deems paramount when making a decision'. However 'other criteria such as equity and political acceptability may be of greater concern to environmental policymakers' and to the community (Cooper amp; Hart 1992: 26).

Beyond price

Oscar Wilde described a cynic as 'one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing'. EF Schumacher (quoted in Pearce 1983: 1-2), who wrote the well-known book Small is Beautiful, said of CBA:

To press non-economic values into the framework of the economic calculus, economists use the method of cost/benefit analysis... In fact, however, it is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price. It can therefore never serve to clarify the situation and lead to an enlightened deci­sion. All it can do is lead to self-deception or the deception of others;. the pretence that everything has a price or, in other words, that money is the highest of all values.

CBA, and the integration of environmental values into national accounts, assume that environmental 'goods' and human-made goods are inter­changeable and that what matters is the aggregate value of both types of goods.

Many argue that attaching a price to something devalues and cheapens it. This is certainly the case for praise, friendship and even sex. For many people, putting a price on nature is as abhorrent as putting a price on family, justice or freedom. It represents the further creep of the market and economics into areas of life that have traditionally been con­sidered above material concerns. Like the packaging and marketing of religion, sex and body organs, it is somehow unsavoury and definitely unwelcome.

The idea that some things are beyond price is a way of saying that they have special value beyond their value as tradeable commodities. If a thing can be priced in the same way as a sack of potatoes, then that special quality is lost (Kelman 1994: 144-5). O'Neill (1996: 99) argues that asking people what they 'would be willing to pay to forego a good to which they are committed' is in fact an 'attempt to corrupt the relation­ships constitutive of a culture. Only someone corrupted by a lifetime in markets' would be able to give a realistic price.

Many environmentalists believe that other living creatures have a value independent of any monetary value that individual humans can accord to them. Contingent valuation and other methods of finding a price for parts of the environment are completely anthropocentric (human-centred) and take no account of the preferences of other living creatures. This, economists believe, is as it should be. For them value is defined in terms of exchange between humans. For many environmen­talists, however, especially deep ecologists, this is unacceptable and arro­gant. It denies other living things any intrinsic value, that is, any value apart from their value to humans.

Morality

Just because the benefits of an action outweigh the costs, it does not mean that the action would necessarily be considered moral by the community.

Child labour or slavery would be considered immoral even if the eco­nomic advantages to the whole society outweighed the costs to some individuals. In fact in most circumstances the fact that someone benefits from wrong compounds the crime rather than justifies it. Killing someone for money is, in the eyes of the community, thought to be worse than killing someone in a fit of passion. Yet CBA reverses this logic. Pollution and its consequences are okay as long as there is much money to be made from it (Corner House 1999).

CBA tends to be used to avoid considering the moral dimensions of a decision. New Zealand politician Marilyn Waring (1988: 20) says that the moral value of averting injury, saving life and ensuring healthy working conditions are ignored in a CBA: 'The value of safety is its costs and benefits relative to lost or gained production, possible legal suits, different groups of workers, and the allocation of scarce resources'.

Most people consider species preservation to be an ethical question, but efforts to price environmental benefits miss that dimension alto­gether. For example, surveys have found that US householders are col­lectively willing to pay $18 billion to protect humpback whales. Yet they would be outraged if someone offering a larger amount, say $30 billion, were allowed to kill all the remaining humpback whales (Ackerman amp; Heinzerling 2004: 162). The public participation curtailed by CBAwould enable ethical and other non-economic values to be considered.