Evaluating Dispute Resolution as an Approach to Public Participation

Public participation has become an integral part of environmental policymaking. Dispute resolution-with its focus on deliberation, problem solving, and consensus seeking among a small group of people-is one of the alternatives decision-makers increasingly turn to for involving the public. This paper evaluates dispute resolution as a form of public participation by measuring its success against five "social goals": incorporating public values into decisions, increasing the substantive quality of decisions, resolving conflict, building trust, and educating the public. The data for the analysis come from a "case survey," in which researchers read and coded information on more than 100 attributes of 239 published case studies of public involvement in environmental decision-making. These cases describe a variety of planning, management, and implementation activities carried out by environmental and natural resource agencies at many levels of government. The paper demonstrates that dispute resolution processes typically do much better than other forms of public participation in achieving social goals, but only among the small group of actual participants. The dispute resolution cases do far worse in extending the benefits of participation to the wider public. Many dispute resolution cases lack significant outreach, either to inform the wider public or to draw the wider public's values into decision-making. The benefits of conflict resolution or trust formation also often do not extend beyond a small group of participants. The findings have normative implications for the desirability of dispute resolution in certain types of environmental decisions. They also have practical implications because the exclusion of the wider public from decision-making can come back to haunt project proponents in the implementation stage

The U.S. Patent System and Developing Country Access to Biotechnology: Does the Balance Need Adjusting?

Many agricultural and food security experts believe that biotechnology has potential to assist developing country farmers in meeting current and future food needs. Most of the tools of biotechnology have been developed, however, by companies, governments, and universities in industrialized nations; are the subject of U.S. patents; and have so far been applied commercially to address the needs of large-scale growers in the United States and other developed countries. For commercial and other reasons, applications of biotechnology that might benefit developing country farmers are unlikely in the foreseeable future to be developed and disseminated through commercial channels. At the same time, noncommercial, public sector researchers report that their access to tools of biotechnology for creating developing country applications is impeded by the array of existing patents. After reviewing the basis for these observations, this paper outlines the utilitarian theory and objectives of the U.S. patent system, how the system has been applied to agricultural biotechnology, the "patent thicket" that has resulted, and the general pro-patent orientation of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The paper then describes how the U.S. patent system affects developing country access to biotechnology, based in part on an informal survey the authors conducted among experts and stakeholders in this field, and outlines a normative and analytical framework for evaluating possible changes in patent policy that might improve developing country access without undercutting the patent system's incentives for invention. The central argument is that developing country food security is a legitimate interest to consider when evaluating the operation of the U.S. patent system and possible alternatives to current patent policy. The paper then briefly describes six specific policy alternatives, all addressing access to patented technology rather than the rules governing patenting. This paper serves as the basis for a fall 2002 workshop to be held by Resources for the Future (RFF), at which the policy alternatives and the framework for evaluating them will be explored in more detail and refined by a small group of invited experts and stakeholders. The authors invite comment on the paper, which should be addressed to Dr. Jerry Cayford