Decision making citizen

Expanded the involvement of states and citizens in decision making Provided for new enforcement authorities and responsibilities Increased the focus on human healtli problems caused by hazardous waste sites... 

Deposited by countless private citizens, moreover, lawn care toxins have also proven far more difficult to measure and far more resistant to traditional techniques of pollution control. The political momentum for water quality regulation lags far behind this changing land-use reality. The shift in the last few years to decentralized decision-making that allowed for the implementation of the Clean Water Act, for example, has not come to terms with this change. In this case, the Clean Water Act mandates the creation of total maximum daily load (TMDL) criteria, standards for cleaning up nonpoint sources such as farms, suburban developments, and other nonindustrial sites. These standards are drawn up by water quality management committees. 

I agree that the precautionary principle should be given a central position in guiding legislation for the protection of man and the environment, but in a more restricted sense than it is now used in Sweden to tackle widespread chemophobia. Not only does the Swedish interpretation of the PP open the sluices for capricious regulatory action, it also introduces a factor of arbitrariness that disrupts the functioning of a free market, inevitably inhibits sound technical development, and shifts too much responsibility for technical decisions to citizens and small businesses that are not trained to make them. 

Many of the instruments presented above have their main focus on information dissemination and education of the public. Respecting the citizens right to know and giving access to information is a basic prerequisite for community involvement but as a one-way relation it is not enough to fully integrate the civil society in policy processes. Additional measures are needed to make sure that each citizen can have a say in public decision-making. 

A variety of methods have been utilized to communicate with the public and to solicit public input regarding chemical weapons destruction. Public information sessions have a very narrow dynamic. A few representatives from the Army, usually public affairs officers, are positioned at the front of the room and the citizens primarily serve an audience role. At some point in the hearing, the members of the public are invited to express their concerns or their support or to ask questions about a decision already made by the Army. This style of public interaction is often called Decide, Announce, Defend , and it offers very little in the way of a constructive role for the pubhc in actual decision-making. 

Expanded the involvement of states and citizens in decision making... 

Risk management is being conducted outside of government arenas, by stakeholders (individual citizens, businesses, workers, industries, farmers, fishermen, etc.). So the decision-making process needs to be improved by the involvement of those affected by risk problems. 

The future we describe is not predestined by this history. While the processes behind these trends are central to modernizing societies, they are also the product of human decision making and social forces. The future we evoke in this chapter will help researchers, policymakers, and ordinary citizens calibrate ideas about future energy use and lifestyle as well as illuminate potential market pathways for hydrogen and FCVs. 

Whether a reviewer, a panel member, an industry representative, or just a concerned citizen, it is essential that each recognize that there are severe risks involved in decision making. Risk assessment of pesticides is difficult and not all decisions related thereto will be flawless. Only those who are extremely secure in their roles as scientists and as caring human beings should dare take on such awesome responsibilities. 

Kenyon, W, Nevin, C. Hanley, N. 2003 Enhancing environmental decision-making using citizens juries . Local Environment, 8(2) 221-232. 

A paramount consideration in these discussions was whose interests the organization should serve - science or society Scripps and Ritter took a liberal democratic approach that differed from the patrician, elitist attitudes of most senior scientists. Scripps saw that science had extraordinary power to affect modem life and therefore citizens deserved better information about it. As his son Robert P. Scripps later explained, the millionaire knew that for the masses as well as the classes, knowledge is power (Scripps 1932, p. 156). The elder Scripps had, after all, made his fortune by delivering news and entertainment to those very masses. First consideration in the new group s decision-making should be given, he believed, to the potential audience s practical needs and interests rather than the scientific establishment s agendas. 

Sustainable development cannot be achieved without broad public participation in decision-making, a process which must overtake the publicity hype promulgated only too often by major corporations and indeed governments. Every citizen has a role to play in the creation of a sustainable future, and hence the means have to be found to allow people to voice their views, especially the growing number outside the current debating process. This needs to span the entire spectrum of institutions at international, national, and local levels. Knowledge and awareness are powerful components of active citizenship, and in order to achieve the fullest appreciation of chemical safety, there will need to be a partnership between teachers, communicators and scientists. 

A third theory is more problematic. It claims that unions are political hierarchies, pyramidal power structures with power concentrated at the top. Most rank-and-file workers, like most ordinary citizens in modem democracies, have little say in the decisions made by the institutions they nominally control. In this model ective decision making power is vested in the groups near the top of the pyramid, presumably the most senior workers who have ascended to the best jobs, have the most... 

Engaging Diverse Citizens in Dialogue and Decision Making... 

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