Evaluating the effectiveness of public meetings and workshops: A new approach for improving DOE public involvement

摘要

Although public participation in the environmental cleanup process has been ongoing in the US Department of Energy (DOE) for some time, little if any evaluation of these efforts to include the public has taken place. This report contains the results of an evaluation of six regional workshops and meetings. These meetings and workshops focused on the implementation plan for the programmatic environmental impact statement on DOE's environmental cleanup efforts. The formats of the workshops and meetings differed from typical public meetings by offering more opportunity for interaction between agency personnel and the public, using impartial facilitators, and including more elaborate promotional strategies than notification in the Federal Register. Questionnaires and focus groups were used to solicit participants' perspectives on the meetings.