Public Participation in Environmental Decisions [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Anna Vári and Joanne Caddy The optimism which accompanied transition to democracy in Central and Eastern-European countries during 1989-1990 has, in large part, evaporated in the face of the many difficulties which the consolidation of new systems of political and economic governance has entailed. Widespread disillusionment with the institutions of representative democracy, economic hardship and continued uncertainty, in Hungary as throughout the region, have also had serious repercussions on the scope and quality of newly-established rights of public participation. Transition has also raised a host of questions regarding the future development of key policy areas, from economic development to transport to infrastructure. Policy makers are thus faced with an overwhelming number of choices, all of which must be made simultaneously, under new rules of the game, and with far more participants having voice. As a result, there is great pressure to ensure rapid decision-making at all levels (from the national to the local) which tend to undermine the establishment of new approaches to decision-making which rest on a greater degree of public participation. The cases presented here illustrate the many difficulties associated with such a learning process and the varying degrees of success with which public participation currently meets. In Central and Eastern Europe as a whole, legal provisions for public participation in the field of the environment are generally far greater than those to be found in other policy areas. Hence public participation in environmental decision-making represents a unique testing ground for practices of potentially wider application. In the case of Hungary, such legal opportunities may be expected to have particular impact given the significant experience of the environmental movement as the birth-place of civil society and one of the contributing factors to the peaceful overthrow of the state socialist regime. This book reviews recent experience of public participation in Hungary, through the critical analysis of concrete case studies of environmental decision-making in the 1990s. The case studies reveal a social learning process which involves a wide range of domestic and international actors and which 11