Types of Knowledge in Procedures for Public Participation: Experimental Evidence

• In Event: The Politics of Wildlife and Fisheries Management

Abstract

Existing mechanisms for public participation in administrative agencies often require citizens to hold extensive policy or institutional knowledge. For a citizen to participate through public comment or advisory panels, the citizen must know the relevant policy, the agency implementing that policy, and avenues of participation provided by the agency. The fact that such knowledge is unevenly distributed among citizens is one factor underlying class and educational biases in citizen participation. As an alternative mechanism, citizens may participate in the implementation of policy through particular or case-by-case decisions. This mode of decision-making utilizes local knowledge (or knowledge of policy effects) that citizens who are affected by a policy tend to have.

I study these alternative modes of public participation in the context of fisheries management in Alaska. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim (YK) Delta region of Southwestern Alaska, the decline of the salmon population is a highly salient issue with extensive economic and cultural consequences for the predominantly Alaska Native population. Yet the fisheries management system is highly complex, with decision-making divided among multiple agencies at state and federal levels. While citizens often do not know which agencies make which decisions (lacking knowledge of policy causes), they directly experience policy effects. Hence, citizens know the trajectory of the salmon population as well as their own subjective valuation of the tradeoffs inherent in restricting fishing.

Through a survey experiment, I provide evidence that the mode of decision-making affects the relevant knowledge that citizens have available when participating in fisheries management. A key decision-making body, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC), determines allowable salmon bycatch in fishery management plans regulating commercial fishing in the Bering Sea, and this affects the number of salmon available for subsistence in the YK Delta. When the procedure for public participation in NPFMC’s regulatory process pertains to general rules over Bering Sea fishing, respondents are more likely to lack necessary knowledge and they express less confidence in their response. But when the procedure allows for particular decisions over concrete cases of commercial bycatch, respondents are able to make use of local knowledge and they express greater confidence. These results illuminate how alternative procedures for public participation make use of different types of knowledge, and this affects citizens’ capacity to participate.

As a contribution to APSA’s 2023 theme, this project explores a potential response to concerns about public ignorance and misinformation. In addition to focusing on absent or mistaken information among citizens, political scientists can investigate possible procedures to make use of the knowledge citizens already hold that is currently not being utilized in policymaking.

Author

• Joseph Warren, University of Alaska Anchorage