New information technologies in public participation : a challenge to old decision-making institutional frameworks

Abstract

Given the progress in information technology (IT) in the past 30 years, I hypothesized that new conditions exist for considerable improvements in public participation in decision-making. In order to test my hypothesis, I developed a prototype of an Intelligent Multimedia System to support public and technical consultation and, together with Internet-based collaborative tools, introduced it in the environmental impact assessment review process, for the solid urban waste incinerator of S. Joao da Talha, Portugal. Supported by the evidence gathered from this experiment and by my analysis of the qualitative jump these IT developments represent, I argue that it is possible to use this new IT to capture and represent meaningful planning knowledge and with it enable multiple improvements in the public consultation, both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the other hand, observing the institutional responses and constraints during the process, my findings strongly suggest that the current institutional and regulatory context, inherited from old frameworks, is an impediment to fully set in place the improvements enabled by these IT developments.

(cont.) In other words, the decision-making institutional framework has not evolved at a pace fast enough to provide adequate responses to the challenges brought by the new IT. My findings also illustrate how different actors in a decision-making process are constrained by these old frameworks to follow different planning paradigms, further emphasizing the need to adjust to the new technology reality. In this thesis, I present my hypothesis and research questions; the methodology I followed; the scientific traditions and bodies of literature that support this research; the case study and thesis experiment used to collect direct evidence; the analytical reasoning concerning the IT qualitative jump; the suggested research agenda for this domain; and the conclusions derived from this research, suggesting possible avenues to institutionalize some of the demonstrated IT-based improvements in public participation.