What are we gaining from stakeholder involvement? Observations from environmental planning in the Great Lakes

Attention to the need for greater stakeholder involvement in environmental decisionmaking has been increasing in recent years. The authors draw on a number of cases of environmental planning in the Great Lakes Region in an attempt to understand the possible benefits stakeholder processes can bring to environmental decisionmaking. They outline benefits in four areas: (1) the quality of decisions, (2) the relationships among important players in the decisionmaking process, (3) the capacity for managing environmental problems, and (4) improvements in environmental quality. Although the research suggests that in a number of the cases studied there was a good outcome in the first three areas, there did not appear to be an obvious link between good participation and improvements in environmental quality through implementation of cleanup and restoration activities.