Law Commons^™

Citizen-Friendly Approaches To Environmental Governance, David Markell

Scholarly Publications

Numerous commentators have urged that government increase opportunities for citizen participation as a way to advance a variety of public policy goals (enhancing government legitimacy, promoting more informed government decisions, etc.). In this Article, David L. Markell explores the experience of an international decisionmaking process that relies heavily on citizen participation, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s (CEC) citizen submissions process, through the lens of the procedural justice literature, which seeks to understand the reasons why citizens are satisfied with decisionmaking processes. He offers some thoughts about the design and operation of the CEC process in terms of its effectiveness in …