Public Participation Mechanisms in Environmental Disasters

This paper examines the role of public participation mechanisms in certain major environmental disasters. It examines situations in which people’s lifestyles or their lives have been directly threatened, and thus elicited citizen participation. Threatening issues often seem morally, physically, socially, economically, religiously, and otherwise unacceptable to a group. As will be presented in this paper, citizens voluntarily participate in a community activity when they see that their way of life has been threatened. An introductory historical perspective, the legal framework upon which it is based, and background information on the participatory mechanisms, all emphasizing the importance and need for empowering citizens with participatory skills so as to bring changes in the existing educational, legal, and social systems are presented. The major environmental accidents/disasters of Minamata, Japan; Bhopal, India; Seveso, Italy; Chernobyl, Ukraine; and Exxon-Valdez, Alaska are discussed, mainly to indicate the reaction, and the participatory mechanisms used by the affected communities in each of the sudden disasters that occurred. If citizens worldwide had been active participants in the environmental issues, it is quite possible that we would have experienced fewer environmental accidents.