Faux Public Process

Anybody who's gotten politically active in the Greater Portland Area will get a chance to be involved in "the public process." If you happen to be skeptical of the official line at one of the public process events, you'll quickly see how many of them are orchestrated and manipulated. I'm starting to better understand the impulses behind faux public process.

As a colleague wrote, "One of the things regional visioning attempts to do is to overcome NIMBYism. One challenge with U.S. policymaking is that local interests have more power than regional interests and they often optimize locally, creating negative regional externalities."

One can readily imagine the dismay of an expert, laboring for months or years, ushering the public towards a good outcome, only to be stopped by a sudden NIMBY uprising at the eleventh hour. How tempted our expert must be, to avoid the resulting 'negative regional externalities' by rigging the system.

I'm told that Australia has a different approach, where random citizens in an affected region are gathered for input, reducing the NIMBY effect while allowing for real input. This differentiates "the public" from "the neighbors" - and obviates the need for orchestrating meetings or rigging events.

There's something corrupt and corrosive about pretending to seek public input and then rigging the results. It may be an attempt at overcoming NIMBYism, but it's always wrong - and damaging - to raise public expectations (i.e. that this will be a fair and open process) and then fail to meet those expectations.

In addition to the general problem of corruption, the rigged process has another drawback: you get the result you predetermined, even if it turns out it was the wrong result. Since self-selected elites seldom consider themselves fallible, they are both more likely to engage in rigging 'faux' public process events and more likely to pre-select a flawed outcome.

Would an honest public process be superior? One source would say 'yes.'

Another option would be to let elected officials decide things, as they were arguably elected to do. But the fetish for public process is strong in the Portland area, and few are strong enough to withstand it.