The environmental impact statement (EIS) process is central to the assessment of environmentally significant actions. Yet decisions about what matters in the environment and what gets studied as part of an EIS are based on values that are largely implicit and come primarily from technical...

Public participation in environmental decisions has become commonplace. A favored model for public input is to use the tools of dispute resolution to seek consensus among members of a multi-party stakeholder group. The authors believe that a focus on dispute resolution and consensus building can...