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Debate about the need to increase public confidence in regulation and risk management has focused on the potential for the negative environmental impact of established and emerging technologies. The social context of public distrust is discussed, and related to how environmental risk is portrayed in terms of both technical risk assessment and social representation. It is concluded that greater public involvement in environmental risk decision making is important if further alienation of the public from scientific processes is to be avoided, although such involvement must be evaluated in terms of its methodological utility, acceptability to participants, and impact on policy.

Both guidance to transport planning practitioners and scientific literature advocate the adoption of in-depth and inclusive participation and consultation methods when developing new transport plans and measures. The motivations for this normative stance are however unclear, other than general statements that public participation is inherently a good thing, and that new forms of transport planning must be different from what has gone before. However, these documents cite little or no evidence to demonstrate that more participatory transport planning has produced ‘better’ decisions or outcomes. It is also important to note that the legitimacy conferred on governments from adopting this form of participation and consultation is only one of several forms of legitimacy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to attempt to assess whether more participatory approaches to transport planning do indeed lead to ‘better’ decisions and outcomes. It does this by developing, based on the literature, a number of criteria by which to judge the decisions made and outcomes delivered. It then reviews the experience of consultation and participation in a non-random sample of four pairs of transport plans or measures, and evaluates the experience in each against the criteria developed. It finds little evidence that more in-depth and inclusive participation processes that follow the normative stance found in practitioner guidance and the literature lead to better outcomes, and some evidence that such processes may in some cases compromise legitimacy by slowing and changing measure implementation.