General Questions

13)  I strongly believe that public managers and environmental planners should engage the public even though they know the lack of the public’s knowledge about the environmental issue. Informing and enlightening is one of the government’s roles. The more the environmental issue is complicated or hard to make the public understood, the more agencies try to make the public engaged in the decision making procedure. Especially “the awareness of uncertainty” (Thrower 2006) regarding the environmental damage needs more the public’s agreement on environmental policies, because “proactive public participation could have resulted in a spirit of co-operation, trust and a mutually acceptable decision” (Shepherd & Bowler 1997, p. 733). If not, there might be some troubles arose such as the public’s distrust, the deterrence of the program, the issue of litigation, and so forth, like the case of the chemical demilitarization program case study (Shepherd and Bowler, 1997).

14) Contingent valuation (CV) is a prominent method to estimate benefits or costs of the good through the survey to ask the willingness to pay for a good or the willingness to accept the loss of a good (Steinemann & Apgar & Brown, 2005). Last January, I read an article titled “Asian Carp Battle” in Times. In this case, there are two sharply divided arguments: one provokes that Asian carp should be restricted because the carps invade and make the native species endanger, while the other side argue that the suppression of the carps in the Mississippi river and Great Lakes would discourage the fishing business. I think that CV would be appropriate to solve this Asian carp case. Through the survey, the public should be asked if they are willing to pay for the lost of the fishing business in order to preserve the native species in the Mississippi river and Great lakes, or vise versa.

15) Contingent valuation (CV) would not be an appropriate method to estimate the environmental issue if the responses of the survey have bias or embedding effects or do not have consistency with the result (Diamond & Hausman, 1994). CV is conducted by the interview, thus there is possibility of survey biases such as interviewer bias, framing bias, hypothetical bias, and so on. Furthermore the prejudice about the issue could affect the decision of willingness to pay regardless of the fact. For instance, the construction of the nuclear power plant suggested by the president Obama recently would be the issue negatively preoccupied by the public. In addition, if the response of the survey is easily converted with the same question, the CV could not be reliable. For instance, an issue related with the worldwide such as global warming could not be estimated with CV because the public would not confidence with their response, they are likely to change their mind with the same issue.