ABSTRACT
Public participation activities are of three types. Firstly, there is publicizing and education, or the dispersal of information to the public; secondly, there is the provision and promotion of opportunities for interaction between the public and those responsible for developing the policy or program; and thirdly, there is the collection of information which is useful to the social impact assessment. The information collected as a result of a public participation exercise can be used in at least two ways. First, some researchers argue that such subjective information, sometimes in conjunction with expert opinion, can be used directly to structure an explicit value weighting scheme which in turn can be applied to objective data. The other approach to using the information is to provide it as a complement to the objective data and allow the several kinds of information to be synthesized by the decision maker.
