The Research Of Public Participation In Environmental Impact Assessment

Public participation is becoming more and more vital along with the perfection of environmental impact assessment(EIA) regulations and relative laws in China. Being a mutual communication method between constructors(or EIA executors) and the public, public participation could propose abundant advice and suggestions to the EIA of constructive projects and therefore reduce potential flaws of EIA. Currently, there is no universal method for public participation practices in China. Social issues occurred time to time due to the random individual selection mechanism of public participation and blurs of investigation contents.Research on public investigation in social statistics showed that it was in common with public investigation in EIA: the purpose of both investigations is to propose solutions to some social issues. During the investigation process, the public are normally interviewed for their opinions about particular questions. Thus, to study the methods of public participation, principles of public investigation in social statistics were studied and adapted. By proposing a full set of public investigation method and implementing it in social statistics, the problems of survey scope, target people, and sample size of public participation in EIA were solved. Furthermore, the theory of effectiveness analysis in social statistics was applied to analyze the rationality of investigation results as well. Finally, case studies were used to examine the effectiveness of proposed logical public participation method.