Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In turn, those starting inequalities necessarily
produce a finishing inequality of some kind if
only in that some households will have more
money spent upon reducing the risk to them
than will others. Hence Ramsbottom and
Green (2004) took some apparently reasonable
rules for ensuring consistency of treatment and
tested the consequences of applying each across
a variety of case study sites. Not surprisingly,
the course of action adopted depended upon the
rule applied.
.
Bias suppression/neutrality - applied in a man-
ner that is both unprejudiced and without self-
interest.
.
Accuracy - the procedures succeed in their own
terms and are based upon accurate information.
.
Correctability - the opportunity to appeal.
.
Consistency -
in application across
like
instances.
.
Representativeness - all affected should be con-
sidered in the decision.
.
Ethicality - the decision should be made
according to prevailing ethical standards.
.
Voice/process control - are the interested
parties given a full voice?
.
Standing - are the interested parties respected as
people?
.
Trust - legitimacy.
.
Decision control - do the interested parties have
any influence on the decision?
Other literature stresses the importance that
the procedure protects the worth and dignity of
those involved in the adjudication (Lind and
Tylor 1988). In this context, the attractions of the
English Common Law approach (van Caene-
gem 1988) become apparent:
1
the use of precedents gives consistency across
cases and over time;
2
but because precedents are not absolutely bind-
ing, there is scope to both learnover time and adapt
to different circumstances; and
3
the extensive appeals process tests the proce-
dural justice of each case at several stages. In
criminal law, this has developed to review past
cases as well, so that past failures can be retro-
spectively reassessed and corrected.
Procedural Justice
In practice, substantive justice is unlikely to be
possible in any single decision taken in isolation
(Green 2007, 2008). Only across an array of
choices is it likely to be possible to achieve
substantive justice; only across such an array of
choices is any single stakeholder likely to achieve
a satisfactory outcome. Hence, it is crucial to
chain choices together; that which makes it pos-
sible to bind them together, that which provides
continuity, is procedural justice. The importance
of the outcome of any single choice is therefore
what it tells us about the application of proce-
dural justice. It is procedural justice that enables
each stakeholder to view the outcome in terms of
the chain of choices rather than focusing on each
choice in isolation.
Procedural justice is both preclusive and pre-
scriptive. In the negative sense - the definition of
what justice is not - procedural justice is about
what powers may be used by whom for what
purpose - those differences in power that will not
be taken into account. Thus, those stakeholders
who have more power than some other stakehold-
er may be precluded from using that power. The
judges' oath specifies some of the powers that may
not be used in a trial.
But again concepts of procedural justice can
differ both between individuals and between con-
texts (Wendorf and Alexander no date). Character-
istics of procedural justice that have been proposed
(Thibaut and Walker 1975; Leventhal 1980; Tyler
and Lind 1992) include:
Social Relationships
How we decide, what we do and how we pay for it
are all statements of social relationships. Hence,
in debating how to manage the risks of flooding,
we are also either implicitly or explicitly arguing
what should be those social relationships. Con-
versely, how we decide, what we do and how we
pay for it are the expressions and articulations of
social relationships and justice in particular.
