Annals of Health Law
ENHANCING COMMUNICATION
water),52 community planning,53 and food and drug safety.54 Furthermore,
the Community-Based Public Health (“CBPH”) model for disease
prevention and health promotion has emerged in recent years, whereby
partnerships between public health professionals and community-based
organizations (“CBOs”) are formed to allow “the community whose health
is the focus of the intervention [to] identif[y] and assume . . . ownership of
the health problem by actively working together with health professionals
throughout the various project phases.”55
Several important limitations and criticisms of public participation in
public affairs and the policy-making process have been identified in the
literature. The democratic philosophies underlying effective public
participation assume that the public participants will engage in an informed,
educated, and rational public discourse,56 consequently “favor[ing] those
who both can and wish to articulate their concerns through reasoned
analysis, skewing the conversation to be more suited to some members of
the polity than others.”57 Some critics have noted that the public often does
not engage in reasoned analysis, and that public participation in government
policy-making can have unintended consequences that are detrimental to
participation in various federal environmental statutes and discussing opportunities for
public participation provided for in the Superfund cleanup process).
