Planning, People and Preferences: A Role for Contingent Valuation

Aiming to stimulate further discussion on the empowering of local people, this study looks at where, when, how and by whom planning decisions are taken, and at the levels of public participation in these decision processes. The book examines the adequacy of current practices in public participation exercises in the development of local plans both using empirical and theoretical arguments. It concludes that the procedures adopted by planners are largely ineffective in allowing the general public to have a say in the shaping of their local environment. It is suggested that the improvement of these procedures is based on the use of the contingent valuation method. To minimize the cost of implementing this suggestion, the empirical work using CVM which is reported, used factorial survey design in order to construct a transferable demand function.