METHODOLOGY

      In 2001-2002, research teams in nine countries -- Chile, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the United States -- undertook a pilot effort to develop, test, and apply a set of indicators of public access. Specifically, this endeavor sought to assess progress toward achieving key elements of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration that emerged from the Rio Earth Summit a decade earlier: public access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to redress and remedy for violations of these rights through national legal systems. Collectively, these three categories are termed access principles or access rights.
      The approach used in this U.S. report, as with other country case studies, seeks to capture both the law and the practice of the access in the United States through the application of common set of performance indicators. A lead team of The Access Initiative (TAI) NGOs working with TAI national partner organizations developed these indicators. This approach combines original data produced at the national, state, and local levels; case studies developed by state teams; and independent assessment.
      Although the approach was developed to serve multiple countries being tracked by The Access Initiative, it is not designed to facilitate the ranking of access rights across these countries. Rather, the primary objective served by the approach is to catalyze and benchmark progress in individual countries.
      The methodological framework was designed to capture progress in implementing key elements of each of the three access principles, as well as enabling conditions for effective national (and state) systems of participation. It builds upon elements in international and regional instruments, including Agenda 21, the 2000 Inter-American Strategy for Public Participation, and the 1998 Convention on Access to Information, Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the "Aarhus Convention").
      Access Initiative teams were encouraged to choose cases from economically important sectors in their countries. In the United States, teams from California and Ohio selected electric power generation and electronic manufacturing industries as the focus of their case studies. In addition, public participation a joint state and federal water program known as the CALFED Bay-Delta Program and regional state implementation of the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) process were examined.
      The indicators focus on performance in law and practice. Each national team sought to gauge the extent to which their government had integrated the access principles into law and implemented them in practice. Thus, for example, for access to information, the indicators benchmark the adequacy of legal guarantees such as "right-to-know" legislation, as well as government responses to public requests for information.
      A second objective of the pilot assessments was to test the methodology. In addition to measuring the performance of their countries, national teams used the pilot to assessments to evaluate the assessment tool itself. If the methodological framework is sufficiently robust to be applicable in such diverse national contexts, it holds promise as a globally applicable assessment tool. For a detailed discussion of The Access Initiative, its methodology and findings, please see Closing the Gap: Access to Information, Participation, and Justice in Decision-making for the Environment (World Resources Institute, Washington, DC: 2002).