The Impact of Consensus Building on Conflict/Prevention Reduction: A Comparative Study of Negotiated and Conventional Rulemaking

This dissertation provides an empirical assessment of the impact of negotiated rulemakings on preventing or reducing conflicts over rules. The subject of this research is the negotiated and conventional rules made at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transport-ation. By comparing the frequency and the scale of challenges to consensus-based and conventional rules, this study found that negotiated rulemakings demonstrated the impact on reducing the likelihood of challenges to rules by 42 to 53 percent and the scale of challenges by 67 percent. It has been also found that the public interest can be better served by negotiated rulemaking than by conventional rulemaking.

Through an analytical case study of 14 challenges to consensus-based rules, this study found that 13 challenges either involved non-negotiated parts of rules or were generated by non-members of the negotiated rulemaking committees. These findings imply that negotiated rulemaking should be more actively used, and that the process of negotiated rulemaking needs to be more inclusive.