Community Development Graduate Group

Public policy consensus building processes, which have been heralded as truly democratic processes promoting citizen involvement in government decision making, are increasingly subject to state and federal open meeting laws. While both open meeting laws and consensus building processes were developed with the laudable intent of enhancing the legitimacy of governmental processes, it has been alleged that application of the former to the latter poses significant challenges for consensus building bodies. Through a case study focusing on the impacts of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (the FACA) and California‟s Brown and Bagley-Keene Acts on consensus building processes managed by the Center for Collaborative Policy (the CCP), this thesis explores the interplay between open meeting laws and consensus building processes. It surfaces several different categories of challenges that open meeting laws present to consensus building processes, as well as discusses the potential geneses of these challenges. It also offers recommendations for addressing these challenges through education, further research and legislative reform.