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Making the Environmental State Democratic:
Is Participatory Governance the Solution?
By Frank Fischer
Rutgers (USA) and Kassel (Germany) Universities
Paper Prepared for ECPR Joint Sessions, Mainz, Germany, 11-16, 3. 2013.
Workshop 31 on “Green Levithan, Ecological Insurance Agency, or
Capitalism’s Agent? Revisiting the Ecological State in the Anthropocene
Draft Version: Not for Citation
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Introduction
Democratic participation has been a central theme in discussions of the ecological state from
the outset of the environmental movement. But these discussions have often been as much idealistic
as practical or realistic. Indeed, a good deal of what has transpired since the late 1960s has been
more technocratic than democratic per se. There have been a range of democratic experiments in
environmental policymaking that seek to redress this development, but most of them remain just
that, namely experiments. Some have produced impressive results while others have clearly failed.
As such, these experiences are in need of careful assessment. This essay is an effort to sort out and
reflect on these successes and failures.
We can begin by noting that much of what has happened to environmental participation
largely mirrors wider trends in governance more generally. Despite the contemporary rhetoric about
democracy and democratic governance, genuine public engagement is seen to be in decline.
Crouch (2004) has even argued that we now live in the period of “post-democracy,” described
as a situation “when boredom, frustration, and illusion have settled in…; when powerful minority
interests have become far more active than the mass of ordinary people in making the political
system work for them; where people have to be persuaded to vote by top-down publicity
campaigns.” In this provocative view, we have begun “a move beyond the idea of ‘rule by the
people’ to a challenge of the “idea of rule at all.”
This is clearly reflected in many of the dominant political practices of the day. Political
leaders, now finding it more difficult to determine the views of the general citizenry, take recourse
to political marketing and public relations techniques designed more to manipulate public opinion
than to take it into account. Such methods give political leaders the advantage of discerning the
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public’s view without providing citizens the possibility of taking charge of or controlling their own
communicative engagements.
These increasing levels of voter apathy and citizen distrust have led to what various writers
have called a ‘political crisis of representative democracy’ (or a “democratic deficit”). This is not
to say that there is no citizen participation, but rather that it tends to be relatively marginalized,
when not simply ignored. It is also not to overlook the energetic activities of advocacy oriented
interest groups. Instead, it recognizes that the activities of these groups are often part of the
problem. In any cases, the interest group process is not particularly democratic. Even when citizens
join these groups, they discover hierarchical structures with little interest in their active
participation.
In view of this declining role of the citizen—the cornerstone of democracy—
participation and devolution of public responsibilities designed to increase citizen involvement have
come to be a standard part of the call for reform in the US, Britain and elsewhere. Toward this end,
there have been more than a few efforts to include citizens in the governance process, some of them
seeking to bring them into the decision-making process itself. One of these efforts has been a call
for “participatory governance.”
Participation and the Environment
From the outset in the 1960s, when the struggle was to get ecological protection on the
political agenda, participation was a core component of the environmental movement (Meadowcroft
2004; Beierle and Cayford 2002). However, after the environment was established on the agenda
and the discussion turned to policy formulation, the complexities of environmental problems tended
to relegate citizens to a backseat. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed an increasing technocratization of
environmental policymaking (Fischer 2000). After the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, in response to
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this technical turn, there was a significant—some would say dramatic—shift back to more
transparency, local level decision-making, and nongovernmental public-private partnerships that
brought citizen engagement back to the fore. In this regard, these issues tended to converge with
the kinds of approaches that were being both theorized and in some cases practiced by the new
“governance” scholars.
In addition to the Earth Summit’s call for citizen engagement, the Arhus Convention (on
Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in
Environmental Matters) in Europe, echoed most of the same themes. Since then, a call for
participation in environmental policymaking and implementation has been reinvigorated and basic
to all environmental initiatives. It is a commitment reflected in participatory environmental projects
of national environmental ministries and their local agencies around the world. Just to name a
couple of examples, the governments of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswanna and Mali
have set up projects to strengthen national capacities to implement Principle 10 of the Rio
Declaration, calling forms of participatory governance in environmental decision-making.
(http://www.unitar.org /strengthening-participatory-environmental-governance-democratic-
republic-congo; also see Kimani, 2010).
It is clear, then, that contemporary calls for participation and participatory governance in
particular have been more than rhetoric. More specifically, they have found their way into the
political practices of a significant spectrum of prominent political organizations, both national and
international. For example, various forms of participatory governance have been embraced by major
organizations such as the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, U.N. Habitat,
and the European Union; all have put money and effort into the development of participatory
processes. Many of these initiatives have drawn their inspiration from the progressive projects of
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political parties in India, Brazil, Spain, Mexico and the UK. Civil society organizations, such as
Oxfam, Action Aid, and the International Budget project, actively disseminate information and
promote participatory practices.
Environmental Governance: The Role of Deliberative Participation
We need first to consider the concept of “governance,” as opposed to the more traditional
focus on government. Although there are different views of governance, including no shortage of
critics, the term “governance” broadly refers “to the changing boundaries between public, private,
and voluntary sectors” in relations to “the changing role of the state” (Rhodes 2012: 33). In many
or most discussions of governance, the focus is on horizontal networks of actors. For Klijn
(2008:506) governments “have become more dependent on societal actors to achieve their goals
because of the increasing complexity of the challenges they face” and it is thus “only through
collaborative action that society’s policy problems can be resolved.” Rejecting traditional
bureaucratic government, it reflects in the words of Skelcher (2010:i164), “the engagement of
citizens, civil society organizations, and business with government in the formulation and delivery
of public policy.” Involving deliberative mechanisms, partnerships at various levels, and forms of
co-production, it is a response to the fact that stakeholders and citizens are demanding more
significant roles in the exercise of governmental or public authority (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003:2).
Governance, in short, means that citizen deliberative inputs become a much more central part of the
policymaking processes, even potentially a central component.
Participation in environmental governance, and “participatory environmental governance”
specifically,” thus puts emphasis on democratic engagement. Not all forms of participation are
oriented on deliberation, but this has been the dominant emphasis in environmental democracy. In
academic circles, the role of participation in environmental governance rapidly became important
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topics in the literature of environmental politics, with a more recent turn to participatory
environmental governance (Newig 2007). Much of the writing on participatory environmental
governance can be seen as a subset of the theory and practice of deliberative governance more
generally.
There are many forms of deliberative participation and people can disagree on how to
categorize them (Fung 2006; Meadowcroft 2003). But independently of an extended debate on the
subject, practices involving public consultations, citizens advisory bodies, and citizens juries,
among others, are taken here to be thin forms of participative deliberation compared to stronger,
more robust forms of participatory governance (Beierle and Cayford 2002). Participatory
governance in its strong form often includes elements of various forms of deliberation, but is
distinguished by its move beyond giving advice to shaping or even determining actual policy
outcomes, binding or non-binding.
In this discussion, we focus our attention on participatory governance in environmental
affairs. How can the theory and its concepts be applied to environmental policy making? What are
the available experiences with it in the field? And how should we assess them? In particular, how
does it address the democratic deficit?
Democratizing Democracy: Participatory Environmental Democracy
None of this is to suggest that calls for participation are necessarily heeded, and where they
are, we often find quite different understandings of democracy in play. Both theory and empirical
experience with environmental governance demonstrates that there are numerous patterns of
participation and non-participation, from elitist top-down forms of interaction to radically
democratic models from the bottom up. Governance, as such, tends to refer to a new space for
decision-making, but does not, in and of itself, indicate the kinds of politics that take place within
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them. Indeed, in some cases, such participation has been manipulated or misused to obtain elitist
nondemocratic goals. Participatory environmental governance, like participatory governance more
generally, seeks to introduce a more active kind of participation in these spaces, or an effort that
Santos (2007) has called the “democratization of democracy.” It does this through an emphasis
democratic practices based on public deliberation. For some, it is a contribution to radical
participatory democracy; for others it is seen as variant or practice of deliberative democracy.
Grounded in the writings on participatory democracy more generally, participatory
environmental governance focuses on the deliberative empowerment of citizens and aligns itself in
varying degrees to work on deliberative democracy in political theory and deliberative
experimentation in policy-related fields of contemporary political and social research, as well as
political activism on the part of various public organizations and foundations. It thus includes but
moves beyond the citizen’s role as voter or watchdog to include practices of direct deliberative
engagement with the pressing issues of the time.
Whereas citizen participation in the environmental government process has traditionally
focused on measures designed to support and facilitate increased public access to information about
governmental activities, efforts to extend the rights of the citizens to be consulted on public issues
which affect them, and to see that the broad citizenry will be heard through fair and equitable
representative political systems, participatory governance seeks to deepen this participation by
examining the assumptions and practices of the traditional view that generally hinders the
realization of a genuine participatory democracy in environmental politics (Gaventa 2002). It
reflects a growing recognition that citizen participation needs to be based on more elaborate and
diverse principles institutions and methods. These begin with a more equal distribution of political
power, a fairer distribution of resources, the decentralization of decision-making processes, the
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development of a wide and transparent exchange of knowledge and information, the establishment
of collaborative partnerships, an emphasis on inter-institutional dialogue, and greater accountability.
All of these measures seek to create relationships based as much or more on trust and reciprocity
than advocacy, strategic behavior and deceit. It involves as well the provision of means to engage
individuals and environmental organizations outside government through political networks and
institutional arrangements that facilitate supportive collaborative-based discursive relationships
among public and private sectors. And not least important, its theorists have sought to find ways to
institutionalize these processes as a regular practice of government with direct influence on policy
decision-making.
Emerging as a part of a multiplication of existing kinds of participatory arrangements for
environmental protection in the 1990s, participatory environmental governance has thus established
new spaces and given rise to different types of civil society actors to inhabit them. In both the
developed and developing countries, these have involved a number of important shifts in problem-
solving, and service delivery, including more equitable forms of support for economic and social
development. Along the way it has often meant a transition from professionally dominated to more
citizen- or client-based environmental activities, frequently taking place within the new civic
society organizations.
The remaining discussion seeks to offer an assessment of what we know and don’t know
about participatory governance in environmental policy. Toward this end it proceeds by beginning
with interrelated questions concerning citizen competence, empowerment and capacity-building as
they relate to participatory environmental governance and then turns to its impacts on service
delivery, social equity, and political representation, including the distribution of power, and it actual
and potential impacts of policy decision-making. The discussion then presents the prominent theory
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“empowered participatory governance,” which offers principles for design. These points are further
illustrated by pointing to several experiences with participatory governance related to environmental
policymaking, in particular the cases participatory budgeting in Brazil, the people’s planning project
in Kerala, India and community forestry in Nepal, including their successes in influencing national
environmental policies. Before concluding, the discussion also raises the question of the relation of
citizens and experts in participatory environmental governance and the possibility of new forms of
collaborative expertise.
Citizen Competence, Empowerment, and Environmental Capacity Builiding
Democratic participation, whether related to environmental, economic issues or social issues,
is generally considered a political virtue unto itself. But participatory governance claims to offer
even more; it is seen to contribute to the development of communicative skills, citizen
empowerment, community capacity-building, and the redesign of policy decision-making processes.
First, with regard to citizen competence and empowerment, the practices of participatory
governance are put forth as a specific case of the broader view that participation contributes to
human development generally, both intellectual and emotional. Empowerment through
participation has, as such, been part of the progressive educational curriculum and numerous
citizen-based deliberative projects bear out its influence on personal development (Joss 1995;
Dryzek 2008). Many of these projects have been concerned with environmental issues.
NGOs, including environmental NGOs, engaged with the practices of participatory
governance, in particular in the developing world, typically speak of “people’s self-development”
and empowerment as primary goals, emphasizing, political rights, social recognition, and economic
redistribution in the development of participatory approaches (Rahman 1995). Rather than merely
speaking for the poor or marginalized citizens’ interests and issues, they have labored to assist
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people to develop their own abilities to negotiate with public policymakers. Beyond
institutionalizing new bodies of client or user groups, they have created new opportunities for
dialogue and the kinds of citizen education that it can facilitate, especially communicative skills. In
matters related to environment, the emphasis has often been on environmental citizenship and
learning (Lawrence 2005).
The issue is crucial for participatory governance as participation has no special significance
if citizens are neither capable nor empowered to engage in decision processes that affect their own
lives. Studies show that many people in the middle rungs of society, and in some cases people closer
to the bottom, can competently deal with policy discussions (Fishkin 2009; Delli Caprini et al, 2004)).
Research, much of it related to environmental and technological policy issues, finds that lay
panelists on citizen juries increase their knowledge of the subject under discussion and often gain a
new confidence in their ability to deal with complex policy issues generally (Joss 1995). Many
participants tend to describe such participatory experiences as having had a stimulating impact on
their personal lives, often leading to further involvement in public affairs, environmental issues in
particular (Lawrence 2005).
Much more challenging, however, is the situation for marginalized members of society, those
who might benefit from it the most. But here too there are positive signs. The participatory projects
in Porto Alegre, Kerala and Nepal taken up below, as well as other experiences in developing and
underdeveloped countries, show that citizens with less formal education can also participate under
the right conditions with surprisingly high levels of competence. In the case, of Kerala, most of the
members of the local deliberative councils concerned with resource planning would be described as
simple farmers. And the same can be said for the people living from the forests in Nepal.
Nonetheless, they impressively participated in environmental and resource management planning
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projects, the likes of which one very seldom finds in the advance industrial world. In particular,
local environmental knowledge often has taken its place alongside technical expertise.
Participation, it also needs to be noted, is more than a matter of competence. As the
evidence shows, competent people may not perceive an incentive to participate in environmental
and other issues. Thus, getting them to do so is another important issue. Engagement in the public
realm is not without its costs and most people have little interest in participating unless the costs of
involvement outweigh the possibility of benefits from it (Osmani 2007). Local people, including
competent citizens, may themselves be highly skeptical about the worth of investing their time and
energy in participatory activities. In some situations, participation will lack immediate relevance; it
may carry more significance for outsiders—e.g., political activists or social scientists—than it does for
members of the communities. Moreover, as a lot of environmental experience shows, not everyone
within the communities will be able or motivated to participate. Even when there is sufficient interest
in participation there may be time barriers. Sometimes decisions have to be taken before
deliberative projects can be set up and carried out.
Finally, questions of participation and competence also bear directly on the issue of capacity
building. Capacity-building, as the development of a community’s ability to deal collectively with
the problems such as environmental degradation, can contribute to a sense of social togetherness.
Rather than the relative passive role of the individual associated with traditional conceptions of
citizen participation, participatory governance helps to connect and enable competent individuals in
local communities build together the kinds of “social capital” needed for joint problem-solving
(Putnam 2000). It does this in part by building social trust and the kinds of mutual understanding
that can facilitate environmental problem-solving.
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Basic to the development of building capacity is the devolution of power and resources
from central political-administrative control and toward local democratic institutions and practices,
including street-level administrators willing and able to assist community members in taking charge
of their own issues. Whereas community members under conventional forms of representative
government are more often than not relegated to a vicarious role in politics, under participatory
governance they move to a more direct involvement in the political process, as illustrated below by
participatory budgeting in Brazil and the people’s resources planning campaign in Kerela, India.
Service Delivery and Equitable Outcomes
For many involved in participatory environmental governance, the underlying
goal of building capacity for action is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery
and management of environmental programs. For others concerned with such governance, as Ron
has explained, a primary goal of capacity building “is to provide citizens with the tools that are
needed to reflect on the normative principles that underlie the provision of public services.” [1 ]
That is, the goal is to provide citizens with opportunities to critically reflect on the norms and values
justifying the equity of the social and environmental outcomes.
A range of environmental experiences shows that community participation can improve the
efficiency of programs (in terms of uses of resources) and effective projects (that achieve their
intended outcomes) in the provision and delivery of services, in both the developed and developing
worlds (Newig and Fritsch 2009). In fields such as education, health care, environmental
protection, forestry, and irrigation, it is seen to lead to quicker responses to emerging issues and
problems, more effective development and design of solutions appropriate to local resources, higher
levels of commitment and motivation in program implementation, and greater overall satisfaction
[
1 ] The observation is drawn from Amit Ron’s helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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with policies and programs (Ojha 2006). Furthermore, an emphasis on efficiency typically leads to
improved monitoring processes and verification of results.
While there is no shortage of illustrations to suggest the validity of the claim, there is a
methodological issue that can make it difficult to establish such outcomes (Osamni 2007). When
local participatory governance is found to contribute to efficiency, firmly establishing the cause-
effect relationships can be problematic (Newig 2007). It is always possible that a positive
association between efficiency and participation may only reflect a process of reverse causation—
that is, community members had already chosen to participate in those projects which promised to
be efficient. To know if participation has in fact contributed to efficient outcomes, investigators
have to discern if such extraneous factors are at work. Although this is theoretically possible, it is a
difficult technical requirement. Such information is often unavailable or difficult to come by.
Participation also has the potential to combine efficiency with environmental equity. Research
shows that decisions made through the participation of community members rather than by
traditional elites or unaccountable administrators offers less powerful groups in the community
better chances of influencing the distribution of resources or delivery of services (Heller 2001;
Fischer 2000). This view is founded on the presumption that through critical reflection in
participatory processes disadvantaged citizens have improved chances of expressing their
preferences in ways that can make them count. It is a point basic to the environmental justice
movement (Schlossberg 1999).
But this is not always the case. Empirical investigation tends to be mixed on this issue
(Papadopoulus and Warin 2007). Many studies suggest that participatory approaches in local
arenas can be of assistance to the poor and disadvantaged members of the community, but other
research fails to clearly confirm this. Overall, investigation shows that community participation can
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lead to more equitable outcomes, but it is particularly difficult to achieve such results in inequitable
social contexts. Equitable outcomes more commonly occur in combination with other factors, such
as those related to the distribution of power, motivation levels of the participants, and the presence
of groups that can facilitate the process. One of the difficulties in assessing the impact of such
participation is that there is often no reliable information about the distribution of benefits and costs
to households, thus making it difficult to render comparative assessments (Osmani 2007).
Some also argue that by diffusing authority and control over management, decentralized
participation can also weaken efficiency (Khwaja 2004). But, depending on the design, this need
not be the case. And others argue that it can lead to resource allocations that violate the true
preferences of community members, as some may withhold or distort information about their
preferences and choices. This problem is perhaps most acute in developing countries, in which
community participation is frequently related to external donor-funded projects. All-too-often in
these cases such participation can intentionally advance preferences that are seen to be more in line
with the interests of the donors than local interests. It is a point that we can be confirmed in the
case of the community forest movement in Nepal. The participants simply try to increase their
chances of obtaining available resources by telling the donors what they want to hear (Platteau
2007).
In short, while participation can lead to important payoffs, there are no guarantees. It
cannot be said without qualifications that decentralized participation leads to greater efficiency
and/or equity. What the experiences suggest is that the conditions of success depends on
conscientious effort and design, both of which depend heavily on the ability of the participants to
effective present their views. As environmental struggles over the siting of environmental hazards
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shows, this depends in turn on the degree of political representation and the distribution of power
that it reflects.
Political Representation and the Distribution of Power
The questions of representation and power related to participatory governance have been
widely discussed in political theory and deliberative democracy in particular, an influential—even
the dominant—contemporary orientation designed to revitalize a stronger conception of democracy
and the public interest based on citizen participation through public deliberation (Smith 2003) Basic
here is the question of how a small group can represent a larger public. Just as important is how
meaningful deliberation can take place against the backdrop of a skewed distribution of power.
Deliberative democracy is an orientation and discussion that has had considerable influence in
environmental political theory (Eckersley, 2004; Baber and Bartlett 2005; Dryzek, 2000;
Baeckstrand 2010).
Deliberative democracy focuses on promoting “debate and discussion aimed at producing
reasonable, well-informed opinion in which participants are willing to revise preferences in light of
discussion, new information, and claims made by fellow participants” (Chambers 2003: 309). It is
grounded in the idea that “deliberate approaches to collective decisions under conditions of conflict
produce better decisions than those resulting from alternative means of conducting politics: Coercion,
traditional deference, or markets.” Thus, “decisions resulting from deliberation are likely to be more
legitimate, more reasonable, more informed, more effective and more politically viable” (Warren 2007:
272). [2]
A critical issue is the relationship of environmental participation to the larger representative
structure of society. Because participatory environmental governance is largely introduced to
[
2] While the theory of deliberative democracy has had the most influence on these projects, the theory of agonistic
democracy can also support the theory and practices of participatory governance.
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compensate for the failures of representative government to adequately connect citizens to their
elected representatives, the ability to bring these two political models together is important
(Wampler 2009). This is especially so, as some mainstream political scientists have argued that the
two are incompatible, a topic taken up below. Examples that provide evidence to the contrary are
introduced in the next section, presenting the environmentally-related experiences from Porto
Alegre and Kerala.
Closely related to representation is the question of power, or what Osmani (2007) calls the
“power gap.“ A function of the asymmetrical power relations inherent to modern societies,
especially those created by the inequalities of rich and poor, this gap poses a difficult barrier to
meaningful environmental participation. As environmental justice studies show, when inequalities
are embedded in powerful patriarchies such projects are prone to be captured and manipulated by
elites, whether they be political leaders and their patronage networks or those providing
development assistance from the outside. Again, we can gain insights into this process in the
following discussion of Porto Alegre and Kerala.
In many ways, participatory environmental governance is a response to this power problem,
as it seeks to give a voice to those without power. But one has to be careful in assessing the degree
to which it can generate unmanipulated participation. At the current state of development,
participatory environmental governance itself often exists as much or more as a strategy for
struggling against the political imbalances rather than for counterbalancing them outright.
A manifestation of this struggle is the problem of co-optation, which makes it difficult to
judge the significance of participation in successful environmental projects. All too often they are
in jeopardy of being co-opted (Malena 2009). Experience shows that success is frequently
rewarded by governmental institutionalization, at which point they are often manipulated to serve
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purposes other than those intended. The World Bank, for example, has deftly co-opted various
participatory projects and their methods to generate support for their own agendas. Having
discovered of the relevance of local involvement and participation from many of its Third World
investment failures, the Bank took an interest in the advantages and institutionalized a participatory
program designed to facilitate direct local contact with the communities it seeks to assist (World
Bank, 1994). Not only have senior bank staff members been directed to get to know a particular
region better through personal participation in programs and projects in its villages or slums, the
bank has pioneered a technique called participatory poverty assessment designed “to enable the
poor people to express their realities themselves” (Chambers, 1997: xvi). It has been adapted from
participatory research experiences in many countries around the world (Norton and Stephens,
1995).
Such instrumentalization of environmental participation, from the more critical perspective
of participatory governance, can be seen as a “political technology” introduced to control processes
and projects, hindering the possibilities of popular engagement. Bourdieu (1977) refers to these as
“officializing strategies” that domesticate participation, directing attention to less active forms of
political engagement. Given the widespread manipulation of participatory techniques, Cooke and
Kothari (2001) are led to describe participation as “the new ideology"
As is the case with service delivery and equity, there is nothing simple or straightforward
about either political representation and equitable power arrangements in participatory projects (Roa
and Mansuri 2012). Indeed, there is no shortage of things that can block effective political
participation in environmental issues. It is a question that again raises the issue of participatory
design and brings us to a discussion of “empowered participatory governance” which has sought to
set out principles for design.
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Empowered Participatory Democracy
Examining a range of cases, including environmental cases, designed to promote active
political involvement of the citizenry, Fung and Wright (2003) have labored to sort out what works.
Acknowledging that complexity makes it difficult for anyone to participate in policy decision-
making, they speculate that “the problem may have more to do with the specific design of our
institutions than with the task they face.” Toward this end, they have examined a range of
empirical experiences (including Porto Alegre and Kerala) in the participatory redesign of
democratic institutions, innovations that elicit the social energy and political influence of citizens—
especially those from the lowest strata of society—in pursuit of solutions to problems that plague
them.
Even though these reforms vary in their organizational designs, the policy issues to be
deliberated, and scope of activities, they all seek to deepen the abilities of ordinary citizens to
effectively participate in the shaping of programs and policies relevant to their own lives,
environmental protection being one of the most important. From their common features they isolate
a set of characteristics that Fung and Wright define as “empowered participatory governance.” The
principles they draw from these cases are designed to enable the progressive “colonization of the
state” and its agencies. Relying on the participatory capabilities of empowered citizens to engage in
reason-based action-oriented decision making, the strategy and its principles are offered as a radical
political step toward a more democratic society.
As a product of this work, they isolate three political principles, their design characteristics,
and one primary background condition. The background enabling condition states that there should
be rough equality of power among the participants. The political principles refer to (1) need of such
experiments to address a particular practical problem; (2) a requirement that deliberation rely upon
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the empowered involvement of ordinary citizens and the relevant; and (3) that each experiment
employs reasoned deliberation in the effort to solve the problems under consideration. The
institutional design characteristics specify (1) the devolution of decision-making and the powers of
implementation power to local action-oriented units; (2) that these local units be connected to one
another and to the appropriate levels of state responsible for supervision, resource allocation,
innovation, and problem-solving; and (3) that the experimental projects can “colonize and
transform” state institutions in ways that lead to the restructuring of the administrative agencies
responsible for dealing with these problems.
While this work is an important step forward, a theory of the design of deliberative
empowerment still requires greater attention to the cultural politics of deliberative space (Fischer
2006). Beyond formal principles concerned with structural arrangements, we need as well research
on the ways the social valorization of a participatory space influences basic discursive processes
such as who speaks, how knowledge is constituted, what can be said, and who decides. From this
perspective, decentralized design principles in environmental governance are necessary but
insufficient requirements for deliberative participation. We need to examine more carefully how
political-cultural and pedagogical strategies can facilitate the deliberative empowerment in
participatory environmental governance.
Participatory Projects and Practices
The theory and practices upon which real-world participatory environmental governance rest
are based on a number of varied sources; they include academic theorizing, but also importantly the
efforts of political activists, social and environmental movements, NGOs, and the works of
governmental practitioners. Of particular significance on the practical front have been experimental
projects in participatory governance, all designed to bring citizens’ reasoned preferences to bear on the
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policy process (Gastil and Levine, 2005). Most of these projects are dedicated to goals closely related
to those spelled out by the theory of deliberative democracy, although many do not emerge from it per
se. Some scholars, though, have argued that deliberative democratic theory should strive to be a
“working theory” for the deliberative experiments of participatory projects (Chambers 2003). There
are now some prominent examples of such interaction, in particular on the part of scholars such as
Fishkin (2009), Warren and Pearce (2008) and Dryzek (2008). They clearly illustrate constructive
“communication between the theorists of deliberative democracy and empirical research on
deliberation” (Fischer 2009: 87).
Participatory experiments are to be found across the globe, from Europe and the US to the
developing and underdeveloped world. In Europe and the US numerous projects have focused on
efforts to develop fora through which citizens’ views on complex economic, environmental and social
issues can be brought to bear directly on policy decisions. Some of these have been organized from the
bottom, whereas others have emerged from the top down. Such research has ranged from
investigations of the traditional citizen survey and public meetings to innovative techniques such as
deliberative polling, televoting, focus groups, national issue conventions, and study circles on to
more sophisticated citizen juries, scenario workshops, planning cells, consensus conferences, and
citizens’ assemblies (Gastil and Levine 2005; Fishkin 2009; Joss and Durant 1995). These
experiences offer important insights as to how to bring citizens into a closer participatory
relationship with environmental decision-makers.
Most important among these efforts have been the citizen jury and the consensus
conference. Developed in Northern Europe and the United States before spreading to a range of
countries around the world, these two deliberative processes permit a high degree of citizen
deliberation on important matters of public policy. Involving many cases related environmental and
21 | P a g e
technology policy issues, they provide citizens with an opportunity to deliberate in considerable
detail among themselves before coming to judgment or decision on questions they are charged to
answer. During the process, they hear from experts and pose their own questions to them, before
deliberating among themselves. But citizens panels are largely advisory in nature; they supply
additional information that can be useful to politicians and the public. Given the limited amount of
space available here, the present discussion will focus more specifically on those deliberative
arrangements built into the governmental structure itself.
The most progressive projects have developed in the developing world, especially in Brazil,
India, and Nepal. These innovations, which I take here to be authentic cases of participatory
environmental governance, include deliberative processes analogous to citizen juries but have more
formally integrated them into the policy processes of established governmental institutions. Of
particular importance are the practices of public budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil and people’s
development planning in Kerala, India. These innovations have been influenced by both social
movements, NGOs, and left-oriented political parties, both theoretically and practically. Turning
first to participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, by all standards one of the most innovative practices
in participatory governance, it has becomes a model widely emulated around the world.
Participatory Budgeting in Brazil. Under public budgeting in Porto Alegre significant parts
of local budgets, including finances for environmental protection, are determined by citizens
through deliberative fora (Baiocchi 2003; Wampler 2009). In Porto Alegre, for example, waste
removal and road reconstruction because of flooding have been part of participatory budgeting.
Perhaps even more significant, in Recife Nova an entire neighborhood was completely
reconstructed in accordance with rigorous environmental standards.
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In a state of 1.3 million inhabitants, long governed by a clientelistic pattern of political
patronage, a left coalition led by the Worker’s Party took office and introduced a publicly
accountable, bottom-up system of budgetary deliberations geared to the needs of local residences.
Involving a multi-level deliberative system, the city of Porto Alegre has been divided into regions
with a Regional Plenary Assembly which meets twice a year to decide budgetary issues. City
administrators, representatives of community groups, and any other interested citizens attend these
assemblies, jointly co-coordinated by the municipal government and community delegates. With
information about the previous year’s budget made available by representatives of the municipal
government, delegates are elected to work out the region’s spending priorities. These are then
discussed and ratified at a second plenary assembly. Representatives then put these forward at a
city-wide participatory budgeting assembly which meets to formulate the city-wide budget from
these regional agendas. After deliberations, the Council submits the budget to the Mayor, who can
either accept the budget or send it back to the Council for revisions. The Council then responds by
either amending the budget or overriding the Mayor’s veto through a vote of two-thirds of the
Council representatives.
The success of the model is clear. The Porto Alegre model of participatory budgeting or a
variant of it has been put into practice in a large number of countries around the world. In Germany
alone, there have been well over 100 exercises in participatory budgeting (or “Buergerhaushalt”),
also applied to environmental local environmental decisions (Franzke and Kleger 2012) .
Peoples’ Planning in Kerala. The second case, that of Kerala, has involved a full-fledged
process of people’s environmental and resource planning (Issac and Heller 2003; Fischer 2000).
Located in the southwestern corner of the country, Kerala has gained attention in the development
community for its impressive economic and social distributional activities in the 1980s. In the mid-
23 | P a g e
1990, a coalition of left parties led by the Communist Party of India/Marxist decided to extend these
activities to include a state-wide, bottom-up system of participatory planning, the goal of which was
to develop the Kerala 5-year Plan to be delivered to the central government in New Delhi.
Pursuing a devolutionary program of village-level participatory planning as a strategy to
both strengthen its electoral base and improve governmental effectiveness, the government decided
that approximately 40 % of the state’s budget would be redirected from the administrative line
departments and sent to newly-established district planning councils, about 900 in number. Each
village, supported by the Science for the People social movement and the Center for Earth Sciences,
formulated a specific development plan that spelled out local environmental problems and resource
needs, development assessment reports, specific projects to be advanced, financing requirements,
procedures for deciding plan beneficiaries, and a system of monitoring the outcomes. These
developments were then accepted or rejected by vote in village assemblies. The final plans were
send to the State Planning Board and incorporated into the state’s 5-Year Plan, sent to New Dehli
for inclusion in the overall development plan of the national government.
It was a process adapted and reproduced in several hundred parts of India, before being
killed off by conservative politicians in Kerela. But there are discussions designed to find a way to
bring it back.
Community Forestry in Nepal. In the case of the community forest movement in Nepal
participatory environmental governance emerged as a project developed by a national federation of
local forest user groups. Evolving in the period after two political revolutions and the struggle to
bring democracy to Nepal after centuries of monarchial rule, the government initiated a number of
reforms designed to facilitate the process. One of them was the Forest Act of 1993 which permitted
the devolution of particular forest activities to the local forest users, including an operational plan to
24 | P a g e
be submitted to the regional District Forest Office for approval and implementation. Because forest
protection has long been in the hands of scientific foresters mainly working for the national forestry
ministry, it proved difficult to carry out the provisions of the Forest Act, in particular those related
to community engagement in the planning processes. In significant part, it became a struggle
between those with scientific knowledge of forests and those with local knowledge about everyday
realities of particular forests.
By forming a federation, the local groups were able to significantly challenge the central
ministry. Toward this end, they introduced a system of participatory decisions-making in forest
governance that succeeded in changing many of the ways that the foresters now relate to them. Not
only did it succeed in introducing new laws and policies, it has had an very important impact on the
practices of many foresters who have come to support the movement.
In view of the significance of the experience, the community in particular the insights it
offers for participatory environmental governance generally. Beyond its impact on forestry policy in
Nepal, the federation came to be a major force in the struggle to democratize the political system
more generally. In view of the significance of the experience, the community forestry movement
offers informative insights for both participatory environmental governance and forestry practices
around the world. Given the importance of forests to global warming, the resulting model of
community forestry became a model that other forest covered countries around the world now
emulate.
As a consequence of these activities, from participatory budgeting, people’s planning and
community forestry, participatory environmental governance has gained a prominent place on the
political spectrum of participatory democracy (Fung2006). Indeed, it has emerged in the 1990 as the
most advance form of among participatory innovations. Promoting decentralized practices, it has
25 | P a g e
added an additional layer of local participatory institutions to an increasingly complex institutional
landscape that in some cases, such as those discussed here, have given rise to transfers of both
resources and decision-making powers. In environmental governance participatory practices are
now ubiquitous and, though the progress fairly slow, there is an increasing turn to the stronger,
more democratic approaches to participatory environmental governance.
In addition to participatory governance’s contribution to democratic practices, the political
impacts are different to other forms of participation. In the case of the citizen jury and the
consensus conference, the outcomes are merely advisory. They offer politicians and decision-
makers a different kind of knowledge to consider in their deliberations, a form of understanding
often more closely akin to the types of thinking they themselves engage in (as opposed to complex
technical reports). But in Kerala, Porto Algre and Nepal by contrast, deliberation was integrated
into the policy decision process. In Kerala, local resource management discussions were
hierarchically channeled up to the State Planning Board for inclusion in the official planning
document. In Porto Alegre budgetary decisions were linked into the official governmental budget-
making process; the outcomes of the deliberations determined an important portion of the budget. In
Nepal, a strong social movement managed to reshape forestry policy and practices, giving local
forest users an important say in the development of forest policy.
Moving Up the Levels: Local Impacts on the National Environmental State
But what about the higher levels of government. An important and challenging question
raised against participatory governance is the contention that it only works at the local level.
Various theorists have argued that it is an important contribution to governance at the local level,
but can contribute little to higher levels of politics, national politics in particular. Basic here is the
26 | P a g e
contention that that participation is “unrealistic.” The issues of government at the higher levels are
simply too complicated for citizen participation to be meaningful. Democracy at this level has to
remain representative at best (Sartori 1987; Przeworski (2010). Such participation, it is argued, can
only be realistic in small groups. Writing from the perspective of social choice theory, Przeworski
(2010) maintains that the “causal efficacy”of democratic participation is a possibility for only a few
in elite circles. Insofar as effectiveness and equality generally conflict, participatory democracy “is
not feasible at the national scale.”
More recently, Pogrebinschi and Samuels (2012) have challenged this assumption pointing
the role of the National Public Policy Conferences in Brazil. Convened by the national executive
branch with strong civil society participation, these policy conferences, start with deliberative
participation among diverse groups at the local level, the results of which are carried forward by
local representatives to the state and regional levels, before being taken up officially by organized
public deliberations at the national level. Covering are range of topics, including environmental
protection, such conferences go on a year, with positive outcomes. Their research demonstrates a
high degree of correspondence between the recommendations in the final reports and the resultant
public policies that make their way through the legislative branch. It is presented as convincing
evidence that participatory democratic deliberations at the muncipal can have a national impact.
The National Public Policy Conference is not participatory governance per se. But the kinds
of deliberations involved are basic to such governance. And it is just here that we can add the
experiences of Kerala and Nepal, which in fact serve as examples. Both illustrate the possibility of
local deliberations influencing higher levels of decision-making. As we saw, through a set of
hierachically interrelated deliberative forums Kerela has formulated its state five-year plans on
resources planning from the bottom up. The plans have been sent forward by the state planning
27 | P a g e
office to New Delhi to be included in the larger five-year plan for the country as a whole. In Nepal a
network of locally based forest user groups, through a federated network (FECOFUN) that extends
upward to regional and national levels, significantly changed the policies and practices of the
central Ministry of Forestry. The deliberative politics of the network also has had a clearly
documented impact of the political culture of a newly democrating nation; indeed, it has been one of
the primary democratizing forces. Both of these examples are clear cases of participatory
environmental resource planning that, albeit in somewhat different ways, demonstrate that strong
participatory goverance can have significant impacts beyond the local level.
Especially interesting here is the fact that in all three cases, the National Public Policy
Conferences, Kerela’s People’s Planning and the Community Forestry movement in Nepal, these
deliberative processes emerged and succeeded because political groups at the top joined together
with grassroots movements from below. That is, the top and the bottom of the power structure must
work together (Fischer 2009). Activists and reformers must emerge at both levels.
Also interesting is the fact that all of these come from the developing world. To some degree
Brazil is an exception here, but not entirely, given that the National Public Policy Conference was
development and introduced long before the country had achieved its current economic status.
Moreover, where they are often discussed in public administration as practices of “good
goverance,“ the experiences presented here show them to emerge from political struggles against
unjust and inequitable social systems. As such, they emerged in civil society but move forward with
the help of particular political parties and public servants willing to help make space for them.
In short, we do not know enough about the social and political factors that have contributed
to the successes of these processes. These cases show, however, that such practices can have an
impact both at the level of level of local goverance and beyond.
28 | P a g e
Although the dramatic successes of are exceptions to the rule, their experiences justify the need for
more empirical research into these democratic innovation process.
Participatory Environmental Expertise: A New Type of Expert?
Of particular significance in these environmental projects is a breed of NGOs working to
represent and serve the needs of marginalized or excluded groups. In many of the newly created
participatory spaces activists have assisted excluded peoples—such as the poor, women, AIDS
victims, and the disabled—in developing a collective presence that has permitted them to speak for
themselves. Through such efforts environmental activists and their citizen groups have in many
cases succeeded in influencing the policies of mainstream institutions. In some cases, these
activities have given rise to a new breed of public servant—frequently schooled in NGOs— devoted
to offering assistance to these groups. As government officials or independent consultants to
parallel institutions—they have often played an essential role in the development and spread of
participatory approaches to environmental governance (Fischer 2009).
The result of these participatory activities has also given rise to a new kind of
professional orientation, one that challenges the standard techno-bureaucratic approaches of the
modern state (Fischer 2000; 2009). These professionals, along with their respective theoreticians,
have sought to reconceptualize the role of the public servant as facilitator of public engagement.
Feldman and Khadermian (2007), for example, have reconceptualized the role of the public
manager as that of creating “communities of participation.” In their view, the challenge confronting
those working in the public sector is to interactively combine knowledge and perspectives from
three separate domains of knowing—the technical, political and local/experiential domains. As the
three cases outlined above make clear, bringing about more inclusive practices of environmental
governance involves inventing participatory contexts in which the representatives of these forms of
29 | P a g e
knowing can discursively share their perspectives in the common pursuit of problem-solving.
Beyond merely identifying and disseminating information from these various ways of
understanding and analyzing policy problems, such work involves translating ideas in ways that
facilitate mutual understanding and environmental deliberation among the participants and
discursively promotes a synthesis of perspectives that helps to simulate different ways of knowing
relevant to the problem at hand.
In many cases participatory expertise involves the development of citizen/expert alliances
and the use of practices such as community-based participatory research and participatory action
research, as was the case in Kerala and Nepal (Fischer 2000). These methods involve professional
experts in the process of helping lay participants conduct their own environmental inquiry on
problems of concern to local residences.
While there have been important efforts to facilitate deliberation between citizens and
environmental experts, there are a number of problems that still need to be dealt with (Fischer
2009). Perhaps most important, professionals are not trained to facilitate participation and many—
maybe most—don’t believe there is any point in engaging citizens in such issues. The successful
efforts, more often than not, are the result of activities engaged in by professionals involved in
progressive social movements of one sort or another (Fischer 2009). In addition, they raise
difficult but important epistemological questions related to the nature of such knowledge: Does it
just involve a division of labor organized around the traditional separation of empirical and
normative issues? Or does it require a new hybrid form of knowledge, involving a fusion of the
empirical and the normative and perhaps a special role for local lay knowledge? Included in this
question is the need to explore the relationship of reason to emotion. Although everybody in
30 | P a g e
politics knows that emotion and passion are basic to the politics of governance, this topic has yet to
receive the attention it deserves in the literature on democratic governance and policy.
Concluding Perspectives
Many of these participatory activities have offered significant new insights into questions
that have long been ignored in traditional political analysis and democratic theory, including the
theory of environmental democracy. If a strong system of representative democracy depends on
vigorous participation from below, then participatory governance has the potential to fill the
“institutional void” that the political theory and contemporary practices of representation has failed
to address. Given that this participatory void extends to the environmental state, participatory
environmental democracy offers an alternative to further technocratization of environmental
policymaking.
It can do this because of the degree to which citizens have shown themselves to be able to
participate meaningfully in the complex environmental decision processes, as demonstrated by the
cases presented here. Such findings are anything but mundane, given the fact that citizens are
regularly said to be unable to understand the problems and thus meaningfully participate. It can
also confront head on the argument that participation impedes managerial efficiency and political
accountability. Indeed, we have seen that participatory environmental governance can not only
improve service delivery but also increase the social equity of programmatic outcomes. Further, it
has the potential to facilitate the creation of new professional forms of environmental expertise,
especially knowledge practices that recognize the value of local environmental knowledge.
Beyond the theoretical realm, however, it should be clear from the foregoing discussion that
much of the practical work on participatory governance involves a collection of separate
experiments and projects that have common threads but often involve outcomes that are difficult to
31 | P a g e
interpret, projects in Porto Alegre, Kerala and Nepal being important exceptions. In this regard, it
is essential to underscore the fact that the experiences with these efforts have by no means been all
positive. It is a story of mixed outcomes, with experiences ranging across the spectrum from very
impressive to disappointing. Indeed, the failures far outnumber the successes. The successful
cases, moreover, offer few uniformities. As Newig (2007:52) sums it up, “it is still an open
empirical questions as to the extent to which participative processes actually contribute to an
improved implementation of environmental policy and thus to a more sustainable usage of the
environment.” The answer, as we have seen, depends on the contextual factors associated with the
particular environmental decision process.
The task of sorting out the positive and negative elements contributing to the success and
failure of such participatory environmental projects thus takes on particular importance. We need to
learn more about the contextual circumstances—power relationship, degrees of inequality, levels of
citizen competence, and more—that promote or hinder such projects, especially those factors
associated with the strong models of participatory environmental governance. Given that there is no
shortage of elements that come into play, such an assessment is challenging.
What then can we conclude? Independent of a good deal of the rhetoric associated with
discussions about participation, the evidence about new forms of participatory governance
illustrates participation to pose difficult issues with no simple solutions. A closer look reveals that
while citizens can participate and that participatory environmental governance can improve both
democratic decision-making and efficient service delivery, participation has to be carefully organized,
facilitated—even cultivated and nurtured.
Given the difficulties involved in designing and managing participatory processes, it comes
as no surprise to learn that citizen participation schemes rarely follow smooth pathways. In the
32 | P a g e
absence of serious attention to the quality and viability of citizen participation, it is usually better to
forgo such projects. Participatory environmental governance, despite its promise, is a complicated
and uncertain business that needs to be carefully thought out in advance (Fischer 2000). This
should be the first priority of those engaged in both the theory and methods of the practice.
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