An Evidence-based Approach to the Assessment of Public Participation in Environmental Governance: A conceptual and methodological overview of the ‘EDGE’ project

Activity: Talk or presentationPresentations (poster etc.)Research

Ed Challies - presenter

Public participation in environmental governance is widely believed to produce more environmentally sustainable policy outcomes than less participatory forms of governance. Scholarly literature and current (European) public policy assume that public participation leads to better-informed decisions, collective learning and a stronger consideration of ‘ecological’ values, as well as higher levels of acceptance and compliance. Participation is thereby expected to lead to ‘better’ environmental outcomes. However, the benefits of participation are disputed on theoretical as well as empirical grounds. While there is much faith in the merits of participatory environmental governance, evidence is lacking. The ‘EDGE’ project – Evaluating the Delivery of Environmental Governance using an Evidence-based Research Design – employs an innovative mixed methods approach, with the aim of substantially improving our knowledge on what works in environmental governance.

The paper outlines a framework for conceptualising the relationship between decision-making processes, policy outputs, social and environmental outcomes, and concrete environmental impacts. We then describe our three-pronged approach, which combines: (1) Development of a theoretically-informed analytical coding scheme, applied to a large-N case survey meta-analysis (Yin & Heald 1975; Larsson 1993) of documented cases of environmental decision-making, designed for high external validity; (2) A novel field experimental design, responding to calls for the extension of this approach in political science (Gerber & Green 2002), for the investigation of citizen participation in EU governance processes (in the context of EU Floods Directive implementation), and designed for high internal validity, and; (3) A retrospective case study approach to analysing citizen engagement in participatory planning (in the context of EU Water Framework Directive implementation). We expect that our findings will significantly advance scientific understanding of the environmental consequences of participatory governance, extend the frontiers of meta-analytical and field experimental methodology, and yield insights of value for policymakers and practitioners.
05.10.2012

Event

Berlin Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change 2012 : Evidence for Sustainable Development

05.10.1206.10.12

Berlin, Germany

Event: Conference

Recently viewed

Activities

  1. Kunstuniversität Linz
  2. HyperKult XXI. 2012
  3. Dynamics Days Europe 2018
  4. Rudimentary theory of entrepreneurship
  5. How teachers use digital data: a systematic review
  6. 2nd International Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Science and Engineering - MACISE 2020
  7. Linking Teaching and Learning Formats with Student Development of Key Sustainability Competencies
  8. School Innovation through Knowledge Flows: Does Open Innovation Make the Difference?
  9. Do we need a new paradigm for mastering existing and future challenges of the urban water cycle
  10. Corporate Responsibility Evolution Models: Concepts, Evidence and Implications
  11. Ocean eddies and the polar vortex: coherence in complex systems
  12. Sym­po­si­um "Degrees of Freedom. Art Programs at Universities"
  13. Lodz University of Technology
  14. Art and Sustainability: Aesthetics of Complexity
  15. Conceptualising Animal Resistance: Questions and Approaches
  16. Workshop: Schreibtypengerecht Schreiben - 2018
  17. Journal of Pragmatics (Zeitschrift)
  18. Reciprocity and Democracy
  19. 20th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms - ESA 2012
  20. Where tasks, technology, and textbooks meet: Intelligent tutoring systems on the task-based language teacher's horizon (SLTED, Universität Wien)
  21. Peter Lang Verlag (Verlag)
  22. Greta Claire Gaard
  23. The Justice Dimension of Sustainability - A systematic and general conceptual framework
  24. Urban struggles, frontiers of capital, and migration in the current global crisis: A perspective from Berlin
  25. Workshop on Gender Responsive Policy Making - 2015
  26. Model choice and size distribution: a Bayquentist approach
  27. Comparing responses of carbon dyamics to elevated atmosperic CO2 concentrations in arable crop rotations in Germany and China
  28. What is in the attention of pre-service teachers while teaching? An eye-tracking study about attention processes during standardized teaching situations