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

Publications

  1. Finite element modeling of laser beam welding for residual stress calculation
  2. Internet research differs from research on internet users
  3. Frame-based Data Factorizations
  4. Gerbil – Benchmarking named entity recognition and linking consistently
  5. Introduction to the Design, Implementation, and Management of Digital Government Policies and Strategies Minitrack
  6. Strengthening the transformative impulse while mainstreaming real-world labs: Lessons learned from three years of BaWü-Labs
  7. Learning in the "Third Space"
  8. Introduction: Habitual Action, Automaticity, and Control
  9. Practice and carryover effects when using small interaction devices
  10. Teaching Sustainable Development in a Sensory and Artful Way — Concepts, Methods, and Examples
  11. Unraveling Privacy Concerns in Complex Data Ecosystems with Architectural Thinking
  12. Influence of Mg content in Al alloys on processing characteristics and dynamically recrystallized microstructure of friction surfacing deposits
  13. A Two-Stage Augmented Extended Kalman Filter as an Observer for Sensorless Valve Control in Camless Internal Combustion Engines
  14. Stimulating Computing
  15. Comparison of three methods of length compensation in a parallel kinematic and their equivalence conditions
  16. Introduction
  17. Can a Revision of the Universal Service Scope Result in Substantive Change?
  18. Modeling and simulation of the heterogenous material behavior in thermal-sprayed coatings
  19. Sliding Mode Control of an Inductive Power Transmission System with Maximum Efficiency
  20. Hybrid modelling by machine learning corrections of analytical model predictions towards high-fidelity simulation solutions
  21. Estimated substitution elasticities of a nested CES production function approach for Germany
  22. Short-arc measurement and fitting based on the bidirectional prediction of observed data
  23. Graph-Based Early-Fusion for Flood Detection
  24. Adaptive Notch Filter in Wavelet Packet Trees
  25. An introduction to sliding mode control for interdisciplinary education
  26. Short and long-term dominance of negative information in shaping public energy perceptions
  27. Deconstructing and reconstructing diversity in client-provider-relationships of social work
  28. Analysis of the relevance of models, influencing factors and the point in time of the forecast on the prediction quality in order-related delivery time determination using machine learning
  29. A Framework for Applying Natural Language Processing in Digital Health Interventions
  30. Vielfalt des Alterns - Differenz oder Integration?
  31. Changing the decision context to enable social learning for climate adaptation
  32. On the Equivalence of Transmission Problems in Nonoverlapping Domain Decomposition Methods for Quasilinear PDEs