Proceedings of Conference. 4th-7th June 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
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The role of scale and representation in public participation: Insights from recent participatory processes on genetically modified organisms

Claudia Carter, Katrine Soma, Valborg Kvakkestad and Arild Vatn

The Macaulay Land Use Research Institute, Aberdeen

Decision-making on new technologies often requires making choices under radical uncertainty considering long-term perspectives. There is extensive literature and emerging political will that this can no longer be the exclusive realm of decision-makers and experts, but needs to involve the wider public – at least by consultation and ideally through active participation. This paper is based on a comparative study of several recent deliberative events across Europe on the commercialisation of GMOs. We focus on how issues of representation and scale may influence the quality of the process and the characteristics of the results. Specifically, we are interested in the following dimensions of scale: (i) the geographical scale of the participatory process; (ii) the scale of the problem; and (iii) the time scale. A fundamental issue regarding representation is whether a small group of participants is able to represent the wider community. This issue seems to be exacerbated when decisions no longer just affect local communities but a whole nation or supra-national regions; thus we will consider whether and how outcomes may vary with different size events. In terms of representation of knowledge, we try to assess how the level and type of expert knowledge may impact on public participatory events and their outcomes. Finally, we will look at how interests of future generations have been represented. We conclude by putting these findings into the wider context of environmental governance and institutional change.


Participatory Approaches in Multi-level Governance of Biodiversity in the European Union

Thomas Koetz 1*, Sybille van den Hove 1, Felix Rauschmayer 2, Juliette Young 3

  1. Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain;
  2. UFZ–Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig-Halle, Germany;
  3. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Banchory, UK

The PATH project aims at taking a critical look at advances in participation in policy deliberation with an emphasis on issues of scale and representation. This is an extended summary of a draft paper which was presented during the PATH Conference in Edinburgh in June 2006. It addresses one of the three study areas of the PATH project: biodiversity loss.

In the following, we frame questions pertaining to participation in the context of multi-level governance. Over the years, participation has emerged as one of the key principles of environmental governance (van den Hove 2000).

As a consequence, a general normative stance towards participation is encompassed in the institutionalisation of governance; for example in Principle 10 of Rio Declaration, the EC White Paper on Governance, or the Aarhus Convention. We define participatory approaches as institutional settings where the public and/or stakeholders of different types are brought together to participate more or less directly, and more or less formally, in some stage of the decision-making process. Stakeholders are deemed to be of different types if, for a given issue, they hold different worldviews, and act on the basis of different rationales. Hence, participation refers to the implication in the decision-making process of persons external to the formal politico-administrative circle (van den Hove 2006).   Biodiversity loss is a complex issue and both, drivers of biodiversity loss and response mechanisms are of inherently global dimension and at the same time deeply rooted in the local context. Such complexity places the issue in a multi-level governance framework, crossing both local and global dimensions of both, the issue at hand and the institutions addressing it. The case of EU biodiversity policy provides a good setting studying participation in a context of multi-level governance for two main reasons. First, EU biodiversity policy development reaches back as far as the 1970s and has been –and remains– highly controversial. As such, it provides a broad range of positive as well as negative examples related to theory and practice of participatory approaches. Second, EU environmental policies, and in particular biodiversity policies, mirror the wider EU evolution towards a multilevel polity and the inherent contradictions accompanying this evolution. “These contradictions include the maintenance of unity in diversity, the competition between national priorities and supranational imperatives, and the distribution of powers between actors at different spatial levels of government” (Jordan 2002, 321). Moreover, the European Union remains the most established example of an institutionalised multi-level governance system.

We explore how participation has been theorised and practiced in this multi-level governance framework. We focus mainly on the political scale rather than the many other scales that are also relevant to the question of participation (e.g., power, formality, space, time, etc.).

Three main conclusions emerged from our analysis of case studies: the need to take historical developments into account; the context-specific nature of participatory approaches, and the slow translation into practice of the three major rhetorical shifts in biodiversity governance which we used as guiding threads in our exploration. These shifts are presented in the following section.

A scale is a spatial, temporal, quantitative or analytical dimension used to describe a phenomenon. (Gibson et al. 2000)

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