Environmental governance: Participatory, multi-level - and effective?

Current international and European Union environmental policies increasingly promote collaborative and participatory decision-making on appropriate and multiple governance levels as a means to attain more sustainable policies and a more effective and lasting policy implementation. The entailed shifts of geographical scale of governance can be exemplified by the EU Water Framework Directive in that higher-level policies are devolved not only to the member states but to local collaborative decision-making bodies on natural as opposed to territorial scales. To date, empirical evidence and theoretical considerations have remained ambiguous about the environmental outcomes of such modes of governance. At the same time, the relationship between multi-level governance and non-state actor involvement remains a largely uncharted terrain. Accordingly, a twofold research agenda is mapped out: How does public participation work in different governance contexts? And what potential do multi-level governance environments have to foster the effectiveness of participatory governance? Drawing on scholarly literature on multi-level governance, policy implementation, public participation and complex systems, we develop five sets of hypotheses on how the number of policy levels and geographical rescaling affect citizen participation, actor interests and policy outcomes. We present empirical results based on a comparative meta-analysis of 47 case studies in environmental governance in North America and the EU, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. --Civic participation,multi-level governance,re-scaling,policy implementation,institutional fit,meta-analysis,case survey

Experiments in climate governance – lessons from a systematic review of case studies in transition research

Experimentation has been proposed as one of the ways in which public policy can drive sustainability transitions, notably by creating or delimiting space for experimenting with innovative solutions to sustainability challenges. In this paper we report on a systematic review of articles published between 2009 and 2015 that have addressed experiments aiming either at understanding decarbonisation transitions or enhancing climate resilience. Using the case survey method, we find few empirical descriptions of real-world experiments in climate and energy contexts in the scholarly literature, being observed in only 25 articles containing 29 experiments. We discuss the objectives, outputs and outcomes of these experiments noting that explicit experimenting with climate policies could be identified only in 12 cases. Based on the results we suggest a definition of climate policy experiments and a typology of experiments for sustainability transitions that can be used to better understand the role of and learn more effectively from experiments in sustainability transitions

Under which conditions does public participation really advance sustainability goals? Findings of a Meta-Analysis of stakeholder involvement in environmental Decision-making

Environmental governance on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly relies on the participation of non-state actors such as citizens and organized interest groups. Prompted by the U.S. Negotiated Rulemaking Act of 1990 and the Rio Declaration of 1992, which demands in principle 10 that “environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens”, followed by the Århus Convention of 1998, four recent European Union directives 1 have legally institutionalized access to information and public participation in environmental decisions..

More input - better output: does citizen involvement improve environmental governance?

Bezug nehmend auf eine Analyse politischer Dokumente zeigen die Verfasser, dass die Partizipation zu einem integralen Element der offiziellen Rhetorik von EU-Institutionen geworden ist, die sie 'präventiv' den Vorwürfen bezüglich des Demokratiedefizits entgegensetzen. Es wird argumentiert, dass die Steigerung der Output-Legitimität oder der politischen Effektivität lediglich durch Erhöhung der Input-Legitimität (Inklusion, Verfahrenslegitimität) erreicht werden kann. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass Partizipation die Legitimität und Effektivität der Governance steigert. Die Autoren analysieren einzelne Mechanismen, durch die eine positive Wirkung der Partizipation auf die Qualität der Entscheidungen und deren Implementierung gewährleistet werden kann. Abschließend werden empirische Forschungsergebnisse herangezogen, mit deren Hilfe die Bedeutung von Partizipation im Rahmen ökologiebezogener Entscheidungsprozesse verdeutlicht wird. (ICF

Partizipation und neue Formen der Governance

Formen kollektiver Entscheidungsfindung werden in den letzten Jahren nicht nur durch staatliche Institutionen dominiert, sondern auch von zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationsformen beeinflusst. Diese zunehmende Partizipation ist auch der steigenden Komplexität moderner Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeitsprobleme geschuldet. Der Autor diskutiert das Konzept der Partizipation im Zusammenhang mit gesellschaftlicher Governance. Partizipation bedeutet Beteiligung an kollektiven Entscheidungen. Fünf zentrale Elemente charakterisieren Partizipation näher: Kooperation/Kommunikation, Öffentlicher Raum, Mitbestimmung, Machtabgabe und Repräsentation. Als Prozess tritt Partizipation auf, wenn der Charakter der Informationsflüsse, die Stärke des Einflusses auf die Entscheidungen sowie der Kreis der beteiligten Akteure untersucht wird. Innerhalb der Umweltsoziologie werden Kerndiskurse um die Leitthemen Emanzipation, demokratische Legitimität und Effektivität geführt. Stand der Forschung in Bezug auf die Effektivität ist, dass Partizipation in modernen Demokratien sich als erhebliches Governance-Potenzial identifizieren lässt, insbesondere in Hinsicht auf Umweltbezug und gesellschaftlicher Akzeptanz. Forschungslücken liegen in einer Systematisierung von Fallstudien zur Partizipation und Öffentlichkeitsbeteiligung, in der genauen Erfassung von Effektivität sowie in der Integration natur- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Konzepte im Umweltbereich. (ICC

Experiments in climate governance – a systematic review of research on energy and built environment transitions

Experimentation has been proposed as a key way in which governance drives sustainability transitions, notably by creating space for innovative solutions to emerge. In seeking to bring greater coherence to the literatures on climate and sustainability governance experiments, this article reports on a systematic review of articles published between 2009 and 2015. Based on these results a new definition and typology of climate governance experiments is suggested. The typology distinguishes between the various purposes experiments can have, including niche creation, market creation, spatial development, and societal problem solving. It deepens the understanding of the diversity in experimenting by highlighting the salient features of different types of governance experiments. It can therefore guide future research to generate more cumulative research findings contributing to a better understanding of the role and outcomes of experiments in societal transitions. The findings also suggests that real transitions towards low-carbon and climate-resilient societies will require a systematic deliberate combination of different types of experiments

Participatory and collaborative governance for sustainable flood risk management: An emerging research agenda

[No abstract available