involved project preliminary findings - what makes stakeholder participation in environmental...

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What makes stakeholder participation in environmental management work?


Preliminary findings from the Involved projectMark Reed, Joris de Vente, Lindsay Stringer & Jens Newig

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Plan

1. Introduction2. What can published literature tell us?3. Preliminary findings from new research

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1. Introduction

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Participation: frustrating...

... yet alluring

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How can we design participatory processes that

effectively engage stakeholders in environmental decisions?

How can we harness participation to achieve social and environmental benefits, but avoid the pitfalls?

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2. What can published literature tell us?

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1. Start talking to people as soon as you can

• From concept to completion

• Early involvement leads to higher quality and more durable decisions

• Avoid raising false expectations: make sure there’s something to negotiate

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2. Make sure you’re talking to the right people

• The nature and legitimacy of outcomes is significantly affected by participant mix

• Lots of methods available now for “stakeholder analysis”

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• Design the process to the goals

• Identify goals with stakeholders

• Be prepared to negotiate and compromise

• Partnerships, ownership and active engagement in the process is more likely

3. Make sure you know what people want to talk about

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4. Be flexible: base level of participation & methods on your context & objectives

• Communicate e.g. information dissemination via leaflets or the mass media, hotlines and public meetings

• Consulte.g. consultation documents, opinion polls and referendums, focus groups and surveys

• Participate e.g. citizen’s juries, consensus conferences, task-forces and public meetings with voting

• Tailor your methods to context

• Manage power

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What makes stakeholder participation in environmental management work?5. Get a facilitator

• The outcome of a participatory process is more sensitive to the manner in which it is conducted than the tools that are used

• Don’t underestimate the power of investing in a good facilitator to bring people together and deliver high quality outcomes

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6. Put local and scientific knowledge on an equal footing• Science can help people make more informed decisions • Local knowledge can question assumptions, and perhaps

lead to more rigorous science

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• Decisions based on a combination of local and scientific knowledge may by more robust due to more comprehensive information inputs

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3. New research…

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Twinned projects

• Environmental Consequences of Participatory Governance (ECOPAG): a comparative meta-analysis of case studies in environmental decision-making (led by Jens Newig)

• Involved: in-depth interviews with those who led and participated in environmental management projects/programmes in Spain & Portugal

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Goal

• To help people design participatory processes that are more likely to deliver the outcomes people want, by understanding why different approaches work in different contexts

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Questions

• Does participatory environmental governance – as opposed to more hierarchical, top-down approaches: – Improve the quality of decisions or policies, facilitate their

implementation and thus achieve environmental goals more swiftly and effectively?

– Benefit participants in other ways linked to the process e.g. learning, trust etc., and achieve their stated goals (whether related to the environment or not)?

• Which conditions and which modes of participation affect the outcomes of participatory processes?

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Involved

• Semi-structured interview & questionnaire (adapted sub-set of Ecopag items) analysing:– Different participatory processes in comparable

socio-economic and biophysical contexts• 5 each in Spain/Portugal

– Comparable participatory processes in different contexts

• DESIRE/DesertLinks in Spain/Portugal and DESIRE in 12 countries

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Emerging lessons• Low levels of participation may lead to simple solutions:

easily implemented and accepted but perhaps ineffective• High levels of participation may lead to deeper

understanding, learning and more complex solutions: more effective but harder to apply

• Policy makers with actual decision-making power, need to be included in the process for short-term impact

• In some cases, their presence created a power imbalance that limited active participation & generation of new ideas

• But if decision-makers not part of process, immediate implementation of findings is less likely

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Emerging lessons

• If land managers are well represented, outcomes are generally economically and practically feasible, and there are more social benefits (social learning, better functioning social networks, increased trust)

• Involvement of this group increases likelihood that process outcomes are implemented in longer term

• To get participation of land managers, the process needs to be brought to their local context and communication tailored appropriately

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Ecopag

• Sample of c.300 existing, published case studies

• Precise coding according to theoretically informed scheme transforms qualitative into quantitative data for statistical analysis

• All cases coded by 3 coders

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Preliminary findings of a 47-case-comparison

• High inter-coder reliability

• No confirmation of the hypothesis that participation improves environmental standards of decisions

• Weak evidence that participation improves implementation of environmental decisions

• Single most important factor to explain outputs/outcomes: preferences of involved actors (r = 0.85 with, p < 0.001)

• Context variables influence correlations between process and outputs/outcomes

(Newig / Fritsch 2008; Fritsch / Newig in review)

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More informationhttp://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~lecmsr/involved

http://homepages.see.leeds.ac.uk/~lecmsr/involved

involved project preliminary findings - what makes stakeholder participation in environmental...

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