This article makes the case that legally required participation methods in the US not only do not meet most basic goals for public participation, but they are also counterproductive, causing anger and mistrust. Both theory and practice are dominated by ambivalence about the idea of participation itself. Both struggle with dilemmas that make the problems seem insoluble, such as the conflict between the individual and collective interest or between the ideal of democracy and the reality that many voices are never heard. Cases are used to draw on an emerging set of practices of collaborative public engagement from around the world to demonstrate how alternative methods can better meet public participation goals and how they make moot most of the dilemmas of more conventional practice. Research shows that collaborative participation can solve complex, contentious problems such as budget decision making and create an improved climate for future action when bitter disputes divide a community. Authentic dialogue, networks and institutional capacity are the key elements. The authors propose that participation should be understood as a multi-way set of interactions among citizens and other players who together produce outcomes. Next steps involve developing an alternative practice framework, creating forums and arenas, adapting agency decision processes, and providing training and financial support.

Reframing Public Participation: Strategies for the 21st Century

This article makes the case that legally required participation methods in the US not only do not meet most basic goals for public participation, but they are also counterproductive, causing anger and mistrust. Both theory and practice are dominated by ambivalence about the idea of participation itself. Both struggle with dilemmas that make the problems seem insoluble, such as the conflict between the individual and collective interest or between the ideal of democracy and the reality that many voices are never heard. Cases are used to draw on an emerging set of practices of collaborative public engagement from around the world to demonstrate how alternative methods can better meet public participation goals and how they make moot most of the dilemmas of more conventional practice. Research shows that collaborative participation can solve complex, contentious problems such as budget decision making and create an improved climate for future action when bitter disputes divide a community. Authentic dialogue...

/pdf/reframing-public-participation-strategies-for-the-21st-1o8y08xrf1.pdf

Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st century

This paper is concerned with debates over the implementation of sustainability objectives. In particular, it focuses on policies that address the ‘value‐action gap’ in environmental policy. Using evidence from the author's research connected with the UK Going for Green Sustainable Communities Project in Huntingdonshire, the paper highlights the tensions between national policies that are based on an ‘information deficit’ model of participation, and local research and experience that posits a more complex relationship between individuals and institutions. While this suggests the need to develop more differentiated policies based on the restructuring of socioeconomic and political institutions, the paper warns against knee‐jerk calls for more local, community or public participation which simply replace one set of generalised appeals with another. The paper concludes that greater emphasis must be placed on the negotiation of partnerships that are more sensitive to local diversity, and which involve...

Overcoming the ‘value‐action gap’ in environmental policy: Tensions between national policy and local experience

In this paper we analyze a turn to “quality” in both food production and consumption. We argue that quality in the food sector, as it is being asserted at the present time, is closely linked to nature and the local embeddedness of supply chains. We thus outline the broad contours of this shift and discuss the most appropriate theoretical approaches. We consider political economy, actor-network theory, and conventions theory and argue that, whereas political economy has proved useful in the analysis of globalization, it may prove less so in the examination of quality. We concentrate, therefore, upon actor-network theory and conventions theory and show that the former allows nature to be brought to the center of analytical attention but provides few tools for the analysis of quality, especially in the context of the food sector. Conventions theory, on the other hand, links together a range of aspects found in food supply chains and allows us to consider the establishment of quality as a system of ne...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/144549.pdf

Quality, Nature, and Embeddedness: Some Theoretical Considerations in the Context of the Food Sector

Developments in the agricultural industry are requiring dramatic changes in the role of the farmer away from intensive production oriented approaches towards more sustainable forms of agriculture. While this may appear to require a relatively simply change in emphasis, production based roles not only contain economic value, but contain social value in that they are used to communicate status as a 'good farmer'. Thus, when farmers are asked to change approaches to agriculture, they are not only incurring economic costs but also social costs and this is rarely, if at all, acknowledged. This study uses a symbolic interactionist framework to investigate the symbolic meaning of intensive agricultural production: how crops/livestock are perceived by farmers, how they convey status, and how they are linked with the status of the farm family within the farming community. It concludes that understanding the true meaning of agricultural activities on the farm and considering these factors in the development of policy may reduce the potential loss of established farm families from the land and the subsequent loss of decades or even centuries of experience, knowledge and local history.

Seeing Through the ‘Good Farmer's’ Eyes: Towards Developing an Understanding of the Social Symbolic Value of ‘Productivist’ Behaviour

Constructing the Countryside

Regulating the new rural spaces: the uneven development of land

Arguments in favour of participative democratic practices have been promoted stridently in recent years as trust in existing political institutions has receded. These arguments assume the declining ability of elected members to represent increasingly diverse constituencies in a period of rapid change, and a sense of powerlessness among citizens in the face of distant economic and political forces. There have been few attempts to review the available empirical evidence on whether deliberative and inclusionary processes lead to ‘better’ decisions. For the United Kingdom, evidence is limited, except in the land-use planning field, and we argue that in present circumstances their primary role should be to stimulate wider civil engagement as a means of restoring trust. ‘Better’ decisions will then follow. However, barriers to their acceptance remain, not least in the need to create sufficient incentive for citizens to participate and in the requirement that established economic and political interests devote s...

Deliberation and inclusion: vehicles for increasing trust in UK public governance?

In this paper, we review recent developments in political economy approaches to agricultural geography. During the last decade, the main areas of debate have shifted from materialist concerns about uneven development, transformation of the family farm, and the role of the state to the related questions of consumption and social nature. We emphasize the common challenges faced by economic geographers addressing the embeddedness of economic relations in social, political, and cultural practices, including the need for theoretical approaches which examine the differential constitution of "structural" processes, their articulation in localities, and the role of actors. To illustrate, we recount recent changes in British farming that demonstrate the continuous repositioning of agriculture within restructured rural spaces and an increasingly integrated, corporate agro-food chain. From these changes new themes emerge. These include those of nature, specifically relations between "natural" and "social" processes, contested meanings of the natural world, and the environmental regulation of agriculture, and the growing need to address aspects of consumption, ranging from food safety to the delivery of amenity, landscape, and ecological "improvements."

Richard Munton

Papers

Constructing the Countryside

Regulating the new rural spaces: the uneven development of land

Deliberation and inclusion: vehicles for increasing trust in UK public governance?

Agricultural Geography and the Political Economy Approach: A Review

Towards a political economy of capitalist agriculture: a British perspective