Home

What do we know already?

Publications

People

Contact

Summary

Involved is a research project investigating what makes stakeholder participation in environmental management work. By understanding why different approaches work in different contexts, we want to help people design participatory processes that are more likely to deliver the outcomes people want.

It will ask who benefits in what ways, and how outcomes are influenced by the design of participatory processes and the contexts in which they take place. In doing so, the project will develop new theoretical and methodological insights that can enhance stakeholder participation in environmental management. It will do this by analysing: i) different participatory processes in comparable socio-economic and biophysical contexts; and ii) comparable participatory processes in different contexts.

The project runs from 1 December 2009 till 31 December 2012 and has a budget of £120K. The project is co-ordinated from the University of Aberdeen, with collaborators from the Universities of Leeds and Leuphana, and members of the EU-funded DESIRE project.

Rationale

The nature of most environmental problems demands decision-making that is flexible to changing circumstances, and embraces a diversity of knowledges and values. To achieve this, stakeholder participation is increasingly being sought and embedded into environmental decision-making, across scales from the local to the international. This is largely due to the many perceived benefits of stakeholder participation, whether pragmatic (e.g. making better decisions) or normative (e.g. empowering people to make more democratic decisions). However, critiques of participation now abound, and there is growing concern that many of the claimed benefits are not being realised. This research assesses these claims, both for and against participation, by analysing: i) different participatory processes in comparable socio-economic and biophysical contexts; and ii) comparable participatory processes in different contexts. It will ask who benefits in what ways, and how outcomes are influenced by the design of participatory processes and the contexts in which they take place. Existing attempts tend to be based on analyses of a small numbers of projects using either quantitative meta-analysis or more qualitative case study approaches. These studies have tended to focus on evaluating the process rather than the outcomes. This may be partly due to the highly fractured nature of the theoretical literature on stakeholder participation. Without a coherent theoretical framework, it is difficult to select appropriate evaluation criteria and data collection methods. Through an analysis of published literature, drawing largely on grounded theory approaches, Reed (2008) provides an essential first step by building theory to explain the conditions under which stakeholder participation can meaningfully contribute to environmental decision-making. This analysis identifies a number of areas where evidence is still required to test and refine emerging theory, and provides a basis for this proposal. In order to design more effective and appropriate participatory processes, research needs to better understand and prioritise the factors that make stakeholder participation lead to normative and pragmatic benefits under different conditions. Given the challenge of replicating under all potential combinations of conditions, similar participatory processes will be compared under different socio-economic and biophysical conditions, and different participatory approaches and methods will be compared under similar conditions. Such analyses need to work with stakeholders to systematically evaluate participatory processes against criteria derived from both published literature and from stakeholders themselves. In this way it will be possible to develop more rigorous theory to explain how participatory processes work, which can enhance the future development of participatory methods.

 

Research questions:

1. (How) can multi-stakeholder participatory processes be designed to deliver enhanced pragmatic and normative benefits in different socio-economic and biophysical contexts? i) What are the challenges to participation presented by different socio-economic and biophysical conditions? ii) What types and levels of participation have been used in these different conditions, and with what levels of success? iii) How have processes been designed or adapted to successfully overcome barriers to participation?

2. What other mechanisms (e.g. social learning, social creativity) play a role delivering benefits from participation in different contexts?

3. How does the socio-economic and biophysical context in which participation takes place influence the outcomes of participatory processes?
 

Methods

The applicant will work with an interdisciplinary team (covering geography, political ecology, and environmental governance, planning and management), drawing on a “realistic evaluation” approach (Pawson and Tilley, 1997) to address each of the questions above. RQs 1 and 2 will be addressed by analysing different participatory processes in comparable contexts. To do this, the RA will enter secondary data from around 150 participatory environmental management projects into a database according to pre-determined information fields. This will be collected from published literature, then checked and supplemented through a questionnaire with project staff and/or participants. A preliminary list of information fields will be supplemented/revised through a questionnaire trial for this research. The questionnaire will include, for example, questions about:

i) the combination of strengths and challenges that each project faced;

ii) objectives of the participatory process (as originally stated and any changes made);

iii) measures taken to build on the strengths and address the challenges through process design and implementation (e.g. level of involvement of different stakeholder groups at different phases of planning/implementation/evaluation, effectiveness of facilitation during any meetings, use of stakeholder analysis), and the level of perceived effectiveness of these measures;

iv) evidence of other mechanisms (e.g. social learning, social creativity) that may deliver benefits from participation;

v) outcomes of the documented participatory processes (e.g. evidence about the quality of decisions made through participation including perceived achievement of stated project objectives and wider consequences of decisions for policy and practice, evidence about the durability of decisions including maintenance of project outcomes and their acceptance by wider stakeholder communities); and

vi) interviewee perceptions on reasons for the success or failure of stakeholder participation in each project. This information will form the basis for a meta-analysis of participatory projects.

To more rigorously explore hypotheses about what makes participation work that will emerge from the quantitative analysis, case study fieldwork will be carried out, with projects in Spain and Chile during 2009. The case studies have been chosen in countries with DESIRE study sites that represent different socio-economic and biophysical contexts. This will compare the participatory process applied in the DESIRE project with project(s) elsewhere in each country in similar socio-economic and biophysical contexts, but with different levels of stakeholder participation; and will also aim to directly address RQ2. In Spain, the research will compare the DESIRE process with Desertlinks. In Chile, the research will compare the DESIRE project with “El Llamado del Espino”, a participatory permaculture project addressing desertification. Project teams will be interviewed using the questionnaire above, and semi-structured interviews with team members and stakeholders will explore perceptions about why stakeholder participation led to the outcomes identified in the questionnaires. RQ3 will be addressed by analysing comparable participatory processes in different socio-economic and environmental contexts. This will be done by conducting the above questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with researchers from the DESIRE project who are replicating the same participatory process in 16 study sites internationally. Questionnaires will also be administered with researchers in the less participatory DESERTLINKS project in four DESIRE countries. This information will be supplemented through further case study work in Spain and Chile, including participant observation, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with team members and stakeholders. Data analysis will combine: i) Grounded Theory Analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) of transcripts based on open questions from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews from case studies; and ii) quantitative analysis of numerical data in the database.

Funded by a Research Development Award from:

A collaboration between: