Frans Coenen

LA21-processes, on the basis of chapter 28 of Agenda, are under way in more than 4000 municipalities all over the world. A Local Agenda 21 can be characterised as a local action plan for the achievement of sustainable development, which has to be worked out through a broad consultative process between local authorities, citizens and relevant stakeholder groups. The underlying assumption is that a transition towards sustainable development can never be reached without the involvement of all societal actors. For such a consultation process a participatory reform is needed which leads to participation in an early stage of decision making with broad participants involvement. This paper concentrates on the experiences in a number of Western European countries. In these countries the effects on the ground of LA21-processes on participative practises are becoming visible. The general picture that we will sketch is that the impact of LA21 as a participatory reform is rather limited. The mai...

The result of the first research phase of the project was an outline of the playing field of local climate policy. The utility of options and instruments from the playing field is examined on the basis of literature and interviews with local governments. In the process, barriers for the implementation of options are illustrated. The evaluation of the playing field in practise shows that local governments often utilise only a part of their playing field. Even local governments that excel and are familiar throughout the country in relation to one particular task area ignore other task areas. The reasons why options and instruments are not fully utilised vary per task area: not enough internal support; lack of clear policy framework; climate policy must join in with other targets or local governments depend on cooperation of other actors. Nevertheless, generally speaking the success and failure factors in utilising options in the local government playing field are often related to the ...

As explained in the introductory chapter, a careful attempt to consider the link between participation and the quality of environmental decision-making — with particular concern for the functional perspective and thus societal survival – needs to deal with the issue of ‘level’, in the sense of the location, scale, and jurisdiction over which environmental decision-making is to be effective. Whether the issue is global warming, producing impacts over the entire planet, or a seemingly local matter, like the siting of a hazardous waste facility or the regulation of noise pollution in a municipality, effective decisions would seem to require a sensible connection between the scope and impact of an environmental challenge, on the one hand, and the relevant institutions and stakeholders – including the broad public –, on the other. There is no such thing as the problem scale for environmental questions. As mentioned in the first chapter, such issues can appear at local, regional, national, fluvial, continental, or global levels. ‘Thinking globally, acting locally’ is thus not a very helpful general action principle. Rather, it can be sensible only if the decision-making incorporates some strategy for associating local involvement and action with forces and actors that can have causal impact at the appropriate points on the real problems that demand attention. Otherwise, participation may be a sop, or a chimera, little more than a form of unintentionally symbolic politics. Efficacious participation requires more than appropriate motivation, tools, and involvement. It demands the right kind of articulation between the scale and methods of participation, on the. one hand, and the requisite causal levers, on the other.

Being a delta, one third of the Dutch territory consists of flood-prone areas. This article discusses how the local civil protection system in the Netherlands responds to increasing climate change-induced flooding risks in terms of risk perception and action. Case studies on three Safety Regions are used to better understand the relation between climate change risk and changes in civil protection systems and practices. Data is presented that suggest that a minimum level of climate change risk awareness is present and that proactive action from the civil protection system is exceptional. 3 1

Polish research has made great advances in building technological expertise in many of the renewable energy technologies needed for an green energy transition. However the roll-out of these renewable energy technologies in society and in the energy market in Poland is, likewise several Central European countries though a few are in the forefront of the EU-countries. Typically in this phase of the energy transition in the lower-performing EU-countries in the energy transition, technology actors usually focus on developing, testing and optimising technology and leave the societal implementation of these technologies to a later stage. Setting up special research programmes in R&D settings or demonstration projects in itself might not be enough to directly bridge the gap between R&D and market introduction. As intermediate step the living lab’ as a research concept, real-world experimental projects, and other similar technology user-centred cooperation and partnership models are needed....

Institutional arenas may be regarded as the context in which actors ‘interact’ in policy processes (Ostrom et al. 1994). In this sense they shape the ‘playing field’ for political leaders, community actors and other participants. The institutional rules that set the arena both provide and restrict participants’ possibilities to interact. They provide the actors with a set of behavioural alternatives and thus shape (but do not determine) their actions.

Cooperatives for renewable energy supply (REScoops) provide their members renewably generated energy within a cooperative model that enables members to co-decide on the cooperative’s future. REScoops do not only collectively own renewable energy production facilities and supply this to their members, they also use their specific position as energy suppliers to take several actions to persuade their members to save energy. Although the activities that REScoops undertake to some extent resemble those of other organizations, because of their particular organisational and business model as citizens initiatives, the cooperative model, REScoops are supposed to be very well positioned for activities to influence and help their members to save energy. The paper discusses arguments why the REScoop model in energy supply can be an important contributor to reduce energy use by their members. Further this paper discusses measures that have been undertaken by REScoops studied in the REScoop Plus...

In recent years cooperatives for renewable energy supply (REScoops) have emerged as important new actors in energy markets. They provide their members (i.e., households) with renewably generated energy within a cooperative model that enables members to co-decide on its strategic and tactical goals, plans and business model. REScoops do not only collectively own renewable energy production facilities and supply this to their members. They also use their specific position as energy suppliers to take several actions to persuade their members (households) to engage in energy conservation. Because of their particular organisational and business model as citizens’ initiatives REScoops are in theory well positioned for activities to influence and help their members conserve energy. This particularly has to do with REScoops being in close proximity of their members, which enables them to intervene and influence social structures and social norms. In a previous paper by the authors arguments...

This chapter draws on research in the policy areas of social inclusion and economic competitiveness in two Dutch cities: Roermond and Enschede. In both of these cities and policy areas we examine one type of Dutch political leader: municipal aldermen.1 The Dutch system of local government is uniform and all municipalities essentially have the same decisionmaking structure. The legal regime for municipalities does not vary, but there are nevertheless considerable de facto differences in local politics, citizen involvement and local decision-making across the country. Our prime focus in this chapter is the role of municipal aldermen as political leaders, their leadership types, leadership styles, actual behaviour and role in shaping the complementarity between urban leadership and community involvement.

Researchers, particular in the field of energy and climate, do not only want to follow their own research interest but also want to take a responsibility for climate change as one of the greatest societal challenges. Although everybody agrees how important technological innovations are for a transition towards a sustainable energy society, innovations only diffuse very slowly. While researchers in various settings came with numerous, promising innovations with a great potential to address climate change, it took for instance the OECD countries more than 40 years of developing sustainable energy technologies to reach a 10 % share of modern renewables. Literature provides us with many explanations why promising innovations are not used, like the mechanism of carbon-lock in. How could society, business and governments better benefit from renewable energy research? We will address this question from the perspective of the research community. We recognize that many problems and market ba...

How can the governance of nature areas foster the sustainability of ecosystems? This is discussed with regard to larger threats on ecosystems despite larger global nature areas that reach 19 million km2 of land along with larger costs per area unit. Moreover, monetization of nature with payments for ecosystem services is sometimes demanded for justification of the nature areas; however, this does not resolve the threats but faces scientific and ethical scrutiny. An alternative is the governance that incubates sustainable innovations in the nature areas for broad dissemination which generates interests in the sustainability of ecosystems. Opportunities are due to demands for ethical products, ecotourism and images of nature which generate USD 1100 billion in global markets. Sustainable innovations of using reed for insulation walls, furniture panels and upholstery in the EU can generate a few hundred million dollars in addition to present roof thatching, fodder and fuels if good func...

Little is known about how renewable energy cooperatives (REScoops) try to influence energy conservation among households and the resulting impact. In this article the main research question is: What is the predictive value of renewable energy cooperatives on intention to save energy, engagement in energy-saving actions, and self-reported energy conservation by households? A survey was conducted to answer this question. Data analysis involved multivariate and binary logistic regression on data from two cooperatives: Ecopower (Belgium; N = 1000) and Enercoop (France; N = 8290). Results show that in addition to psychological and socio-demographic variables, REScoop items modestly contribute to the explained variation in engagement in energy-saving actions and reported energy conservation. At Enercoop 18.2% of the respondents indicated that their cooperative contributed to household energy savings; for Ecopower this figure was 36.9%. Moreover, at Enercoop, 38.7% of the respondents repor...

The contributions of this volume have focused centrally around the core questions of whether, how and under what circumstances participation in decisions regarding the environment influences the quality of choices being made. The chapters have been clustered around recurring issues and themes in environmental decision-making - the link between levels of decision-making and the scale of environmental problems to be dealt with, Local Agenda 21, decision-making on infrastructure, strategic planning, and environmental decision-making in developing countries — but they have all addressed elements of the core questions. This concluding chapter uses these analyses as bases for a review and assessment of the central theme: the relationship between participation and decision quality.

The following three chapters examine questions of participation raised by infrastructure projects, taking for study diverse examples from the fields of waste and transport policy. Such projects are frequently controversial for policy-makers and the public who pay and vote for them. This is firstly because various policy rationales may conflict with each other. For example, high-speed rail may indeed be better for the environment than new motorways but is it really sustainable to travel so fast and far if it is based on nuclear sourced electricity? Secondly, infrastructure policies are intrusive in physical terms, as they will demand considerable intervention in the natural environment and they are nearly always doomed to be on somebody else’s ‘backyard’.

The previous parts of this book dealt with participation in environmental decision-making processes in industrialised countries. The advanced nature of many of the participatory experiences in the earlier chapters reflects the more or less stable, democratic structures in which participatory (learning) processes in industrialised countries are taking place. The following three chapters deal with participation in a rather different setting. Participation in environmental decision-making is analysed in the context of developing countries, where structures are generally less stable and of a less democratic nature in than industrialised countries and where participation in environmental decision-making is often in an initial stage. In three contributions the relationship between participation, environment and development is explored, with each chapter referring to cases from a specific continent: Latin America, Asia and Africa.

In Rio de Janeiro, June 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) agreed upon Agenda 21. This initiative, an international action programme for the next century, emphasised, among other things, co-operation between local authorities and groups in tackling environmental problems. About 2,500 actions were agreed upon in Agenda 21, two-thirds of which are to take place at the local level along the credo ‘think global, act local’. Taking this cue for action at heart, some 2,000 municipalities in 50 countries have started LA21 activities.

The main subject to which this book seeks to contribute is the question of how and under which circumstances public participation can enhance the quality of environmental decision-making. This chapter outlines the issues addressed in the succeeding contributions. The core of the argument is that in the present age of ecology and in a society permeated by risk, ecological problems can wreak havoc with the social agenda. Environmental problems are not merely technical; they also raise inherently political questions and thus bear directly on long-standing challenges of democratic theory and practice. The theme of democratic governance is at the heart of environmental decision-making because the latter often requires a shift of resources and opportunities from some groups to others, and because finding solutions may necessarily require continuing and broadened participation — or so it has frequently been argued. Various solutions have been offered to deal with environmental problems, some stressing the need for a strong centralist state acting on the public’s behalf others favouring a more decentralised solution. In either case, the topic of public participation is central. Public participation is here approached from an analytic-functional perspective, meaning that the focus is on the maintenance of human society. This chapter introduces the criterion of competence to evaluate public participation processes. How well actual decision processes perform on this criterion can be assessed through the use of substantive and procedural considerations. Even if certain decision processes score well on the criterion in one setting or situation, it is important to assess carefully the cultural, institutional and physical circumstances under which the decision-making process is successful. In this fashion, a truly useful empirical theory of participation and environment can be developed.

The contributions in this part all deal with strategic planning processes or more fundamental decision-making processes that are undertaken along ‘interactive’ lines. One of the major problems with early environmental policies is that they led to ‘problem displacement’, shifting problems to other areas, other parts of the environment or to the future rather than resolving them. Strategic planning is a potential means to prevent such displacement and it may also offer opportunities to link together various environmental issues to prevent new problems being created when others are solved. Along similar lines, debates are needed every now and then about the fundamentals underlying environmental policies.