Despite a proliferation of research on participatory and collaborative approaches in environmental governance, the effectiveness of such approaches is highly contested, and there is only limited knowledge on ‘what works’ (Chess and Purcell 1999; Koontz and Thomas 2006; Newig and Fritsch 2009). A huge number of rich case studies of participatory environmental governance conducted over the course of several decades, has prompted relatively few efforts to generate consolidated knowledge. In this paper we report on a large-n meta-analysis (case survey) of 250 cases of public environmental decision making from 22 different countries. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most rigorous analysis of its kind in the field of environmental governance to date.
