Testing the impact of stakeholder involvement in mandated participatory planning: A natural experiment in flood risk governance

Current European Union environmental policy relies heavily on mandated local planning for the achievement of environmental goals (Newig and Koontz 2014). One example is the Floods Directive of 2007, which requires the involvement of citizens and organised stakeholders for improving plan quality and implementation. It is, however, still an open question whether and to what extent participation in plan-making actually delivers on these instrumental objectives (Newig et al. 2014). This paper reports on the role of participation in the implementation of the Floods Directive in Germany. The Directive mandates the preparation of Flood Risk Management Plans, which had to be produced by late 2015, with updates due every six years. Member states and local authorities have considerable leeway in choosing the degree and forms of participation they employ in drafting these plans. In Germany, the responsibility for flood risk management planning lies with the federal states, across which participatory models vary hugely (Newig et al. 2014). This setting lends itself well to conducting a natural experiment: We study participatory flood risk management planning in three German flood risk areas which are bisected by federal state borders. These are the river Iller in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria; the river Diemel in Hesse and North Rhine Westphalia, and the river Vechte in North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony, yielding a total of six case studies. Through this design, we test the impact of different modes of participation in three pairs of different planning efforts each of which shares the same natural characteristics. By holding the geographical context constant as far as possible, we are able to isolate the impact of different modes of participation. Drawing on document analysis (websites, flood risk management plans), structured interviews with public officials and a standardised survey among participants, we assess both the process of participation, and outputs and outcomes in terms of plan quality and participant evaluation. Overall, we find a moderate effect of participation on plan quality and stakeholder acceptance. The most important stakeholder groups were municipalities, alongside environmental NGOs, agriculture, industry and civil protection. Contrary to our expectations, their involvement did not make a significant difference to plan quality, although in some cases they did contribute useful knowledge and information, and participation helped build capacity to deal with futher flood events. Given the prevailing upstream-downstream issues of flood risk management planning, careful co-ordination at river basin level appears more important than intensive local participation processes. These findings challenge to a certain extent the dominant rationale of EU environmental policy, which emphasises local participatory planning for effective policy implementation. References Newig, J. and T.M. Koontz (2014) 'Multi-level governance, policy implementation and participation: the EU's mandated participatory planning approach to implementing environmental policy.' Journal of European Public Policy 21 (2): 248-67. Newig, J., E. Challies, N. Jager and E. Kochskämper (2014) 'What Role for Public Participation in Implementing the EU Floods Directive? A comparison with the Water Framework Directive, early evidence from Germany, and a research agenda.' Environmental Policy and Governance 24 (4): 275-88.