Consolidating participatory, transparent policy-making in the environmental and climate field

Transparency and participation are two of the prime means of democratization. The status of citizen participation in public debates of good governance has been described as ‘sacrosanct’ (Day 1997), the significance of transparency as ‘quasi-religious’ (Hood 2006). This applies in particular to the environmental policy field, where influential pressure groups have pushed very strongly for a ‘participatory turn’ and public access to information, leading to a codification of these demands in national, European and international conventions and policy guidelines. How to actually deliver on participatory and transparent policy-making is far from straightforward, however. Democracy scholars have pointed out repeatedly that citizen participation usually suffers from a class bias and is not necessarily particularly democratic or ‘good in itself’ (Brown 2009, 223). Besides, research has emphasized that the effect of transparency may be negative (de Fine et al. 2011, 5) and indeed paralysing when it promotes demagoguery, misinformation and rigidity. Against this background, this study asks how to make the most of transparency and participation. More precisely, it discusses how to design democratic innovations in such a way that they combine meaningful, democratic participation with a non-paralysing openness of governance, without jeopardizing other democratic values. Based on democratic theory, the study first underlines why transparency and participation potentially clash with other important sources of democratic legitimacy, such as efficient conflict resolution and fair and equal deliberation. In a second step, it is shown under which institutional conditions such tensions are moderated, using empirical examples of democratic innovations from the environmental and climate policy field and paying special attention to the disenchantment that public engagement practices generate among the involved citizens.