A Science Studies Perspective on Environmental Participation
This is a book about some of the ways in which people engage with the natural environment, acting collectively in and through the institutions of science and democratic government. It is not about individual experiences of the natural environment, or cultural values. It is about how people not formally connected with science and government can get involved with the ways these institutions act in relation to the natural environment. Environmental participation is a notion intended to capture the diverse ways in which publics get involved with the work done in institutions to govern the society–environment relationship. The four social constituencies discussed in this book—scientists, decision makers, experts and publics—all engage with the natural environment, in their own ways. Scientists, decision makers and experts involve in professional practices and environmental participation occurs when publics become involved with the activities of these professionals.
Coming to this phenomenon as a science and technology studies (STS) researcher my perspective on environmental participation originates in transdisciplinary research projects, involving collaborations of natural and social scientists and local publics. As an STS researcher, my work is firmly anchored in qualitative social science and my interest is in the many different ways in which we create knowledge about the natural environment. Working together with other social scientists, natural scientists and local people have shown me that we really can do more and better together. Collaborating with people from different backgrounds have forced a rethink of the way I do STS. In collaborative environmental projects it is not possible to study the creation of scientific knowledge and its role in society from the outside. All project members have to contribute to the shared goals. Doing STS differently in projects with environmental participation has provided the motivation for this book that focuses on practical experience, not societal dynamics.
Working with environmental issues in collaborative projects has also alerted me to the importance of place. Environmental experiences are always geographically specific, there is no general environment outside of the pages of academic journals and books. In reality it is always a particular environment, with its unique configurations of land, water, air, plants, temperature, animals, humidity and so on. STS traditionally focus on science that strives to generate general knowledge and technology that can be applied anywhere has not paid much attention to the specificity of place. Fortunately, I could learn from human geographers in transdisciplinary projects and in this book STS perspectives are supported by concepts from human geography. The hybrid environmental STS perspective resulting from this combination is the starting point for this book that attempts to tell a coherent story about environmental participation in practice.
In this introductory chapter I start by explaining why it is useful to consider environmental participation as a distinct area of public participation. After this I retell some of the origin stories of the field that are told by STS researchers. The existence of a multitude of such origin stories points to the fact that environmental participation is a novel and growing topic in current academic debates. However, this is not a book that aims to make an impact in these debates, hence, they will only be dipped into to offer some concepts that are useful to organise the presentations of environmental participation practices which are my main interest. After outlining STS concepts capturing environmental participation in science, decision making and expertise we will look at the discussion about participants. And, finally, the four subsequent chapters of the book are outlined.
Why Environmental Participation Is Unique
The previous section hinted at the reasons for viewing environmental participation as a distinct area of public engagement. This is a rather unusual view, mostly public participation is treated as the same, regardless of what people participate in, when discussed by social scientists. This makes sense when the focus is on the dynamics of power in participatory processes, however, there are important reasons for distinguishing between public participation in different fields when the interest is in the practices.
One of the features of environmental participation that stands out to me is that place, in a geographical sense, matters. The environmental processes and problems that become the subject of scientific research, decision making, expert management and public concern occur in particular locations. In contrast many STS cases studies of public participation have highlighted medical research that concerns patients with a particular condition that does not relate to geographical location. With regard to environmental issues the features of the location are important determinants for the nature of the problem, for example, flooding is experienced by some people, but not others, and flood risk matters in places close to rivers, lakes or the coast (although flash flooding due to heavy rainfall can occur anywhere). In these places institutional actors will address flood risk and local publics will be interested in how the issue is managed. The ways in which flood risk is governed will depend on the physical features of the flood process, as well as the economic and technical resources available. In places at risk for flooding or where floods have occurred publics will be interested in participating in research and decision making addressing it. Public interest in a local environmental matter of concern to them does not translate into a general interest in environmental science or decision making. Institutions pursuing environmental participation are forced to pay attention to local matters of concern.
The independent agency of the natural environment has to be recognised in environmental participation. Many STS discussions of public participation address policy choices, for example, about how to regulate new technologies. In contrast environmental participation concerns processes occurring in nature that are not fully knowable or controllable by science or decision makers. Environmental processes are complex and emergent, scientific knowledge about them is tentative and evolving. Environmental governance is never complete, as the natural environment continues to change new management strategies and interventions must be developed in response. Environmental participation often occurs in contexts where the non-human independent physical agency of environmental processes pose risks to humans, such as flooding. These risks may originate in environmental change caused by human activity, but they must be analysed as non-human agency and addressed with some type of physical intervention. The matters of concern in environmental participation are always more-than-human, involving non-human agency outside of institutional control.
The role of the natural environment means that environmental participation always involves at least three parties—processes in nature, institutions and publics. The relationship between the first two is constitutive, it is in the institutional activities engaging with the natural environment that publics can participate. The notion of participation assumes that there is organised, goal-directed activity with which publics can get involved. When bringing lay people into the relationship of institutions and the natural environment it becomes clear that everybody experiences the physical environment. The publics becoming involved in environmental participation have had time to develop experiences and knowledge by engaging with environmental processes in a place they are familiar with. This is very different from publics invited to participate in deliberations on how to govern or use, e.g. nano-technology, they have no experience of encountering these technologies in everyday life before taking part in scientific engagement events.
I do not claim that environmental participation is unique because it is different from participation in other fields, but that it brings together many of the features of participation in a particular way. That publics have independent and sometimes superior knowledge to scientists can also be the case in medical research, patients can know more about how an illness affects the body than medical researchers. The agency of the subject at hand has been an issue in public participation addressing genetically modified organisms. However, in the STS literature public participation has largely been treated as the same regardless of the matter of concern but when the interest is focussed on practices it is beneficial to distinguish between different topic areas.
Environmental participation brings together people who have separate, different relationships with the environment, such as local people affected by a problem, businesses managing potential risks, scientists investigating environmental change, policy makers balancing economic interests against environmental protection and so on. Everybody brings knowledge emerging in their own relat...
