Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 24
Deliberative and Participatory
Approaches in Environmental
Geography
Jason Chilvers
Participatory Environmental Geographies
In the environmental sphere it is now very fashionable to be doing, or at least talking
about, 'participation'. This never used to be the case of course. Environmental policy
has traditionally been determined by scientists and other policy elites in exclusive,
technocratic processes. Indeed, it is unlikely that this chapter would have featured
in this
Companion
had it been written even a decade ago. Emerging participatory
practices seek to empower voices often marginalised in science-policy processes.
Their development in environmental geography forms part of a wider 'participatory
turn' across the discipline, which has been particularly visible in development geo-
graphy (e.g., Binns, 1997), social geography (e.g., Pain, 2004) and GIS (e.g., Craig
et al., 2002).
Ideas of citizen participation are central to green political ideology and have
gained greater prominence with the rise of the sustainability agenda and global
attempts to implement Local Agenda 21 post-Rio (Macnaghten and Jacobs, 1997).
This has coincided with increasing realisation of the 'post-normal' nature of envi-
ronmental risk issues where 'facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and
decision urgent' (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993, p. 740). Uncertainty, indeterminacy
(see Chapter 6, this volume) and intense epistemic and ethical differences demand
that an extended range of actors, knowledges and values are incorporated into
environmental policymaking (Eden, 1996), as well as core expert domains of envi-
ronmental science, appraisal, and management (Irwin, 1995). Such engagements
overlap with partnership approaches linked to new forms of environmental gover-
nance beyond the state (see Chapter 32, this volume). These global trends overlay
participatory developments in environmental planning in the global 'north' (Healey,
1997), and international development in the global 'south' (Chambers, 1997).
Across these domains the search for deliberative and participatory alternatives
has been driven by a common realisation that 'top-down' technocratic approaches
are defi cient, often due to their apparent irrelevance and insensitivity to local con-
texts. Yet as the idea of participation has swept through successive policy arenas it
