Introduction

Recent decades have seen the emergence of a very widespread consensus that ‘public participation’ is a crucial element of good and democratically legitimate environmental decision making. Consensus around public participation can be seen at every level, international, regional, national and local. In Chapter 1, we discussed the public values inherent in an environmental decision, which mean that ‘experts’ have no monopoly on judgment. Public participation in decision making is very often put forward as a way through the tension between technical and popular input into decisions, and has become a conventional element of any discussion of ‘good governance’ for the environment. In the words of Sherry Arnstein, ‘The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you.’ Notwithstanding agreement on its desirability, however, the precise meaning of ‘public participation’ remains unclear. We might include the most basic form of political participation, voting in elections; this can be contrasted with highly visible unofficial forms of participation, such as mass public demonstrations, protests and civil disobedience. Sherry Arnstein's famous ‘ladder’ of citizen participation considers different levels of participation between these two possibilities.