Abstract
Menzel, S., and M. Buchecker. 2013. Does participatory planning foster the transformation toward more adaptive social-ecological systems? Ecology and Society 18(1): 13. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05154-180113
Highlights
The need for social-ecological systems to become more adaptive is recognized by many practitioners and researchers
We aimed to offer some insights regarding questions as to which social effects are formed in participatory planning processes and at what costs, and to discuss their contribution to the transformation toward more adaptive social-ecological systems based on empirical evidence
We identified social and political capital building as well as ecological knowledge resulting from social learning as the main social effects
Summary
The need for social-ecological systems to become more adaptive is recognized by many practitioners and researchers. Processes of participatory planning, used synonymously with comanagement throughout this study, are expected to bring about social learning through social interaction. Social learning is both cognitive and value-related and can, for example, create social as well as political capital. We suspect that unrealistically high hopes for the impact of participatory planning on social-ecological transformations may be held. We ground this suspicion on excessive expectations of outcomes of participatory approaches held in the past, such as resistance-free acceptance of projects. Realistic expectations of learning effects and subsequent social outcomes of participatory planning reduce the risk of major failure with a subsequent possible reversion to autocratic or pseudodemocratic decision making styles
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