Environmental Governance and Public Participation

Abstract

Environmental sustainability is a complex term, characterized by dynamic interactions between human and natural dimensions. Policy-makers in the developed world face the challenge of balancing economic growth with citizen concerns for curbing human impact leading to environmental degradation. This thesis contributes to the investigation of environmental governance on local scale by assessing the quality of environmental decisions. It examines and compares how the involvement of interest groups and citizens into local decision-making structures promotes efficient environmental policies. By applying the crispy sets qualitative comparative analysis (cs/QCA), this study aims to indentify the conditions necessary and sufficient for formulating participatory environmental decisions. The results suggest that successful policy formulation is dependent upon the presence of governmental agenda-setting and multilevel governance. The findings outline good practices, which reveal how governments can organize and facilitate participatory decision-making to ensure legitimate representation of interests and, thus, reach consensus-based decisions, which then translate easily into policy formulation.