Abstract
This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time. In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and ‘the public’. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected ‘ecologies of participation’, and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions.
Highlights
Bringing about transitions to sustainability has emerged as one of the key organizing global challenges over the past four decades (United Nations, 2012)
We have brought literatures on socio-technical transitions into closer conversation with constructivist STS perspectives on participation as one way of addressing calls to better understand actor dynamics and the politics of transitions (Shove & Walker, 2007). Adopting this more relational approach has proved valuable in opening up the notion of participation in transitions, extending it beyond sites of deliberative fora (e.g. Einsiedel, Boyd, Medlock, & Ashworth, 2013; Hendriks, 2009) to multiple forms of public engagement across low carbon energy systems (Smith, 2012) including activism, grassroots innovation, and interactions with more mundane technologies in everyday life
An important advance of our approach has been to introduce a framework that allows the sort of symmetrical and comparative analysis across diverse cases of engagement that has not been evident in the sustainability transitions or participation literatures hitherto
Summary
Bringing about transitions to sustainability has emerged as one of the key organizing global challenges over the past four decades (United Nations, 2012). It offers a new perspective on public participation in transitions, one which moves beyond the compartmentalized tendency of existing approaches to attend to specific parts of ‘the system’—for example the relative focus of deliberative processes on sites of institutional decision-making, social practice theory’s existing emphasis on domestic settings of everyday practice, social movement theory’s focus on sites of situated protest and activism, and so on—to open up to the diversities of participation and the ways in which publics are constantly being made and remade in attempts to change socio-technical systems This highlights the multiplicity of possible forms of participation, the competing normativities that underpin these, and the inherent partialities of them all. Considering implications for research and practice in the final section of the paper, we begin by outlining how ideas of participation are conceived in existing strands of the transitions literature and how a constructivist STS perspective on participation can both open up and deepen these understandings
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