Procedural Fairness and Expected Outcome Evaluations in the Public Acceptance of Sustainability Policymaking: A Case Study of Multiple Stepwise Participatory Programs to Develop an Environmental Master Plan for Sapporo, Japan

Susumu Ohnuma,Miki Yokoyama,Shogo Mizutori

doi:10.3390/su14063403

Abstract

Measures of sustainability-related participatory programs vary according to social and cultural contexts. Thus, this study proposed a stepwise participatory program in which stakeholders and randomly chosen citizens (citizen panels) were repeatedly and sequentially involved, and the citizen panels discharged discrete functions through all the planning stages. Procedural and outcome fairness was focal to the evaluation of the participatory program because these criteria are widely deemed essential for public acceptance. Evaluation by nonparticipants was imperative because of the limited number of participants, but sustainability plans affect and mandate the cooperation of the general public. Therefore, this study undertaken during the revision of the city of Sapporo’s environmental master plan compared evaluations of nonparticipants with those of participants from three stages of the stepwise participatory program applying backcasting scenario workshops. A two-wave mailout survey was administered to test two hypotheses: (a) workshop participants would evaluate the acceptance, process, outcome, and antecedent factors more positively than nonparticipants, and (b) procedural fairness and evaluation of expected outcomes would affect acceptance. The results supported these hypotheses. Procedural fairness was associated with acceptance most robustly and consistently. The study’s primary contribution to the extant literature entails accumulating empirical evidence on stepwise participatory programs.

Highlights

Public participation is crucial for the successful implementation of a sustainable policy because it requires citizen consent [1]
The current paper examines the effects of a stepwise participatory program on public acceptance and demonstrates the significance of procedural and distributive fairness with the case of an environmental master plan for Sapporo, Japan
This study explores the effects of public participation programs that emphasize procedural fairness and demonstrates that a fair process of stepwise decision-making based on citizen participation fosters greater public acceptance of new sustainability plans

Summary

Introduction

Public participation is crucial for the successful implementation of a sustainable policy because it requires citizen consent [1]. The local context must be considered, for making the policy feasible, efficient, and tangible by involving various people [2]. The acceptability of a policy is significant for making sustainability goals feasible, which would lead to cooperation from the broader public [3–6]. Numerous case studies performed on processes to design measures pertaining to renewable energy [7–9], natural resources including shale gas [10,11], and sustainable city planning [12] have reported that citizen participation forms the grounding for public acceptance. The methodologies of participatory programs vary depending on social and cultural contexts and require both conceptual cognition and an increasing accrual of case-based information [2]. The current paper proposes a participatory package encompassing a stepwise rolesharing design founded on deliberative democracy from the domain of political sciences

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion