Abstract
It is widely assumed that stakeholder participation has great potential to improve the perceived legitimacy of natural resource management (NRM) and that the deliberative-democratic qualities of participatory procedures are central to the prospects of success. However, attempts to measure the actual effects of deliberation on the perceived legitimacy of participatory NRM are rare. This article examines the links between deliberation and legitimacy in participatory NRM empirically by tracing the determinants of stakeholders’ level of policy support and their views about procedural fairness. The study uses statistical methods to analyse survey data from a state-led initiative to develop new plans for ecosystem-based coastal and marine management through a participatory approach in five coastal areas in Sweden. We find that the perceived quality of deliberation had a positive impact on these aspects of legitimacy. However, both policy support and perceived procedural fairness were mainly driven by instrumental-substantive considerations rather than deliberative-democratic qualities of the process.
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Notes
For example, “collaborative” public management (or co-governance) (Fung 2006; Ansell and Gash 2008), has been defined as a context of stakeholder participation where “one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative…” (Ansell and Gash 2008, 544; cf. Choi and Robertson 2014, 495).
The Swedish formulation used in the survey to capture this aspect of legitimacy is “Jag ställer mig bakom” (“I stand behind”). Responding affirmatively to this implies an explicit commitment to the result of the participatory process (i.e. it is stronger than simply “being in favour of”). This is, of course, fully consistent with having personal views that may deviate considerably from the collectively agreed content of plan, just as we may fully recognize the moral validity of a hard-won compromise or wholeheartedly accept the winner of a fair election even when we voted for a different candidate.
This emphasis of our study leaves out whether these practices may also be perceived as legitimate by non-participants (Jentoft 2000, 145). More fundamentally, it also means that the study remains silent on normative conceptions of legitimacy, i.e. on when and why we “have good reasons to support or obey” a public policy or decision (Fung 2006, 70; cf. Beetham 2013; Pettit 2012). We are not, then, trying to establish whether (or how well) the participatory approach under study satisfied any particular normative standard of legitimacy, deliberative or not.
Learning is also often treated as an important aim in itself. With this in mind, we should stress that our focus on the possible role of learning-related variables to serve the ends of perceived legitimacy is not to imply that such goals of social learning and better informed decisions are less important than perceived legitimacy, or to deny that they may also be very important objectives in their own right.
The terms of “an ecosystem-approach”, “ecosystem management” and “ecosystem-based management” are not identical and different meanings have been attached to each of these terms. For our present purposes, however, we shall leave such differences aside and use them interchangeably. What matters here is that they can all be analysed as part of the same general discourse (introduced below) in which the emphasis on stakeholder participation is a key component.
It should be pointed out that all respondents have, as a prerequisite for taking part in the survey, participated in the process. Thus, answering “uncertain” represents uncertainty in terms of agreeing/disagreeing with the question statement, and not uncertainty as a result of not being part of the process.
Indeed, our results from a parallel study, presenting a content analysis of the five management plans, suggest that central parts of the plans were quite generally formulated, and that difficult trade-offs between opposing values, and divergent stakeholder interests were often avoided (Borgström et al. 2015; see also Sandström et al. 2015).
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Acknowledgments
This article is a contribution to the project “Regime Shifts in the Baltic Sea Ecosystem”, funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS. Our work was also supported by the research programme BEAM, Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management, and MISTRA through a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Thanks to Andreas Duit, Jonathan Kuyper and Ole Laegreid for their useful comments on early drafts. We are also grateful to two anonymous referees and the editors of this journal for their constructive feedback.
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Birnbaum, S., Bodin, Ö. & Sandström, A. Tracing the sources of legitimacy: the impact of deliberation in participatory natural resource management. Policy Sci 48, 443–461 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9230-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-015-9230-0