Frans Coenen

Participation in strategic green planning in the Netherlands

Throughout the world a new type of governmental ‘green’ planning is developing which takes a more communicative approach towards other actors in society and incorporates the idea that sustainable development is not possible without close co-operation with the community. Participation is an essential element in such a communicative approach. This chapters deals with a pioneer country in green planning; the Netherlands. It reveals how and in which circumstances participation in (green) planning through a communicative use of these plans can enhance the quality of planned (environmental) decision-making. Participation is considered to be linked to the communicative use of plans because it opens up communication on plans, and this communication can lead to consensus and goal sharing. This functional-analytic argument for participation goes back to the basic roots of participatory and communicative planning. The basic hypothesis in this chapter is that a communicative use of plans can enhance the quality of decision-making after plans have been approved if plans are treated as investments in analyses. This investment is assumed to lead to ‘better’ decision-making after plan approval if the plans point out future consequences and interconnections between decisions and therefore help to avoid all the alternatives and consequences being considered again each time every individual decision is taken.

Participatory Decision-Making for Sustainable Consumption

This chapter concerns the impact of public involvement in public decision-making processes as related to household consumption patterns, and the impact on consumer behaviour of active participation.1 The call for participatory decision-making is common in the field of sustainable consumption (Murphy & Cohen, 2001). Implicit in many of these calls is the assumption that increasing the awareness and engagement of the public in decision-making processes for environmental protection will, ultimately, strengthen that protection. A second assumption is that public participation may also result in behavioural change by consumers. At a minimum there is the hope that an engagement of consumers will mean a greater awareness by consumers of the environmental impact of their purchases and behaviour (Barry, 2006). From a functional perspective there is the idea that the active participation of the consumer/citizen in public decision-making processes, as one of several stakeholders or partners, could lead to alternative developments in sustainable consumption patterns.

Providing a Scientific Arm to Renewable Energy Cooperatives

Renewable Energy-Supplying cooperatives (REScoops) are cooperatives of renewable energy producers and/or consumers, which are under formulation in the emerging European smart grid. Their emergence highlights the importance of proconsuming green energy and simultaneously puts forward principles such as energy democracy and self-consumption, assists the fight against energy poverty, and helps reduce GHG emissions. To this end, the incorporation of scientific and technological solutions into the REScoops’ everyday business and practices, is key for improving these practices and assessing their potential benefits, and as such for enabling them to deliver the maximum possible gains to their members and society at large. This chapter outlines three key axes of scientific research and solutions that can be used for REScoops, namely, (a) a statistical analysis, (b) an applied behavioural analysis, and (c) an artificial intelligence/machine learning one. Also presented are results and lessons learned from providing such solutions to European REScoops as part of the H2020 REScoop Plus project.

Why do entrepreneurial individuals locate in non-metropolitan regions?

This paper analyses the dynamics of personal location choices of entrepreneurs in five European non-metropolitan regions. We started with the research question as to why these highly talented and creative individuals, who could live almost anywhere in the world, chose non-metropolitan regions, instead of the vibrant urban agglomerations with multiple (business) opportunities. The analysis showed that regional embeddedness, quality of life factors (amenities), combined with a specific entrepreneurial climate, contributed to these choices. Furthermore, different types of entrepreneurs exhibited distinct location choices. On the one hand, entrepreneurs in creative industries valued an open and tolerant neighbourhood coupled with cultural amenities and qualities of the natural environment. On the other hand, entrepreneurs in other economic sectors and sciences appreciated the more traditional factors of good schools, business opportunities and an attractive housing market.

Introduction Part Five: Participation, Environment and Development: The Developing Countries’ Setting

The previous parts of this book dealt with participation in environmental decision-making processes in industrialised countries. The advanced nature of many of the participatory experiences in the earlier chapters reflects the more or less stable, democratic structures in which participatory (learning) processes in industrialised countries are taking place. The following three chapters deal with participation in a rather different setting. Participation in environmental decision-making is analysed in the context of developing countries, where structures are generally less stable and of a less democratic nature in than industrialised countries and where participation in environmental decision-making is often in an initial stage. In three contributions the relationship between participation, environment and development is explored, with each chapter referring to cases from a specific continent: Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Introduction Part Four: Infrastructure: The Road to Eternity?

The following three chapters examine questions of participation raised by infrastructure projects, taking for study diverse examples from the fields of waste and transport policy. Such projects are frequently controversial for policy-makers and the public who pay and vote for them. This is firstly because various policy rationales may conflict with each other. For example, high-speed rail may indeed be better for the environment than new motorways but is it really sustainable to travel so fast and far if it is based on nuclear sourced electricity? Secondly, infrastructure policies are intrusive in physical terms, as they will demand considerable intervention in the natural environment and they are nearly always doomed to be on somebody else’s ‘backyard’.

Introduction Part Three: Strategic Planning

The contributions in this part all deal with strategic planning processes or more fundamental decision-making processes that are undertaken along ‘interactive’ lines. One of the major problems with early environmental policies is that they led to ‘problem displacement’, shifting problems to other areas, other parts of the environment or to the future rather than resolving them. Strategic planning is a potential means to prevent such displacement and it may also offer opportunities to link together various environmental issues to prevent new problems being created when others are solved. Along similar lines, debates are needed every now and then about the fundamentals underlying environmental policies.

Introduction Part Two: Local Agenda 21

In Rio de Janeiro, June 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) agreed upon Agenda 21. This initiative, an international action programme for the next century, emphasised, among other things, co-operation between local authorities and groups in tackling environmental problems. About 2,500 actions were agreed upon in Agenda 21, two-thirds of which are to take place at the local level along the credo ‘think global, act local’. Taking this cue for action at heart, some 2,000 municipalities in 50 countries have started LA21 activities.

Introduction Part One: Interconnectedness, Participation and Problem Scale

As explained in the introductory chapter, a careful attempt to consider the link between participation and the quality of environmental decision-making — with particular concern for the functional perspective and thus societal survival – needs to deal with the issue of ‘level’, in the sense of the location, scale, and jurisdiction over which environmental decision-making is to be effective. Whether the issue is global warming, producing impacts over the entire planet, or a seemingly local matter, like the siting of a hazardous waste facility or the regulation of noise pollution in a municipality, effective decisions would seem to require a sensible connection between the scope and impact of an environmental challenge, on the one hand, and the relevant institutions and stakeholders – including the broad public –, on the other. There is no such thing as the problem scale for environmental questions. As mentioned in the first chapter, such issues can appear at local, regional, national, fluvial, continental, or global levels. ‘Thinking globally, acting locally’ is thus not a very helpful general action principle. Rather, it can be sensible only if the decision-making incorporates some strategy for associating local involvement and action with forces and actors that can have causal impact at the appropriate points on the real problems that demand attention. Otherwise, participation may be a sop, or a chimera, little more than a form of unintentionally symbolic politics. Efficacious participation requires more than appropriate motivation, tools, and involvement. It demands the right kind of articulation between the scale and methods of participation, on the. one hand, and the requisite causal levers, on the other.