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Article Contents

1. participatory arrangements, 2. comparing design options, 3. dilemmas in design, 4. coping with ambivalence, 5. conclusion, disclosure statement.

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Designing effective public participation

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Luigi Bobbio, Designing effective public participation, Policy and Society , Volume 38, Issue 1, March 2019, Pages 41–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1511193

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This paper reviews the various connections that can exist between the design of participatory processes and the different kind of results that they can entail. It details how effective participatory processes can be designed, whatever are the results that participation is deemed to elicit. It shows the main trends pertaining to design choicesand considers how to classify different arrangements in order to choose from among them. Then the paper deals with the main dilemmas that tend to arise when designing participatory processes. Thanks to this review, the paper argues that participatory processes tend to display a certain degree of ambivalence that cannot be completely overcome through the design choices.

Participation is a loose concept: involved citizens can be few or many, poorly or highly empowered, and their participation can be on-site or online, for short or long periods of time, on high- or low-stake issues, etc. Participatory processes can also include citizens, as such, or only representatives of associations or organized groups. Hence, while for many a stakeholder forum is unlikely to be considered as a participatory tool, the boundary between associative and participatory democracy is quite blurred. Similarly, electoral participation could be included on a list of such tools especially in the form of direct democracy (e.g. referenda and other ‘democratic innovations’ (Smith, 2009 )).

In the literature on policy design, public participation is often mentioned among the procedural instruments policymakers can use when shaping policies (Howlett, 2011 ). That is, instead of defining all of the content of a measure a priori, policymakers can choose to submit some aspects of it to a procedure in which citizens are involved in the design process. Public participation is thus a procedural tool which allows policymakers to include new actors (i.e. citizens) in a policy network and entrust them with some design-related tasks.

While many scholars have argued that public participation has become a mantra and is common practice (Hoppe, 2011 , 163), and that [m]odern societies appear to be undergoing a participatory revolution (Walker, McQuarrie, & Lee, 2015 , p. 7), evidence of these movements is thin. Although the mantra and the revolution images could appear appropriate as discourses on participation have been spreading quickly over the last few decades due to the growing perception of the failures of the representative democracy, it is doubtful whether the corresponding practice has become as common as often alleged: most governments still prefer to keep citizens out of the decision-making arenas and governance arrangements rarely include citizens as such.

In which cases and with which goals do governments choose to co-design public policy through participation? Answering this question is not an easy task, as this choice is fostered through conflicting (and hidden) aims (Hisschemöller & Cuppen, 2015 , p. 429).

Three kinds of motivations can push policymakers toward participation: empowerment, legitimacy and learning : participation can serve to empower people and thus to put in practice democratic ideals, to acquire consensus or to gain inputs from citizens’ knowledge when facing complex or badly understood problems (Hisschemöller & Cuppen, 2015 ). That is, a participatory process is not always used for designing the substance of a policy. It can also be undertaken for normative or ideological reasons, that is, for example, the desire to implement policy in a fully democratic way and give people (especially the worst-off ones) a chance to be heard, or sometimes for instrumental reasons in the hope to increase the legitimacy of the policy choices (and of those who make them) (Fiorino, 1990 ). 1

Policymakers often opt for citizens’ participation when they need resources that they find difficult to obtain without this means. In so doing, they look to participation as a tool which can provide both cognitive and political resources. The cognitive resources are made up of all the information, practical knowledge and insights that citizens possess and can transfer to policymakers, resulting in wiser or more suitable problem definitions or policy formulations. The political resources consist of the consensus/legitimacy that policymakers can acquire, thanks to the citizens’ involvement, in order to, for instance, gain support on contentious measures, avoid conflicts, reduce the disaffection of the public, favor the coproduction of policies or the cooperation of the users during the implementation stage or simply for securing more ready compliance with whatever measure is being considered.

This article presents the various connections that can exist between the design of participatory processes and the different kinds of results that they can entail. It details how effective participatory processes can be designed and whatever are the results that participation is deemed to elicit.

The first section shows the main trends pertaining to design choices. Section 2 considers how to classify different arrangements in order to choose from among them. Section 3 deals with the main dilemmas that tend to arise when designing participatory processes. Section 4 shows that participatory processes tend to display a certain degree of ambivalence that cannot be completely overcome through the design choices. Finally, it concludes that most design choices can be traced back to the two clusters that designers sometimes try to blend together.

Since the reasons why policymakers move toward participation are manifold, intertwined and sometime conflicting, there cannot be a single definition of effective participatory design. Participatory processes can serve different purposes for different people and their success should be evaluated regarding the different expectations that revolve around their deployment.

Designing public participation processes, however, has become a widespread concern for both practitioners and academics. A great variety of proposals, models, arrangements, methods and devices have been produced toward this end.

Designing a participatory process means making decisions on several features, e.g. on the issue that must be submitted to the citizens, on the selection of the participants, on the structure of the process, on the role of facilitation, on the mode of interaction among the participants, on the information to be supplied, on the nature of the output and, of course, on many other aspects. Intense research and experimentation on these subjects have been made over the last two or three decades and nowadays policymakers have at their disposal several devices which combine various aspects to produce some standard configurations of participatory processes.

Some of these arrangements have arisen from a political choice, such as the participatory budget, introduced in Porto Alegre in the late eighties, which had clear redistributive aims (Baiocchi, 2003 ; Fedozzi, 1999 ; Gret & Sintomer, 2005 ). It then spread, although with several adjustments, all over the world (Sintomer, Herzberg, Allegretti, & RöCke, 2010 ), including influencing the public debate ( débat public ) on infrastructures introduced in France through a national law in 1995 (Fourniau, 2001 ; Marshall, 2016 ). Other devices have had a more academic origin: this is the case of the use of Deliberative Polls (Fishkin, 1991 , 1995 ) and Search Conferences, for example Greenwood & Morten) 1998 ). Others, techniques such as the Citizens’ Jury (Crosby & Nethercut, 2005 ), the 21st Century Town Meeting (Lukensmeyer, Goldman, J., & Brigham, 2005 ) and the Open Space Technology (Owen, 1997 ), have been designed by activists or practitioners. The British Columbia Citizens Assembly for the electoral reform (Warren & Pearse, 2008 ), for example, was reproduced in Ontario and in the Netherlands (Fournier, Van Der Kolk, Carty, Blais, & Rose, 2011 ), and its design had an influence on the participatory constitutional arrangements that were setup in Iceland (Bergman, 2016 ; Landemore, 2015 ) and in Ireland (Suiter, Farrell, & Harris, 2016 ). Such devices are manifold and continuously evolving: a list of 57 democratic innovations was provided by Graham Smith ( 2005 ); 106 public engagement mechanisms were listed by Rowe and Frewer ( 2005 ).

These devices are made up of sets of ready-to-use provisions and some of them (e.g. deliberative pollings) have even been protected by trademarks in order to avoid their misuse. Notwithstanding, most of them are rather flexible. They are adjusted to contexts, as the story of the curious journey of the participatory budget around the world shows (Ganuza & Baiocchi, 2012 ). They are also the subject of an endless process of refinement (Bobbio, Lewanski, Romano, Giannetti, & Crosby, 2006 ; Carson, 2006 ) and sometimes are combined in hybrid forms (Carson & Hartz-Karp, 2005 ).

Nevertheless, the worldwide commitment to such methodologies and the interactions among specialists has produced a certain degree of convergence. While the devices display very different features (e.g. pertaining to the topics they address, to the selection of the participants, duration, modes of interaction, conclusions, etc.), they increasingly tend to share many common aspects (Bobbio, 2003 ). For example:

participatory processes are highly structured through well-defined phases;

their duration is pre-defined; with strict control over time maintained;

interaction among the participants mainly takes place in small groups; small round tables dominate the participatory landscape;

complete, balanced and accessible information is supplied to the participants;

the process is designed and run by neutral moderators or facilitators.

The latter point shows that designing (and running) public participation processes has become a profession (Bherer, Gauthier, & Simard, 2017 ; Blue & Dale, 2016 ; Cooper & Smith, 2012 ; Hendriks & Carson, 2008 ; Mansbridge, Hartz-Karp, Amengual, & Gastil, 2006 ), in which thousands of people are engaged all over the world through non-profit (but also for-profit) firms or associations. Many of the deliberative practitioners who encourage participatory processes (Forester, 1999 ) are the products of this participatory wave, and at the same time have also contributed to make the participation thrive for both ideal and self-interested reasons.

Nevertheless, despite these common elements, in designing participation processes, policymakers and their advisors still face a vast array of techniques. How can these different design options be compared and their effectiveness assessed?

Much of the literature suggests that participatory models can be ordered according to a single dimension, that is, from less to more or from lower to higher. A seminal example of this approach is that of the famous ladder of citizen participation ( Figure 1 ) drawn up by Sherry Arnstein ( 1969 ) in one of the most frequently quoted articles on public participation.

Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation (Arnstein, 1969 , 217).

Reflecting on her direct experience in US urban development policies in the 1960s, she concluded that citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power. It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic process, to be included in the future (216).

Despite its prominence, this one-dimensional model has been criticized, because it appears to be too simple to account for the diversity of the processes and of their goals (Tritter & McCallum, 2006 ). The only dimension that can be used to assess the degree of effectiveness of a participation design is the participants’ power in decision-making. The low rungs of the ladder host fallacious designs that provide a specious participation. The design’s effectiveness (i.e. citizen power) improves as the ladder is climbed. But participation in some issues (e.g. climate change) should be aimed at social learning rather than at citizen power (Collins & Ison, 2009 ), and citizen power is not always desirable (Fung, 2003 ), e.g. when the decision at stake affects a much broader community than that of the participants.

However, various similar one-dimensional ladder-like models continue to re-appear in the literature. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), for example, developed a public participation spectrum fashioned on five hierarchically ordered steps ( Figure 2 ). Though three decades had elapsed since Arnstein’s ladder was first introduced, the IAP2’s spectrum is not very different from that model, except for the labels, which are more neutral and not so value-laden.

IAP2’s public participation spectrum ( www.iap2.org ).

These one-dimensional models highlight an important point: citizens’ involvement can be more or less intense, that is, more or less influential. Yet, the intensity of involvement and the weight of influence are not the only sensitive dimensions. There is not one single measure of effectiveness, be it empowerment or political influence. Not all participatory arrangements can be ordered in a single ranking.

I have argued that participation serves three particularly important democratic values: legitimacy, justice, and the effectiveness of public action. Furthermore, no single participatory design is suited to serving all three values simultaneously; particular designs are suited to specific objectives. (Fung, 2006 , p. 74)

The three dimensions of the democracy cube (Fung, 2006 ).

The consequence is that a liberal egalitarian ‘might be attracted to the ways in which the…. Deliberative Poll informs citizens and perhaps allows them to develop and practice civic virtues associated with participation’, while ‘radical democrats are attracted to the strong public, empowered, features of…. Participatory Budgeting, but may view weak mini-publics as irrelevant epiphenomena or instruments of co-optation’. (Fung, 2003 , p. 365)

If the design of public participation processes can embed different aims and values, and if policymakers have to make some choices (or some trade-offs) among them, one fruitful way to improve the design process could be by illuminating the junctions or the dilemmas that policymakers encounter when designing public participation processes. In this sense, the problem is not to distinguish weak from strong arrangements or bad from good ones, but rather to understand the different design choices that can be made, the problems that can be tackled, the values to be pursued and/or neglected, the trade-offs that can be hypothesized among them and the results that can be attained.

In this section, I shall present some recurrent dilemmas in participation design. The list is not exhaustive but rather is an attempt to focus on only those dilemmas that appear crucial, as they tend to lead to important implications for design decisions. The list is neither parsimonious nor systemic. It does not have the ambition of catching, with a few dimensions or a few axes, the universe of the participatory arrangements, as the models I dealt with in the previous section did. Different dilemmas partially overlap.

3.1. Participation vs. deliberation

The terms participation and deliberation are sometimes used as synonymous, the same processes being defined as participatory or deliberative, depending on the case. Quite often participation is meant as an umbrella term that describes the activities by which people’s concerns, needs, interests and values are incorporated into decisions and actions on public matters and issues (Nabatchi & Leighninger, 2015 , p. 14) and thus it also includes the deliberative practices that are understood to be part of the more general participatory domain (and in this paper, up to now, I have been talking of participation in this broad sense). But the concepts of participation and deliberation can also been distinguished, as they focus on clearly different aspects (Floridia, 2017 ; Lafont, 2015 ; Mutz, 2006 ).

Both participatory and deliberative democracy aim at involving citizens in public choices, but the former is a more political and a hotter ideal: citizen involvement is conceived as the pressure of people (especially of the worse off) on the government; while the latter is a more philosophical and a colder ideal: that of making public choices arise from a reasoned dialogue among all the affected people. The former is grounded on a dualistic (and perhaps too simple) conception of society, as shaped by the opposition between the powerful and the powerless, between those who govern and those who are governed; while the latter supposes a pluralistic society in which citizens have different and even conflicting interests or ideas that must be tackled through discussion rather than through authoritative or aggregative mechanisms. Though participation and deliberation have much in common, they are – to a certain extent – contradictory: massive participation hinders deliberation, while good deliberation is favored by constrained participation.

Moving toward participation or toward deliberation depends on the problem that has to be tackled and on the expected outcomes. If the problem is that of giving voice to the voiceless, participatory designs are more suitable. As Fung writes: [j]ustice results from the proper counting of their voices rather than from deliberation (Fung, 2006 , p. 73). If the objective is to engage citizens in conflict resolution or in problem-solving, deliberative designs should be preferred. It is necessary to distinguish between problems of will and problems of judgment (Urbinati, 2006 ). In the former case, the power to decide is crucial (as in Arnstein’s ladder), while in the latter influence can also (or perhaps mainly) be attained through the concrete capacity of solving problems or conflicts.

3.2. Online vs. on-site

At a first glance, the juncture between online and on-site processes has nothing to do with the previous one, but in fact some connections exist. Policymakers tend to be attracted to a great extent by online participation: it is less expensive and less demanding, and it can involve a larger number of citizens. The literature that has reviewed the results of empirical researches is more cautious about the comparative advantages of online participation (Friess & Eilders, 2015 ; Rose & Sæbø, 2010 ).

Online platforms provided by governmental agencies are not usually as crowded as one could expect. There are technical barriers, but also cultural and political ones, i.e. a widespread mistrust toward politics and government. Moreover, online arenas seem to be unfit for deliberation, as Internet participants tend to stick to positional confrontation and to limit their contacts to like-minded fellows. In deliberative capacity, face-to-face (F2F) practices outscore keyboard-to-keyboard ones. Online participation works better when it is aimed at gathering information or at receiving inputs (such as suggestions, proposals, ideas) from citizens. A good example is the online platform Decidim (Let’s decide), setup by the new municipal administration in Barcelona, which, in just a few months in 2016, received (and partially implemented) about 10,000 proposals (even though the title of the project decidim is a little misleading).

A more interactive possibility is the use of the Internet for crowdsourcing. This worked in an interesting way in the writing of the new Icelandic constitution (Landemore, 2015 ). In general, online arrangements seem to be more suitable for less demanding participatory processes, where information or consultation are at stake, while their performance is poorer when deliberation is requested. It can be supposed that a sort of division of labor exists between online and on-site designs, the former addressing more simple, non-deliberative arrangements, the latter more demanding ones, although improvements in design may affect the quality of online deliberation (Wright & Street, 2007 ), as the positive online implementation of Fishkin’s deliberative polling seems to demonstrate (Smith, 2009 ). Online and on-site modes may also be combined. There have been cases of discussions that occur simultaneously in a mini-public and on the web (Lanzara, 2013 ) and cases of a F2F deliberation that has been followed by an online vote, as in some participatory budgets.

3.3. Open-door settings vs. mini-publics

Participatory designs are aimed at involving all the people affected by the policy at stake. But, in practice, only a tiny – a very tiny – minority of them can actually participate. As a selection is bound to take place, the problem is how to make it occur. Designers can rely on two broad alternatives that tend to generate the most important distinction in participatory arrangements: (i) open-door arenas , i.e. venues where anybody can step in and where participants are thus self-selected , and (ii) mini-publics , i.e. venues that claim to represent some features of the affected population on a small scale; in this case, participants are selected by the organizers through a certain criterion (e.g. random selection, representation of interests, ideas, discourses). The former is aimed at individual freedom, spontaneity and openness, the latter at building up a reasonable sample of those affected. The open-door setting is typical of conventional participation (Nabatchi & Leighninger, 2015 ), such as public hearings, but also of more recent devices, such as participatory budgets and the French débat public . Mini-publics include citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative polls, citizens’ assemblies and other similar devices. They are the new frontier of deliberative democrats: contemporary theoretical and empirical research is mainly concentrated on them (Grönlund, Bächtinger, & Setälä, 2014 ), while the open-door approach is often overlooked.

Self-selection is preferable when one wants to underline the openness of a process and the fact that nobody is excluded, but it runs the risk of setting up a biased arena. There may be social biases (well-off and educated people are more likely to show up than the worse-off and the uneducated), biases based upon time availability (retired people are more likely to participate than young mothers or busy people) or upon intensity of preferences (the participatory process mainly attracts those who have a great interest in the issue at stake). The latter bias may have a positive effect because it tends to raise information, attention and concern within the arena. Moreover, it may counterbalance the social bias when the issue at stake is mainly perceived by the worse-off. This is the case of the original Porto Alegre participatory budget, where poor people attended in overwhelming numbers or that of the French débat public , where the meetings are dominated by local opponents to large infrastructures. Some distortion can be useful if it serves to give voice to interests that would otherwise remain unheard.

Mini-publics do not incur such biases, because they gather a balanced sample of the affected population, but they tend to suffer from other drawbacks (Lafont, 2015 ). The participants are mainly chosen through a random selection process, and this entails an enormous democratic fascination because it solemnly underscores the full equality of all citizens, that is, of each person having the same probability of being chosen, and because it trusts in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. Again in this case, some self-selection is likely to occur, as only a small minority of those selected actually agrees to participate. However, even though a good demographical representation is reached, some problems may arise. Minorities tend to be under-represented or not represented at all, especially when the number of participants is low (as in the case of citizens’ juries). In the lottery for the British Columbia assembly, no member of the First Nation was drawn (Warren & Pearse, 2008 ); in the Turin citizens’ jury on urban traffic, none of the jurors was a frequent cyclist (Bobbio & Ravazzi, 2006 ). What is needed the most in deliberative settings is not the correct demographic representation of the universe, but rather the representation of all the possible positions on the same issue in a specific society. As Elster ( 1998 , 13) stated, if deliberation is the key to political decision-making, what matters is the full representation of views rather than individuals. In this vein, Dryzek and Niemeyer ( 2008 ) proposed setting up a discursive representation and suggested to use Q Methodology to detect the complete set of discourses that revolve around a given problem in order to grant each of them a representation in the deliberative arena.

Moreover, open-door settings are more flexible than mini-publics, because new participants can step in during the process and offer new ideas. What is sometimes needed in a contentious participatory process is not a good representation of people (or of discourses), but rather the possibility of opening the doors to actors who are capable of introducing innovative ideas and … useful ‘bridge-proposals’ to redefine the stakes and to stimulate the formulation of constructive solutions (Ravazzi & Pomatto, 2014 , p. 10) or even to unblock deadlocks.

3.4. Hot vs. cold deliberation

One of the hardest dilemmas in participation design, and which is in part linked to some of the above-mentioned ones, concerns the heat of the interactions among participants (Fung, 2003 ). It is possible to wonder whether participatory forums should be open to partisan actors (movements, associations, interest groups, activists, stakeholders) or whether they should be made up of ordinary citizens in a non-partisan setting. Most deliberative democrats are prone to the latter solution: they view participatory processes mainly as a means of cooling down the debate, of replacing passion with reason and of favoring a constructive dialogue among people. Partisan actors can be involved as witnesses who present their position to the participants and answer their questions, but are kept out of the deliberative arena. The idea behind this is that of creating a protected space – a safe haven (Chambers, 2004 ) – where deliberators, who were not previously involved in the issue to any great extent, feel free from pressures and are able to engage in cold, dispassionate deliberation. Most mini-publics are conceived in this way.

What reasons did the protesters have for agreeing with the jury’s decisions? On what grounds could they be persuaded to accept the outcome without participating in the debate directly? Why should they think, after months of hard work, that this group of sixteen people chosen by a market research firm should have the decisive voice? ( 2006 , p. 1)

The opposite solution, which is preferred by participatory democrats, and also, of course, by the stakeholders (Hendriks, 2011 ), consists of forums in which partisan positions are admitted, where hot deliberation prevails over the cold one, and a stormy (but real) sea is preferred to a safe (but artificial) haven. The main risk here is that of positional confrontation, without any form of learning. Some design choices can, however, reduce such risks, as happens in French public debate. In this case, open-door hearings are associated with narrower venues ( ateliers ) where (colder) deliberation can take place. As the official aim of the débat public is not that of making a decision, but that of gathering all arguments that pertain to the proposed project, the participants have no incentive to prevail over each other.

When a contentious issue is at stake, designers have to cautiously navigate between the Scylla of cold deliberation in safe havens and the Charybdis of hot deliberation in stormy seas. The possibility of combining the advantages of both and of eliminating their drawbacks, i.e. assuring a good degree of legitimacy through a close linkage to the real world and at the same time triggering sound deliberation, is one of the most exciting challenges of participatory design.

3.5. Decision-making vs. consultation

The dilemma between decision-making and consultative arrangements was long considered by many scholars as a crucial one: participatory arrangements were mainly classified, as seen above, according to the degree of power they enjoyed. The same idea is continuously put forward by social movements, advocacy groups and activists, who never cease to request that participatory settings are formally empowered and to complain if they are not. However, this dilemma appears to be overestimated, because granting formal power to a participatory arena is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for influencing the content of a public policy. Moreover, claiming that a decision made by a mini-public or by a public meeting should be binding for the larger community is bound to be controversial.

However, there are several arrangements though which a certain degree of formal power may be granted to a participatory arena. The strongest (but seldom practiced) one is probably the commitment to submit the recommendations issued by a mini-public to a referendum, as in the case of British Columbia’s assembly on the electoral reform or the case of the Irish constitutional convention. In the case of participatory budgets, the local authorities agree to finance the projects suggested by the citizens’ assemblies as long as they meet certain criteria: such devices are often defined as cases of shared decision-making (Gret & Sintomer, 2005 ). A weaker form of empowerment that is sometimes granted to mini-publics is the commitment, by the public authority, to either adopt their proposal or to publicly motivate the refusal; sometimes authorities just promise to take the participation’s outcomes into serious consideration.

On the other hand, there are several cases in which no formal power has been granted, and yet the participatory arenas do not necessarily lack influence. Deliberative polls, like all polls, have the aim of detecting participants’ opinions and of analyzing whether they changed their mind after the deliberation, and, if so, in which direction; yet in some cases, they have had a concrete impact on lawmaking (Goodin & Dryzek, 2006 ). French public debates are not entrusted with making either decisions or recommendations, but just with bringing to light all the arguments pertaining to an infrastructural project. After the conclusion of the debate, the project’s proponent is free to accept or reject the proposals that have arisen from the debate. However, they often modify their project according to the outcomes of some public discussions (Revel et al., 2007 ). These examples suggest that influence does not necessarily stem from formal power, but can also depend on the quality of the deliberation and of its outcomes. A deep deliberation process that opens up new possibilities and new ways of seeing an issue may be more effective than a poor decision made, thanks to formal power. Moreover, formal power can inhibit deliberation because it induces people to indulge in positional confrontation, while deliberation needs informal interactions that are free from the pressure to decide.

Recent literature tends to reframe the influence issue in terms of micro–macro relations. It wonders through which paths the micro participatory events may be connected to the macro public sphere. A mini-public or a participatory process is not the only game in town (Parkinson, 2006 , p. 95): other games, with other players and other rationales, are played simultaneously elsewhere on the same policy field. The problem is hence to understand which links (if any) are established between the sites (whether institutional or not; empowered or not) in which a policy is tackled or – it is possible to say – what is the structure of the overall deliberative system (Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012 ). Different parts of the system are coupled loosely, so that ideas and reasons coming from other parts of the deliberative system can be accepted through processes of convergence, mutual influence and mutual adjustment (Mansbridge, 2012 , p. 23). Hendriks ( 2016 ), through the analysis of the relations between a citizen jury and a parliamentary committee in an Australian state, has recently argued that coupling informal and formal sites should be designed in order to favor exchanges, interactions and mutual learning. How this connection can be arranged is one of the most challenging issues of participatory design (Setälä, 2017 ).

The participatory processes promoted by a public authority, and especially those with a higher stake, are often criticized by stakeholders, political opponents or activists as being harmful traps that pretend to give voice to citizens, but actually only serve to legitimize decisions that have already been made and to strengthen the power of those who promote them. Policymakers have been accused of displaying a false openness, of practicing tokenism and of manipulating citizens’ goodwill. It is difficult to find a participatory arrangement, which – sooner or later – has not been suspected of being located on the lowers rungs of Arnstein’s ladder. These allegations are often made in a strategic or specious way by political opponents who want to discredit the majority, by interest groups that have been cut off the process (especially in the case of mini-publics formed through random selection) or by the media eager to attack those in government.

Yet, these allegations often have a kernel of truth. As mentioned in the introduction of this article, participatory arrangements are intrinsically ambivalent: they give voice to citizens, but at the same time they use them to gain legitimacy; they are open to new solutions, but often force participants to confirm those that have already been made; they aim at making policymakers learn from citizens, but, at the same time, they put the participants in the position of having to discuss within pre-defined agendas and already framed problems. Some processes are unbalanced on one hand, some on the other, but a certain degree of ambivalence often affects them. For instance, the ‘citizen dialogue’ program enacted by the municipality of Gothenburg ‘can be understood from both idealist and cynical perspectives’, as it served both to deepen ‘local democracy by empowering citizens to voice their needs and ideas’ and to handle ‘the anticipated conflict expected from the inevitable measures of austerity’ (Tahvilzadeh, 2015 , p. 249–50).

Some scholars, moving from the dark side of participatory processes, end up denying they have any validity. They argue that participation contributes to the stabilization of neo-liberal policies (Moini, 2011 ), reinforces inequalities (Lee, McQuarrie, & Walker, 2015 ), leads to de-politicization (Clarke, 2010 ), is aimed at avoiding conflicts and fostering an appeasement that advantages those in power (Gourgues, Rui, & Topçu, 2013 ; Pellizzoni, 2015 ), is just ‘a buzzword in the neo-liberal era’ (Leal, 2007 ) and appears as a democratic illusion (Fuji Johnson, 2015 ): through participation, social movements are bypassed in favor of ordinary (and meeker) citizens.

Designing participative arrangements is seen as an ingénierie participative (Mazeaud, Nonjon, & Parizet, 2016 ) supported by a public engagement industry (Lee, 2015 ) that curbs protest and builds a technical cage that can be used to tame the wild nature of people participation. These accounts, which mainly stem from an agonistic conception of democracy (Mouffe, 1999 ), have been criticized because, for instance, social conflict is not always crushed by participation, it is often fed by it (Bobbio & Melé, 2015 ), and it may help it (Polletta, 2015 ). But, above all, these accounts look at just one facet, and they do not see the ambivalence or the contradictions that characterize participative processes. The latter can develop in different ways: they can be entirely predictable, but they can also be unexpected. In many experiences, some conflict appears between those who would like to normalize it and those who want to push it – at least partially – off the rail.

Several arrangements exist that have the aim of preventing manipulation or any instrumental use of the goodwill of participants, e.g. offering balanced information, expertise and witnesses to participants, entrusting the management of the process to skilled outsiders, setting up an advisory committee in which all the stakeholders are represented, denying any privileged position to the promoters. These or similar arrangements are normally present in participatory designs, but they are not always completely successful: the ambivalence of participatory processes cannot be overcome completely.

Policymakers who wish to include citizens in the policymaking process can rely on a rich toolbox that is continuously being widened, enhanced and refined by a vast community of academics and practitioners all over the world. The crisis of representative democracy on one hand and the rise of populism on the other have encouraged the search for solutions that are supposed to overcome, at least in part, the drawbacks of both phenomena. In fact, participatory arrangements seem able to counteract the oligarchic tendencies that have emerged from the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ as they call for the direct involvement of citizens in public choices and, at the same time, fight against the populist idea of a people with a single voice by fostering a careful discussion among citizens on the merits of specific issues.

Nowadays, this research area is one of the liveliest fields within political philosophy, political science, sociology, policy analysis, planning and other disciplines. How can a policymaker find his/her way within the vast array of tools and arrangements that crowd his/her toolbox? In this article, I have suggested that different arrangements tend to embed different goals or a different conception of effectiveness, and hence that policymakers have to make a choice (or a trade-off) at any juncture of his/her design-making process.

Table 1 lists the five dilemmas I presented above in this paper. The two columns outline – in a very rough way – two possible modes of designing public participation.

Dilemmas in public participation design.

Temporarily leaving aside the online vs. on-site dilemma, the column on the left depicts a cluster of arrangements based on free access venues – that are then open to militants and stakeholders, and that are endowed with some decision-making power and prone to tackle hot issues through adversary confrontation. These can be called participatory arrangements . The items in the column on the right outline a set of arrangements based on a sample of the affected people, which relies more on the possibility of influence than on formal power, where ordinary citizens, rather than stakeholders, play a leading role and where the heat of the discussion is cooled down in order to foster rational deliberation. These can be called deliberative arrangements . The dilemma between online and on-site participation can also somehow be introduced: as seen above, F2F interactions are more likely to develop sound deliberation than virtual ones, while online processes are more suitable for simpler and less demanding arrangements.

The two clusters that emerge, though roughly, from the two columns in Table 1 , echo the division that exists in both the literature and in practice between the world of participation and that of deliberation. This is the main dilemma policymakers face and some sort of trade-off between the properties of each of them is needed, depending on the nature of the context and of the expected results. Several combinations of the items in Table 1 are possible, and many positions in between may be found for each row. Participatory and deliberative settings should not be seen as completely alternative paths, but rather as suggestions that can be hybridized. The most interesting arrangements are found somewhere in between.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Luigi Bobbio († 2017) has been Professor of Public Policy Analysis at the University of Torino, where he created and headed up the Laboratory of Public Policy (Lapo). His research interests included public policy and conflict management, deliberative democracy, local government and governance. Recently, he co-edited (with P. Melé) the special issue Conflit et participation, le cas des choix publics territoriaux in the review 'Participation' (2017) and co-authored (with S. Ravazzi and G. Pomatto) Le politiche pubbliche. Problemi, soluzioni, incertezze, conflitti (Il Mulino, 2017).

A slightly different classification of motivations has been provided by Font, Sesma, and Fontcuberta ( 2014 ) as a support for a quantitative research on participatory processes in several Spanish and Italian municipalities. In their view, the aims of public participation may concern the polity (reacting to citizens’ dissatisfaction, improving community identity and social capital, etc.), the politics (reinforcing the mayor vs. the council, co-opting social movements, strengthening the ideological identities of political parties, etc.) or the policy (incorporate citizens preferences or knowledge into policymaking). In their empirical analysis, aims related to politics appear to be predominant (e.g. leftist local governments are more prone to participation), even if sometimes the goal of improving policy is also pursued.

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Public participation, engagement, and climate change adaptation: A review of the research literature

Stephan hügel.

1 Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2 Ireland

Anna R. Davies

Associated data.

There is a clear need for a state‐of‐the‐art review of how public participation in climate change adaptation is being considered in research across academic communities: The Rio Declaration developed in 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) included explicit goals of citizen participation and engagement in climate actions (Principle 10). Nation states were given special responsibility to facilitate these by ensuring access to information and opportunities to participate in decision‐making processes. Since then the need for public participation has featured prominently in calls to climate action. Using text analysis to produce a corpus of abstracts drawn from Web of Science, a review of literature incorporating public participation and citizen engagement in climate change adaptation since 1992 reveals lexical, temporal, and spatial distribution dynamics of research on the topic. An exponential rise in research effort since the year 2000 is demonstrated, with the focus of research action on three substantial themes—risk, flood risk, and risk assessment, perception, and communication. These are critically reviewed and three substantive issues are considered: the paradox of participation, the challenge of governance transformation, and the need to incorporate psycho‐social and behavioral adaptation to climate change in policy processes. Gaps in current research include a lack of common understanding of public participation for climate adaptation across disciplines; incomplete articulation of processes involving public participation and citizen engagement; and a paucity of empirical research examining how understanding and usage of influential concepts of risk, vulnerability and adaptive capacity varies among different disciplines and stakeholders. Finally, a provisional research agenda for attending to these gaps is described.

This article is categorized under:

• Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation
• Policy and Governance > Governing Climate Change in Communities, Cities, and Regions

Number of publications per year relating to public engagement, public participation, or citizen engagement for climate change adaptation. The quadratic curve demonstrates that submissions in this subject area are currently more than doubling year‐on‐year.

1. INTRODUCTION

The importance of public participation in responding to climate change has featured in key international statements since the Rio Declaration developed in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) included explicit goals for citizen participation and engagement in climate actions (Principle 10). Its significance was reiterated more than 28 years later in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre‐industrial levels, which specifically identified public participation in adaptation planning as a means to enhance capacity to cope with climate change risks (IPCC, 2018 ). Similarly, issues related to public participation in climate action have long been a concern for researchers (Few, Brown, & Tompkins, 2007 ), although a paucity of empirical work in relation to public participation in adaptation planning is often lamented (Burton & Mustelin, 2013 ; Sarzynski, 2015 ; Wamsler, 2017 ; Whitmarsh, O'Neill, & Lorenzoni, 2013 ). Increased pressure from civil society and a widening of public activism around climate change—exemplified by the impact of Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future school strikes, as well as the emergence of the Extinction Rebellion movement—means that attention to matters of public participation in climate change adaptation at this time is particularly apposite. A quantitative analysis, combined with a critical review of published research collated through Web of Science, as presented in this article, provides an important entry point to reflect on and review research examining public participation in adapting to climate change. This article is therefore aimed at researchers interested in understanding how public participation for climate adaptation has been and is being considered across a multiplicity of disciplines.

Before setting out the parameters of the review it is useful to clarify first what is meant by public participation and its allied terms. While there is no singular universal definition, public participation is primarily viewed as an umbrella term incorporating various forms of interaction with people, from informing and listening through dialogue, debate, and analysis, to implementing jointly agreed solutions. Research in land‐use planning forms the foundation for much contemporary attention to such participation in public policy (Arnstein, 1969 ; Nelkin & Pollak, 1979 ; Smith, Nell, & Prystupa, 1997 ; Wiedemann & Femers, 1993 ). This work identifies varying levels of participation, particularly in terms of the intensity of engagement with publics and the degree of control over decision‐making that is afforded to publics through that participation. Rowe and Frewer ( 2000 , 2005 , pp. 253–254) in contrast focus on the dynamics of information flows between a sponsoring entity and participating publics. Participation is seen as necessitating a bidirectional flow of information, whereas communication is characterized by a unidirectional flow of information between sponsoring entity and the public, with public consultation being the unidirectional flow of information from public to sponsoring entity.

Ultimately, and importantly for this review, there are multiple synonyms for public participation and different understandings of those terms across geographical contexts, academic disciplines, and professions. This makes conducting a review challenging but nonetheless important both in terms of fostering greater cross‐fertilization of ideas among researchers from different disciplines and developing robust dialogue with participating sponsors such as local authorities and local or national governments about their understandings of and goals for participation around climate adaptation. In light of this and the growing recognition that adaptation to climate change will only become more pressing over time, this advanced review provides a critical appraisal of the literature specifically focusing on the explicit articulation of public participation and engagement in relation to climate change adaptation from the landmark year for climate change policy 1992 up to 2018.

The review comprises four sections: First, a detailed account of the methodology used in the scientometric analysis is presented, discussing the advantages and limitations of the chosen approach. The second section presents the results of the scientometric analysis, which characterizes a corpus of abstracts of peer‐reviewed publications drawn from the Web of Science Database, based on key terms and phrases related to engagement and participation in the context of climate change adaptation, and detailing the justification for the choice of risk as the key theme of the review, as well as presenting temporal and spatial distributions of papers, the territorial distribution of authorship, and lexical dynamics. This is followed by a thematic analysis which offers a critical review of numerically significant themes and those directly relevant to the research questions from the corpus, particularly focusing on public participation and climate action in relation to the concept of risk, and sub‐themes arising from this: Risk perception and communication and flood risk. In the final section of the article, gaps in current research are mapped and a prospective agenda for attending to matters of engagement and participation around climate adaptation strategies is outlined. Due to the volume of peer‐reviewed material to examine this review does not include gray literature such as policy statements and plans, although conducting a systematic study of this material in the future would usefully complement this review.

2. METHODOLOGY

The analysis of the articles was carried out in three phases ( Figure ​ Figure1). 1 ). In Phase I, the Web of Science database was examined for all articles with titles or abstracts containing the phrase “climate change adaptation”. As established in Section 1 , there are different terms used to capture the ways people are engaged in climate change adaptation. In the absence of an accepted and comprehensive lexicon for public participation, we then conducted a search of the climate change adaptation literature between 1992 and 2018 using three configurations: “citizen engagement”, “public participation”, and “public engagement.” This resulted in a set of 484 publications ( Annex 3 ). Further searches were conducted for two other terms, citizen involvement and city–citizen interactions, which identified three further papers. Given the small number of additional papers, these were not included in the final analyses. There is however scope for more nuanced work identifying and examining additional terms which may be used in particular locations or situations to describe participation, as we shall discuss in the critical reflection section. It is acknowledged that the Web of Science Database does not capture all research outputs, although in 2019 it claimed to include 1.7 billion cited references from over 159 million records. These are derived from 21,100 peer‐reviewed scholarly journals in over 250 sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities disciplines, with conference proceedings, and book data also available. 1

Analysis methodology, comprising three phases: Search, corpus production, and corpus analysis

In Phase II, the abstracts of the publications in Annex 1 were imported into a Pandas (McKinney, 2010 ) DataFrame for textual analysis. Using the Scikit‐Learn Python library (Pedregosa et al., 2011 ), these were used to produce a cleaned version (hereinafter a “corpus”) of single‐word terms (keywords), bigrams, and trigrams by cleaning, stemming, and lemmatizing (reducing inflected words to their root forms). This operation used a “bag of words” approach (Joulin, Grave, Bojanowski, & Mikolov, 2016 ) combined with feature extraction (Guyon, Gunn, Nikravesh, & Zadeh, 2008 ; Lewis, 1992 ) to produce the final terms and frequencies.

In Phase III, two kinds of textual analysis were carried out: First, the keywords, bigrams, and trigrams were ranked by frequency, to determine the 20 most‐frequently occurring entries (Figures ​ (Figures2 2 and ​ and3). 3 ). In a second step, a complementary term‐frequency/inverse‐document‐frequency (tf‐idf) approach (See Aizawa, 2003 ; Ramos, 2003 ; Trstenjak, Mikac, & Donko, 2014 ) was used to rank the relative importance of keywords within the corpus. In addition to the textual analysis, publication dates were normalized to include only the year of publication, allowing a simple regression model to be fitted to the data. The feature extraction and tf‐idf approaches have the advantage of speed and simplicity, though they are limited in the sense that they cannot identify synonyms (Berger & Lafferty, 1999 ), and rely on a preprocessing step (lemmatization, see Annex 1 ; Table ​ Table1) 1 ) to give high‐quality results. However, given that a close reading of the publications for the purposes of analysis and discussion forms an integral part of this review, this limitation was considered to be acceptable. Furthermore, while the regression model only includes a single term, it is nonetheless effective in demonstrating that scholarly attention in the area of public participation in climate change adaptation is expanding rapidly. The interactive Jupyter notebook used to carry out these analyses is available online. 2

Number of publications per year. The fitted quadratic curve has an R 2 of 0.966

Most frequently occurring trigrams in the corpus

Top five tf‐idf scores

Finally, a thematic analysis of the most relevant themes in terms of their numerical significance, as identified in Phase III, was carried out. It should be noted that while the themes of the papers in this sub‐sample overlap, they are considered separately for clarity in this review.

3.1. Lexical and geographic analysis

Though the parameters of the literature search were set to include publications from 1992 onwards, the conjunction of “public engagement,” “public participation,” or “citizen engagement,” and “climate change adaptation” does not appear until the year 2000. This may be explained by changes in standard terminology; for example, activities related to Local Agenda 21 were much to the fore throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (Barrutia, Echebarria, Paredes, Hartmann, & Apaolaza, 2015 ). Furthermore, as Massey and Huitema ( 2013 ) explanation, adaptation did not become a key focus of public policy until the publication of the IPCC report titled Impacts , Adaptation , and Vulnerability in 2001 (McCarthy, Canziani, Leary, Dokken, & White, 2001 ). We found that between 2000 and 2018, research effort at the intersection of participation, engagement and climate change adaptation has increased (Figure ​ (Figure2 2 ).

It is clear from the analysis that the overall frequency of publications is increasing year‐on‐year, beginning in 2005, showing a quadratic increase in attention to matters of participation and climate change adaptation, with publications more than doubling between 2017 and 2018.

The analysis of the corpus's trigrams (a group of three consecutive words) presented in Figure ​ Figure3 3 shows that “sea‐level rise” occurs most frequently (47 times); almost three times more frequently than any other term. This is a strong indication that there is a preoccupation with this particular climate impact in recent scholarship. Though the “sea‐level rise” trigram (see Figure ​ Figure3) 3 ) appears far more frequently than any other, four of the 20 most frequently‐occurring trigrams include the term “risk”, which rises to six occurrences within the top 40, with “social–ecological system”, a key concept in the system model of risk discussed later, also occurring frequently.

The single‐keyword analysis (Figure ​ (Figure4) 4 ) is confirmed by the tf‐idf analysis, a technique that ranks the relative importance of a word within a corpus (Table ​ (Table1): 1 ): Water, risk, community, and policy are all highly‐ranked. Based on these results, “Risk” was chosen as the central theme of the thematic analysis which follows.

Most frequently occurring words in the corpus

Figure ​ Figure5 5 shows the geographic distribution of research effort. Though there are some difficulties with this data—Clarivate analytics calculates this in relation to the institutional affiliation of the authors alone and not the geographical focus of the research—it provides a means of illustrating where relevant research is being undertaken. It is clear that US‐based researchers contribute the highest number (83) of publications that consider public participation and engagement with climate change adaptation, followed by the UK and Australia. While it is not appropriate to use population size as a proxy for expected research effort it is nonetheless worth noting that The Netherlands, with a population of just over 17 million, contributes a research effort just slightly less than half of the US, with a population of 327 million—over 19 times as large. It should further be noted that researchers based in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are beginning to make substantial contributions to this field of research, with most (90%) of the publications from these nations appearing since 2015.

Clarivate Web of Science metrics of research effort grouped by geographic area of author affiliation for climate change adaptation and public participation

Figure ​ Figure6 6 presents the disciplinary affiliation of the journal articles in the corpus. This indicates the range of academic perspectives that are contributing to debates at the nexus of climate change adaptation and public participation. While the subject classification for journals is automatically generated by the Clarivate metrics without any explanation of the metrics used for doing so and while it is possible to assign a paper to multiple subject categories, the graphic is instructive in its visualization of the balance of research effort across broad disciplinary boundaries. Despite the very human nature of public participation, the natural sciences (e.g., Meteorology and Atmospheric Science and Environmental Sciences Ecology) are the most productive in terms of the total number of papers published that include attention to public participation and climate change adaptation. Nonetheless, a considerable proportion of the total research effort is allocated to business and economics, with Geography, as a bridging discipline between the natural and social sciences, also a notable contributor to the field.

Clarivate Web of Science subject categories for climate change adaptation and public participation

3.1. Thematic analysis: Risk, risk perception, and flooding in climate adaptation

This section offers a critical review of numerically significant themes from the corpus. The results of the quantitative text analysis are presented, and used to contextualize the choice of themes and specific papers pertaining to these, which are discussed in more depth. We focus specifically on the theme of risk, and particularly on perceptions of flooding risk as a key theme identified in the scientometric analysis. Other themes, such as adapting to increasing and high temperatures which may result in droughts, changing patterns of disease and viable forms of agriculture, as well as adaptation to other forms of extreme weather events such as tornados, hurricanes, are less prominent in the corpus. It is not possible within this paper to consider these additional themes, though they would benefit from dedicated attention in the future.

In this section, additional context is added by reference to papers outside the corpus, to expand upon and more usefully discuss the concepts under review. An analysis of single‐word (keyword) frequency in the corpus, illustrated in Figure ​ Figure4, 4 , shows that the words “risk,” “policy,” “community,” and “local” occur most frequently (457, 465, 422, and 364 occurrences, respectively) in the abstracts. Of these four terms, “risk,” “community,” and “local” are worthy of further consideration: The search keywords which produced the corpus did not specify these terms, yet it is clear from the number of articles focusing on these themes that they are a key focus of research when considering climate change adaptation and public participation. While “policy” was identified as a significant term, a close reading of the abstracts did not identify it as thematically significant, and it was excluded from further analysis. However, as mentioned previously, it would be useful to conduct a detailed review of gray and policy literature to explore more carefully how such documents address the intersection of policy with public participation and climate change adaptation.

The links between the leading trigram “sea‐level rise” and the most frequently used words are clear. Sea level rise is experienced in places (e.g., at the local scale) by people living in areas (e.g., in communities) that are likely to be affected by it (e.g., being at risk). However, the conflation of citizen engagement and participation, localities, and adaptation raises interesting scalar questions given that much (though not all: See Bierbaum et al., 2013 ) adaptation planning to date has been conducted at national or international scales through initiatives such as National Adaptation Plans of Action (NAPAs; Woodruff & Regan, 2019 ), with local adaptation planning an emerging space of activity (Cloutier et al., 2015 ; Ford et al., 2016 ; Woodruff & Stults, 2016 ).

While the topics of risk, perceptions of risk and flood risk frequently overlap rather than being mutually exclusive, in order to provide a useful heuristic for this review we consider papers under these sub‐headings separately based on their major focus, based on a close reading of their abstracts. More than a third of all publications in the corpus (33% or 160 publications) mention risk in some context, with another 12.6% (61) mentioning vulnerability. Before examining this corpus in detail it is useful to clarify the relationship between concepts of risk, vulnerability, and adaptation as it is often unclear (Brooks, 2003 ). This lack of clarity is due in large part to their use in different disciplines; natural hazard research tends to use the term “risk,” whereas “vulnerability” (E. Downing et al., 2001 ) is more commonly used by social science and climate change researchers. Among social scientists and climate scientists, the term “vulnerability” is often employed differently, with social scientists using it more broadly to refer to a set of socioeconomic factors determining people's ability to cope with stress or change (Allen, 2003 ). Climate scientists meanwhile tend to use it to characterize the likelihood of the occurrence and impacts of weather and climate‐related events. These differences may be more usefully distinguished as social vulnerability and biophysical vulnerability (Brooks, 2003 , p. 3). The relationship between these concepts is illustrated by Figure ​ Figure7, 7 , from the IPCC 2014 WG II AR5 summary for policymakers, demonstrating that “risk of climate‐related impacts results from the interaction of climate‐related hazards (including hazardous events and trends) with the vulnerability and exposure of human and natural systems” (Field et al., 2014 , p. 3).

Illustration of the core concepts of the WGII AR5: “Changes in both the climate system (left) and socioeconomic processes including adaptation and mitigation (right) are drivers of hazards, exposure, and vulnerability” (Field et al., 2014 , p. 3)

In terms of the focus of this review, the complex landscape of risk and vulnerability research engages with public participation in different ways. For example, Smit and Wandel ( 2006 ) and Adger's ( 2006 ) work is contingent upon the conception of a community as a “social–ecological system“, or just a “system” more generally. This is necessary to describe relationships and interactions within it in a concise manner, but it raises questions as to whether this systematic view excludes other kinds of more situated knowledge and relationships. Adger et al. ( 2009 ) see adaptation activities as societally endogenous and “inherently local and necessarily based on contextual knowledge” (p. 346), and suggest “[t]hat an adaptable society is characterized by awareness of diverse values, appreciation and understanding of specific and variable vulnerabilities to impacts, and acceptance of some loss through change” (Adger et al., 2009 , p. 350). The ability to adapt is then affected, at last to some extent, by the availability of technologies and capabilities but also, and importantly “by the ethics of the treatment of vulnerable people and places within societal decision‐making structures.” (Adger et al., 2009 , p. 350).

3.2. Risk assessment, risk perception, and risk communication

The topics of risk perception and communication are deeply interlinked, as explicitly noted by Pidgeon ( 2012 ), who points out that uncertainty about impacts can result in what he terms “uncertainty transfer”: A corresponding and counter‐intuitive uncertainty concerning causes. A similarly counter‐intuitive phenomenon is described by Domingues, Santos, de Jesus, and Ferreira ( 2018 ) in their case study of a vulnerable island barrier system, showing that while risk perception among surveyed inhabitants was high, their belief in the danger of hazards was low, and distant in time, and that authorities’ efforts to increase their perception and decrease their psychological distance may in fact have had the opposite effect, due to what the authors believe is an understudied aspect of the psychological coping mechanisms which are at play. However, the work of Lawrence, Quade, and Becker ( 2014 ) with coastal communities in New Zealand demonstrates that previous experience of flooding heightens risk perception, and increased preparedness, as well as leading to a greater willingness to communicate with local government about adaptation. As Buys, Miller, and van Megen ( 2012 ) emphasize in their study of perceptions of climate change in rural Australia, a detailed understanding of the differing perceptions of climate change is crucial in order to effectively shape both national and local‐level responses to climate change.

Johnson et al. ( 2012 ) have called for a more sophisticated approach to communicating risk, using Fischhoff's ( 1995 ) model of risk communication to demonstrate that to date, most climate change communication has stressed persuasion, rather than social movement mobilization or deliberation. They point out that while social movement mobilization has its own set of weaknesses, it can nevertheless complement persuasive communication strategies. Such mobilization can be activated by focusing on developing power and influence over decision making, subverting mainstream assumptions, and engaging people in collective action, such that “[d]eliberation, unlike the other two approaches does not define the solution or even, necessarily, the problem in advance, and thus offers the chance for people of contending viewpoints to jointly develop concepts and action agendas hitherto unimagined” (B. B. Johnson, 2012 , p. 973).

Another possible method of mitigating the difficulties described is that of risk assessment, more specifically, community risk assessment (CRA). CRA is a participatory method used to assess hazards, risks, and capacities in support of community‐based disaster risk reduction (DRR). Van Aalst, Cannon, and Burton ( 2008 ) review its evolution, noting that an explicitly participatory form of CRA may be useful in the integration of climate change risks arising at the global scale in a bottom‐up, place‐based approach to risk assessment. Bell, Turner, Meinke, and Holbrook ( 2015 ) study of health adaptation responses to climate change, has shown that an applied, complexity‐oriented understanding of the impact of climate change is necessary in order to understand how they can affect both local communities and local services, compromising human health. Their development of an electronic tool demonstrates that CRA can be used to capture and make sense of these complexities, resulting in a more effective ordering of priorities for health sector adaptation, and thus more effective planning.

The use of electronic or geospatial media is by no means a panacea, however. As Lieske, Wade, and Roness ( 2014 ) work demonstrates, “geovisually‐enhanced” communication strategies for flood risk are not guaranteed to be more effective than standard strategies, but they may enhance willingness to become politically active around the issue of climate change. As both Lawrence et al. ( 2014 ) and Lieske et al. ( 2014 ) suggest, these techniques could help to disrupt the perception that governments alone are responsible for providing protection from flooding and move toward a more inclusive and multi‐scalar dialogue between national and local governments and citizens about the changing nature of flood risk. Carayannis and Campbell have attempted to widen this systematic interaction by conceptualizing a “quintuple helix,” which frames interactions between governments, citizens, industry, and academia in the context of the environment (Carayannis & Campbell, 2010 ). Whether it is possible to re‐orient society towards increased risk consciousness on a large scale, however, remains an open question.

3.3. Participation, adaptation, and flood risk

As with the overall corpus of research at the intersection of climate change adaptation, citizen engagement, and participation, attention to matters of flood risk within this corpus has increased dramatically since 2011, accounting for more than half (77) of the 160 risk‐related publications. These papers are largely authored by researchers based in, and focusing on, western high‐income countries, with UK‐based researchers producing over a third of all papers. Looking at papers that focus specifically on public participation and flood risk this pattern largely persists, although The Netherlands appears as another key locus of research. Collaborative and comparative research endeavors are also prominent in this field. For example, Williams, Costa, Celliers, and Sutherland ( 2018 ) bring together researchers based in Germany and South Africa to examine risks for water management in Durban, while Garschagen, Surtiari, and Harb ( 2018 ) explores the flood risk reduction strategies being employed in the high flood risk city of Jakarta, Indonesia. Both Eakin, Eriksen, Eikeland, and Oyen ( 2011 ) and Henriksen et al. ( 2018 ) undertake comparative work, with the former examining the implications of public management for adaptive capacity in Mexico and Norway and the latter using selected Nordic and other European examples to explore the potential for public participation across flood disaster risk reduction cycles.

The bulk of papers in this sub‐corpus examine and assess existing approaches to climate change adaptation, with fewer (4) reporting on novel interventions developed by the researchers or in collaboration with other actors. The latter, more experimental, approach appears in papers focusing on citizen engagement in relation to developing action research for improving adaptive capacity (Picketts, Curry, Dery, & Cohen, 2013 ), using dialogic communication methods (Cone et al., 2013 ) or designing and testing other co‐production approaches (H. Mees, Crabbe, & Driessen, 2017 ). Co‐production is used to describe a process of including multiple actors in the formation of knowledge, recognizing that addressing complex problems such as climate change adaptation requires attention to scientific information, local needs, knowledge, and values in decision making (Djenontin & Meadow, 2018 ). Essentially, co‐production techniques attempt to bring together science, society, and policy as a means to improve problem‐solving (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998 ; Latour, 1998 ).

A small number of publications (2) report on the design and implementation of creative mechanisms to engage citizens, such as gaming. The “serious games” (Connolly, Boyle, MacArthur, Hainey, & Boyle, 2012 ) strategy adopted by Pontee and Morris ( 2011 ) is an example of this experimental approach to research that develops novel responses to pre‐identified problems. Pontee and Morris ( 2011 ) begin their research from the pragmatic and ideological position that it will become increasingly important for stakeholders to become more fully engaged with consultation processes around flood governance and that more creative and imaginative ways of engaging will be required to do this. On one hand, this position is relatively uncontroversial as it is well‐established that mainstream methods of citizen engagement have failed to produce significant levels of participation in climate adaptation planning (Lane, 2005 ). However, research focused on public participation in planning, and environmental planning more broadly has indicated that it is not just the method of engagement that affects whether people engage or not. Other factors such as a lack of trust in processes and a fear of co‐option or manipulation can also affect people's willingness to engage (Davies, 2001a , 2001b , 2005 ). Indeed, attending to the power and politics of participation has been flagged as an important element of any assessment of, or intervention in, planning for more than 50 years (Arnstein, 1969 ; Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018 ).

It is interesting to note that Pontee and Morris ( 2011 , p. 25) explicitly state that the game is “not intended to be used as an expert system for choosing management policies to other stretches of coast”, justifying this based on the simplifications that had to be made for the process to sit within the parameters of the game's architecture. However, nothing is said about what elements of the decision‐making process have been excluded or simplified, and in particular, whether these elements of complexity are related to technical matters, scientific processes or social, political, and economic maneuvers (or indeed all of the above). Also, the paper focuses on the development of the tool rather than its implementation and no papers on implementation or evaluation of the tool have been published to date. Elsewhere, however, work is emerging (see Connolly et al., 2012 ; Flood, Cradock‐Henry, Blackett, & Edwards, 2018 ) which begins to demonstrate how serious games may support and enhance social learning in communities as a way of addressing the adaptation deficit which arises in the gaps between scientific knowledge and public understanding. They attempt to delineate where and how impact is being achieved through serious games, assessing which particular combinations of cognitive (e.g., knowledge and thinking), normative (e.g., norms and approaches), and relational (e.g., how people connect and network building) learning are being achieved. They find that influencing behavior and catalyzing learning for adaptation requires high levels of trust between researchers, practitioners, and community participants, experienced facilitators and robust processes for debriefing and evaluation postengagement. Whether and how such games might bring broader benefits beyond learning, for example, in relation to enhancing trust (Roth & Winnubst, 2014 ) and legitimacy (M. Alexander, Doorn, & Priest, 2018 ; H. L. P. Mees, Driessen, & Runhaar, 2014 ) or action, is still to be determined. Considering matters of visualization also appear in the work of Neset, Opach, Lion, Lilja, and Johansson ( 2016 ), who reviewed the use of geovisual tools to support participation in climate adaptation, while Sheppard et al make the case for community engagement and planning using scenarios and visualization (Sheppard et al., 2011 ).

In contrast to the experimental work of Pontee and Morris ( 2011 ), the bulk of papers in this sub‐corpus examine existing interventions implemented to address the complex challenges of climate change adaptation to flooding. For example, Nye, Tapsell, and Twigger‐Ross ( 2011 ) explore the emergence of a sociotechnical approach to flood and coastal risk management in the UK which explicitly seeks to expand community engagement and explore personal or community‐level responsibility for flood risk planning, awareness, and resilience. These emergent sociotechnical approaches sit alongside more centrally managed structural and technical measures that have dominated responses to flood risk to date. Nye et al. ( 2011 ) focus on the drivers of a perceived “social turn” in flood risk management and they ask whether this marks a broader trend towards a more “civic model” (Owens, 2000 ) of environmental policy and planning that they call “flood risk citizenship.” The civic model delineated by Owens ( 2000 ) suggests that deliberation, in this case with respect to adaptation to flood risk driven by climate change, does not rely on experts to set out the issues at stake; rather the issues are negotiated through discussions among all participants. Adopting a civic model in this way suggests a process which is far removed from asking participants to select prescribed responses to predefined challenges in order to establish passive compliance or what is often termed social acceptance (Fournis & Fortin, 2017 ), instead focusing on redistributing expertise and opening up possibilities for participatory modeling (Landström et al., 2011 ). However, rather than exploring possibilities for reorienting control within flood risk management, many papers in this sub‐corpus focus on understanding how people perceive risks in relation to climate forced flooding (K. S. Alexander, Ryan, & Measham, 2012 ), or how science is communicated when engaging with at‐risk coastal communities (Cone et al., 2013 ). Research concludes that risks are, unsurprisingly, perceived more strongly by those who experience them directly, leading to increased salience of climate change, pronounced emotional responses and an elevated sense of personal vulnerability.

Another thematic focus within the flood risk literature is the process of risk response, often through the development of local adaptation strategies (Manning, Lawrence, King, & Chapman, 2015 ; Picketts et al., 2013 ) and the different perceptions of risk they embody. Yet, despite the prominence of economic arguments in framing decisions about flood risk management (Zhou, Halsnaes, & Arnbjerg‐Nielsen, 2012 ), only a few papers in the corpus (3) directly address the role of insurance schemes in shaping those responses (Kammerbauer & Wamsler, 2017a , 2017b ; Seifert‐Dahnn, 2018 ; Crick et al., 2018 ). There are also relatively few papers (7) in this sub‐corpus which focus on low‐income communities and nation states, despite recognition that it is frequently these communities and countries which are already being worst‐hit by early climatic changes, with dire predictions for future impacts and little capacity to adapt (Adger, Huq, Brown, Conway, & Hulme, 2003 ; Cinner, 2011 ). These matters are not ignored by researchers, rather that they are typically framed within international development discourses and disaster risk management literature rather than explicitly focusing on climate adaptation and citizen participation and engagement (Garschagen et al., 2018 ). However, the uneven distribution of research in this sub‐corpus suggests that there are other processes at play, perhaps in relation to the availability of funding, which should be further explored both in relation to the focus of climate change research and in terms of the disciplines which benefit from climate change research funding (Overland & Sovacool, 2020 ). Within the papers which do address low‐income contexts and countries, there are clear areas of commonality. Vedeld, Coly, Ndour, and Hellevik ( 2016 ) in their study of climate adaptation in Saint Louis, Senegal, for example, examined the multi‐level governing structures which shape adaptation strategies in the city. In terms of citizen engagement, they established that some level of participation is encouraged by public officials in adaptation planning at city and regional scales. However, they also found a lack of support, particularly technical and financial support, for these activities from national structures and uneven investment in participation among low‐income and vulnerable settlements. As the municipality of Saint Louis had no statutory mandate to govern in the areas of adaptation and disaster risk management this limited the capability of diverse citizens to partner effectively with government in co‐producing effective resilience to climate change in the area and beyond. Similarly Mulligan, Harper, Kipkemboi, Ngobi, and Collins ( 2017 ) in their study of community‐responsive adaptation to flooding in Kibera, Kenya found that household‐level engagement with adaptation practices was disincentivized by insecure housing tenure and a lack of effective community engagement. Isunju and Kemp ( 2016 ) meanwhile adopted a more targeted approach, examining flooding in the Nakivubo wetland region of Kampala, Uganda. Combining findings from aerial photos and satellite imagery, focus group discussions, and stakeholder interviews, their findings resonate with those of Vedeld et al. ( 2016 ), that a stronger multifaceted governance approach is needed which co‐ordinates stakeholders and engages wetland‐dependent communities in co‐designing responses to flooding challenges. Nonetheless, as with papers focused on higher‐income contexts, there are general conclusions that community‐responsive adaptation to flooding is required (Ramm, Graham, White, & Watson, 2017 ).

The challenges of social inequality and marginalization in post‐disaster recovery situations is not restricted to low‐income nations, with the research conducted in Germany by Kammerbauer and Wamsler ( 2017a ) warning that recovery efforts may reinforce inequalities and sometimes even create new cleavages. Concurring with the findings of Hegger, Mees, Driessen, and Runhaar ( 2017 ), they call for more attention to the interplay and power constellations between state, market, and civil society actors. Indeed, it is common for publications in this sub‐corpus to flag uneven power relations in planning for climate adaptation. However, rarely do the publications focus explicitly on how to address these power imbalances with a focus instead on increasing levels of participation using deliberative methods. Of course, simply providing opportunities for participation does not mean that underlying patterns of power and influence are dissolved or even reoriented (H. Mees et al., 2017 ; Mees, Alexander, Gralepois, Matczak, & Mees, 2018 ).

4. CRITICAL REFLECTION AND PROSPECTIVE RESEARCH AGENDA

The previous sections of this article have identified a suite of trends in existing research which addresses the nexus of public participation and engagement with climate change adaptation, and focused on a detailed analysis of the dominant themes of risk and flooding. This section addresses matters of engagement and participation more generally. Taken together, the trends and themes identified raise a number of issues that demand more careful consideration and critical reflection. Some of these issues related to the nature, interpretation, and application of the key terms participation and engagement which are used liberally and often loosely across the corpus. Other issues, such as the nature of knowledge and expertise are evoked or mentioned in passing under the umbrella of governance, but they rarely form the key focus of publications. Further issues, such as matters of climate anxiety (Doherty, 2015 ), are conspicuous in their absence or are, at best, addressed only superficially in the corpus. Considering these issues more carefully gives greater clarity to unresolved matters at the heart of climate change adaptation and provides the basis for a prospective agenda for future research. As noted previously, there is considerable scope for the examination of more varied terms for describing participation. For example, city–citizen commoning (Wamsler & Raggers, 2018 ), city–citizen interaction (Wamsler, 2016 ), and citizen involvement (Brink et al., 2016 ) are all directly related to the theme of this review but are poorly represented in search results.

4.1. The wicked problem of participation and engagement

What is clear from the corpus is the extent to which matters of participation and engagement are evoked in a generic and normative manner. There is universal agreement among the papers examined, for example, that greater levels of engagement and participation are needed to improve the efficacy of climate change adaptation. What constitutes appropriate participation, delineating the reasons why it is crucial in a particular context and establishing a clear means for designing it appropriately and evaluating whether it has been successful (or not) are, however, rarely set out explicitly or in detail.

As noted earlier, examining different types of participation and the associated balance of power and influence that those varieties of participation embody has long preoccupied scholars, from Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation in the late 1960s (Arnstein, 1969 ), through the expansion of participatory processes stimulated by Local Agenda 21 and sustainability more broadly in the 1990s (Davies, 2002 ) to contemporary attention to climate action (Corner, Markowitz, & Pidgeon, 2014 ; Whitmarsh et al., 2013 ). Permeating this body of work is what Sprain (Sprain, 2017 ) calls the paradox of participation. Participation occurs in spaces which are not neutral and which can be exclusive and hierarchical rather than inclusive and accommodating (Cooke & Kothari, 2001 ). Similar to the development field which experienced its participatory turn at the turn of the millennium, all papers in this review assume that participation if undertaken correctly, is an intrinsically good thing. Yet participatory approaches, when viewed as add‐ons to fundamentally inequitable structures, could potentially quell dissenting voices and gloss over conflicts between participants. Participatory processes in particular places are rarely apolitical and they are inevitably mediated by uneven patterns of power between those involved (Isunju & Kemp, 2016 ; Vedeld et al., 2016 ). Power that can be, for example, political, economic, gender‐based, and cultural in composition. While many papers in the corpus acknowledge this in their conclusions (Hegger et al., 2017 ; Kammerbauer & Wamsler, 2017b ) they rarely provide the means to navigate these conditions. Ultimately, participation in climate change adaptation must be demonstrably fair and just from both a procedural—That is, the justness of the institutional processes and procedures through which decisions are made, see (Young, 2011 )—and distributional perspective, that is, justice that is concerned with “moral preferences over the distribution of social and economic benefits and burdens among a group of individuals” (Walker, 2010 , p. 7).

Despite ongoing concerns regarding public participation in climate adaptation, great strides have been taken in terms of widening engagement with, and participation in, planning around climate change. It is clear that civil society and private sector groups, for example, now contribute to national and global climate discussions that were once dominated by scientists and technical experts (Schroeder & Lovell, 2012 ). However, the corpus of papers examined in this review also suggests that formal participation by unorganized publics around climate adaptation remains stubbornly limited despite increased research into communicating climate change (Moser, 2010 ; Nisbet, 2009 ). Here it is useful to consider the considerable research which disrupts assumptions of a neat linear path between information, awareness, and action (Ayers, 2011 ; Collins & Ison, 2009 ; Davies, Fahy, & Rau, 2014 ), such that information alone will not be sufficient to lead directly or unproblematically to adaptive changes in social practices. Participation in relation to climate change adaptation will need long‐term collaboration between different groups and ongoing resources and contributions. It is often messy, cumbersome, and slow, creating tensions with other drivers of public governance relating to bureaucratic efficiency and value for money. However, such processes allow for considered debate and ultimately are, as a result, more likely to lead to robust and defensible decisions.

At the same time that formal public participation in climate adaptation is struggling to gain traction there has been a rise in incidence, and coverage, of climate strikes, protests, and marches internationally which provides visible indications of support for progressive climate action (both mitigation and adaptation), particularly among young people (Davies & Hügel, 2019 ; Warren, 2019 ). Exploring the confluence of conditions that generated this phenomenon and interrogating the means to reconcile these calls for action with practical mechanisms for implementing climate change adaptation should be a priority for research. Such grassroots action in relation to climate change is not new (Whitmarsh et al., 2013 ), but a gap between such activities and public policies for climate action has persisted. As such research needs to dig beneath simple calls to incorporate new actors into adaptation planning and implementation processes and approach questions relating to a reconfiguration of governance structures and systems.

4.2. Governance and the redistribution of expertise

The challenges related to participation for climate change adaptation are set within broader frameworks of governance. For all the rhetorical commitment to increasing public participation for climate change adaptation, the lack of practical developments suggests systemic barriers exist which are cumulatively impeding participation being embedded further. This was alluded to in the corpus in relation to fundamental matters of trust and legitimacy and relates to wider debates about decision making. Certainly, it cannot be assumed that the “civic model” of decision making that Owens ( 2000 ) describes, for example, is necessarily the goal of all governments or scientists. Yet, as Sprain ( 2017 ) argues, reducing participation to a narrow technical‐functionalist methodology focused on small technical fixes risks obscuring ambivalences, conflicts, and difficult choices that will not disappear and may lead to more structural resistance in the future. Instead, participatory processes need to acknowledge and accommodate these paradoxes of participation. If politicians and scientists are serious about involving unorganized publics in co‐producing knowledge for climate change adaption, for example, then they need to admit them as experts on their own terms; as experts of their own lived experiences. Effectively, there will need to be some redistribution of expertise in decision‐making structures.

Landström et al. ( 2011 ) explored this issue in relation to the potential of computer simulation modeling around flood risk, suggesting that modelers need to reposition themselves with respect to their modeling practices, bringing in participants as competency groups aimed at harnessing public controversy over flood management. This suggests moving away from a primary rationalist driver for public engagement (to create trust and minimize conflict) and accepting and even encouraging discussions about the very assumptions which underpin decision making processes. Certainly, this will be necessary in order to have open and frank dialogue about what public participation is trying to achieve. Conflict under these conditions is not a failure of governance, rather it is its lifeblood and an opportunity for deeper engagement; a generative force (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009 ). As a result, enhancing public participation in climate adaptation requires not just changes on the part of the public, but also the part of incumbent actors of the decision‐making processes. This is not only possible, but also potentially beneficial. Landström et al. ( 2011 ), for example, found that once the scientists involved in the computer modeling experiment were willing and able to accept a redistribution of expertise they encountered a new sense of “moral imagination” (Coeckelbergh, 2006 ) in flood risk management that became embedded in their day‐to‐day activities, rather than being a bolt‐on activity to their scientific practice.

Within the protected niche of scientific experiments, such reconfiguration is feasible, if still challenging. Yet conventional governance institutions are notorious for being poorly equipped to facilitate, even tolerate, such innovative strategies (Termeer, Dewulf, & Biesbroek, 2017 ), particularly in the complex multiscalar policy world of climate change. Here there is considerable research already being conducted on ideas of experimental governance for climate change (Bulkeley & Castán Broto, 2012 ; Gordon, 2018 ; Laakso, Berg, & Annala, 2017 ), including notions of expanding climate justice at the urban scale (Bulkeley, Edwards, & Fuller, 2014 ), that could usefully be extended beyond their current urban loci and connected explicitly to debates about public participation and engagement with adaptation to climate change more broadly. In particular, the ways in which interventions around climate change adaptation intersect with already existing forms of inequality demands much more nuanced research endeavors.

4.3. Expanding adaptation

There is far greater focus in the corpus on public participation and engagement with material and physical adaptation of environments in response to climate change than to matters of psycho‐social and behavioral adaptation (Bonnheim, 2010 ; Reser, Bradley, & Ellul, 2012 ). This might be because changing the everyday behavior of publics to reduce carbon emissions has tended to be categorized as mitigation rather than adaption, despite the fact that significant adaptations to social practices are required to facilitate such changes (Davies et al., 2014 ). The corpus examined in this review touches on this arena predominantly through attention to individuals’ perception of risk from climate changes and any tensions between those perceptions and scientific calculations of the same risks. It remains the case that studies tend to focus on providing information—perhaps in new ways or in new formats—about risk from climate change to better align public perceptions with scientific judgments. Yet the issue of individuals’ anxiety around climate change as a factor impeding citizen engagement with adaptation is emerging as a legitimate arena of study, particularly within behavioral science (Aronsson & Schöb, 2018 ; Kubo, Tsuge, Abe, & Yamano, 2019 ; Nai, Schemeil, & Marie, 2017 ). This is important not only because an individual's perception of climate change impacts may influence their support for adaptation actions (Singh, Zwickle, Bruskotter, & Wilson, 2017 ), but also because it can impact their psychological health, potentially creating a new arena of eco‐anxiety.

In addition, and beyond perception of climate risk, there are rising concerns that experiencing climate change‐related events and their aftermath, such as floods or sea‐level rise, may trigger post‐traumatic stress disorder, depression, and even violence (Moon, 2016 ). This work recognizes that people respond to such events in different ways, influenced by personal cognition, affect and motivation, and suggests that incorporating a psychological perspective could help improve the efficacy of adaptation interventions and any residual climate impacts. Indeed, Truelove, Carrico, and Thabrew ( 2015 ), in their analysis of farmers’ adaptive responses to drought in Sri Lanka, found that a sense of efficacy was an important predictor of behavioral intentions. While it is not yet clear if there are unique responses needed for psychological adaptation to climate change, sentiment analysis research by Cody, Reagan, Mitchell, Dodds, and Danforth ( 2015 ) found that active responses, such as climate rallies, can contribute to an increase in happiness, at least in the short term. Importantly, and as recognized by (Gifford, 2011 ), psychological, social, and structural adaptation will be required to fully meet the challenges of climate change. In this regard, it would be useful to further explore the cultural and emotional dimensions of adapting to climate change, drawing on recent research which has elevated matters of empathy, identity, and place‐attachment as important determinants of positive engagement in the broader arena of environmental change and sustainability (Brown et al., 2019 ).

5. CONCLUSION

This review has examined the corpus of research captured in a bibliographic database which combines attention to public participation and citizen engagement with climate change adaptation, and suggests an expansion of the research agenda to include the following issues:

• How public participation in climate change adaptation is addressed in gray literature and policy documents;
• Patterns of public participation in relation to adaptation with respect to drought, changing patterns of disease and agricultural viability and also other extreme weather events beyond flooding;
• The nature of public participation for climate change adaptation in local adaptation policies and community practices;
• The extent, form, and findings of evaluation efforts with respect to the impacts of extending public participation in climate change adaptation;
• The geographical distribution of both funding for research and the locus of research efforts into climate change adaptation;
• Examination of the tensions and complementarities between formal public participation interventions and emerging social movements around climate change;
• Expanded consideration of the cultural and emotional aspects that emerge with respect to climate change adaptation.

As noted in the critical reflection, additional terms that refer to aspects of public participation may be relevant but remain invisible unless they can be identified. Such identification requires detailed work to be conducted with diverse communities of scholars across different geographical and disciplinary territories. The current search engines remain a “black box” in terms of search algorithms and metrics, with limited provision for identifying “related” papers from searches. The coverage of research by search engines remains incomplete, and disciplinary traditions and divergent scientific practices across the natural and social sciences and humanities means that cross‐fertilization of ideas, concepts, and vocabularies remains limited, even where researchers are working in related areas.

The relatively recent appearance of research at this nexus of public participation in climate change, from 2000 onwards, is marked by a number of key features, but most particularly an exponential rise in research effort since that date and a predominance of research action focused on areas of risk and its assessment, communication, and perception in relation to flooding. While the landscape of research is still predominantly shaped by researchers based in high‐income countries, the emergence of published activity from other locations including China, India, Brazil, Bangladesh, and South Africa is notable, as is the growth in collaborative and comparative work across both territorial and disciplinary arenas. Research is still dominated, at least in terms of the number of publications, by environmental, meteorological, and atmospheric sciences, with business, economics, geography, and other social science disciplines also making their mark in the field. Here, we concur with Overland and Sovacool ( 2020 ), that research funding to social sciences needs to be expanded to meet the complex challenges related to climate change. In addition, and to optimize learning about climate change adaptation and public participation, it will be necessary to ensure that diverse research outputs from all disciplines are available to all researchers. At present systems like Web of Science tend to under‐represent research outputs from social science, arts, and humanities research. Identifying means of better capturing and communicating these diverse outputs (Moser, 2010 ) to make them accessible to natural and environmental scientists, engineers, and technologists as well as policy makers, needs to be established if interdisciplinary research on public participation and climate adaptation is to flourish.

Critical attention to the thematic areas of risk and the perception, communication, and awareness of risk, particularly in relation to floods, also revealed some important areas for further research. At a fundamental level, there remains work to be done with respect to developing common understanding across disciplines, and between science and policy, of how processes involving public participation and citizen engagement are articulated, as well as ensuring broad comprehension of how influential concepts of risk, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity are used and used differently by different disciplines and stakeholders. This is necessary to aid interdisciplinary interactions which are increasingly recognized as essential to address the wicked challenge of climate change—as set out in the “global stocktake” referred to by Article 14 of the Paris Agreement (Global Stocktake, 2015 ; The Paris Agreement, 2015 )—and also to address tensions between abstract theories of participation and the operationalization of public participation interventions in particular places.

It will become even more pressing to ensure research is translatable given the rise of experimental research in “real world” settings, where researchers in collaboration with other stakeholders, sometimes including publics, conduct novel adaptation exercises within particular locations (Davies et al., 2014 ; Voytenko, McCormick, Evans, & Schliwa, 2016 ). Further attention to the benefits and limitations of creating these living laboratories for examining participation and engagement in climate change adaptation could help bridge the current gaps between theory and practice. Certainly, while isolating public participation in climate change adaptation has heuristic benefits for a review of scientific research it will ultimately, as noted by the IPCC ( 2018 ) need to be married with climate change mitigation and, importantly, action toward wider sustainable development goals.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Stephan Hügel: Conceptualization; data curation; formal analysis; investigation; methodology; validation; visualization; writing‐original draft; writing‐review and editing. Anna Davies: Conceptualization; writing‐original draft; writing‐review and editing.

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Public engagement with climate change: The role of human values

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Supporting information

Annex 1 Supporting information

Annex 2 Supporting information

Annex 3 Supporting information

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska‐Curie grant agreement No. 713567 and the financial support of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant Number 13/RC/2077 and 16/SP/3804.

Hügel S, Davies AR. Public participation, engagement, and climate change adaptation: A review of the research literature . WIREs Clim Change . 2020; 11 :e645. 10.1002/wcc.645 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

Edited by Heike Schroeder, Domain Editor, and Mike Hulme, Editor‐in‐Chief

The copyright line for this article was changed on 06 April 2020 after original online publication.

Funding information Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, Grant/Award Number: 713567; Science Foundation Ireland, Grant/Award Numbers: 13/RC/2077, 16/SP/3804

1 https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/solutions/web-of-science-core-collection/

2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2790803

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• Sustainable development

Evaluating methods for public participation: literature review

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Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy

ISSN : 1750-6166

Article publication date: 19 June 2020

Issue publication date: 9 March 2021

The purpose of this research is to study how current research reports reflect on using public displays in the smart city. In particular, it looks at the state-of-the-art of this domain from two angles. On the one hand, it investigates the participation of citizens in the development of public displays. On the other hand, it aims at understanding how public displays may foster citizen participation in addressing urban issues. Its goal is to provide a literature review of this field, and a research agenda.

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted following a thoroughly detailed protocol. It surveys 34 recent papers through multiple aspects, including interaction modality, level of participation, socio-demographics of participating citizens, topic of participation, evaluation of the display and participation of end-users in the early development stages of the display. Then, a research agenda informed by the results of the SLR is discussed in light of related literature.

The SLR showed that further research is needed to improve the involvement of citizens in the early stages of the development of public displays, broaden the spectrum of citizen participation achieved through public displays, integrate public displays with other means of participation and handle the changing urban context to improve the participation experience.

Originality/value

Previous literature reviews have been conducted in the field of public displays, including one specifically related to citizen participation. However, they have emphasized the technological aspects of public displays and omitted other essential aspects. This article aims at addressing this gap by conducting a literature review, including also non-technological perspectives such as socio-demographics and participation in development, complementing other works.

• Citizen participation
• Systematic literature review
• Public display

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) for their support.

The research pertaining to these results received financial aid from the ERDF for the Wal-e-Cities project with award number [ETR121200003138] and the Federal Science Policy according to the agreement of subsidy [BR/154/A4/FLEXPUB].

Clarinval, A. , Simonofski, A. , Vanderose, B. and Dumas, B. (2021), "Public displays and citizen participation: a systematic literature review and research agenda", Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy , Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/TG-12-2019-0127

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Literature review on Public Participation

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Public participation in governance involves the direct or indirect involvement of stakeholders in decision-making about policies, plans or programs in which they have an interest. This chapter explores the theories illuminating key concerns, namely what constitutes legitimate and useful public participation; the relationships among diversity, representation, and inclusion; the appropriate influence of different kinds of knowledge; and how to align participation methods and contexts. We describe two areas needing additional theoretical development: what levels of participation are desirable and workable, and the threats and opportunities for participation posed by increasingly diffuse systems of governance.

Public Participation

The implementation of the public participation process is important for the democratisation of social values and better planning and fulfilment of public needs. The public participation process, however, is sometimes threatened by bureaucratic constraints caused by the lack of a systematic approach and an inadequate public administration system, which contribute to the public exclusion from the process. The exclusion is also caused by the lack of knowledge about public participation and low levels of education amongst the public. With this in view, this paper reviewed four approaches to public participation in four countries: Denmark, the Philippines, Canada and the United Kingdom. The dimensions of public participation developed by Uphoff and Cohen were then used for data analysis, interpretation and conclusions drawn by discussing the grounds for public inclusion and exclusion from the decision-making process.

Energy & Environment

Over the past ten years there has been an increased awareness of the importance of stakeholder involvement and public participation in policy making. However, despite a general acceptance that stakeholder participation is important within decision-making, it is less clear as to how that participation should be undertaken, who should be involved, and how the various methods for participation should be evaluated. By first reflecting on some of the philosophical assumptions behind the view that stakeholder engagement is important, this paper presents a number of possible evaluation criteria for such involvement. It suggests that the appraisal of processes needs to include consideration of the legitimacy of the procedure, in addition to the more common efficiency evaluation of procedures and outcomes. Using experience from case studies, these criteria are then used to highlight the main promises and pitfalls of the various participation procedures.

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This article examines how independent bodies for public participation (IBPPs) can initiate a convergence around practices among actors in the public participation field, especially sponsors of participatory arrangements and the associated participation firms. As IBPPs have the public resources and legal authority to independently organize participatory arrangements, they can play a coordinating role in the public participation field. A comparison of two IBPPs, one in Canada (Quebec) and one in France, shows that IBPPs enhance the development of the participation industry and strengthen recognition of several informal norms concerning public participation design and implementation.

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Purpose – The paper summarizes data from 12 countries, chosen to exhibit wide variation, on the role and place of public participation in the setting of priorities. The purpose of this paper is to exhibit cross-national patterns in respect of public participation, linking those differences to institutional features of the countries concerned. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is an example of case-orientated qualitative assessment of participation practices. It derives its data from the presentation of country case studies by experts on each system. The country cases are located within the historical development of democracy in each country. Findings – Patterns of participation are widely variable. Participation that is effective through routinized institutional processes appears to be inversely related to contestatory participation that uses political mobilization to challenge the legitimacy of the priority setting process. No system has resolved the conceptual ambiguities...

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Computer Science > Software Engineering

Title: systematic literature review of commercial participation in open source software.

Abstract: Open source software (OSS) has been playing a fundamental role in not only information technology but also our social lives. Attracted by various advantages of OSS, increasing commercial companies take extensive participation in open source development and have had a broad impact. This paper provides a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of existing research on company participation in OSS. We collected 92 papers and organized them based on their research topics, which cover three main directions, i.e., participation motivation, contribution model, and impact on OSS development. We found the explored motivations of companies are mainly from economic, technological, and social aspects. Existing studies categorize companies' contribution models in OSS projects mainly through their objectives and how they shape OSS communities. Researchers also explored how commercial participation affects OSS development. We conclude with research challenges and promising research directions on commercial participation in OSS. This study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of commercial participation in OSS development.

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All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories

• Jerome Barthelemy

Some are more creative than others.

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, that aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies. The framework categorizes all strategies into the following four groups, from the least creative to the most creative: adapting an existing industry strategy, combining different existing industry strategies, importing strategies from other industries, and creating a brand new strategy from scratch.

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether a given opportunity is attractive or whether a particular strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. As the legendary strategy expert Gary Hamel put it: “ The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy creation .”

• Jérôme Barthélemy is Executive Vice-President, Dean for Post Experience Programs, Corporate Programs and Relations and Professor of Strategy and Management at ESSEC Business School. He is the author of Myths of Strategy (Kogan Page, 2023)

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Methods, Indicators, and End-User Involvement in the Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions for the Public: Scoping Review

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