Citizen involvement in green transition: negotiating the tension between participation and environmental effectiveness

Citizen involvement in green transition: negotiating the tension between participation and environmental effectiveness Anders Horsbøl, Aalborg University Citizen involvement plays an important role in many governmental and municipal attempts towards green transition, reflecting a departure from a deficit model of public communication towards participatory ambitions of engaging citizens in more open-ended decision making (Lassen et al. 2011, Phillips et. al, 2012). However, there is often a tension between the participatory ambitions on the one hand and predetermined environmental goal to be achieved by the engagement process on the other, i.e. between a normative and instrumental rationale (Delgado et al., 2011). Navigating within this tension poses a challenge to which there is no easy answer, but where concrete studies may enrich our understanding This paper addresses the challenge in the form of a case study investigating how four municipality associated partners in Sweden and Denmark embark on a common project on citizen involvement as an avenue to green transition. At the outset of the project each partner identified different environmental goals such as reduction of electricity consumption, replacement of oil-fired boilers, higher distribution of electric cars, and installation of solar panels. These goals all affect private decisions of individual citizens or families, where the municipality has no legislative competence. In a series of 4 two-day workshops in 2016, representatives from the four local partners met in order to develop a common framework for ‘co-creational green transition’, meant to be applied and tested in the different local contexts. Participants from two universities took also part in the process and were allowed to record presentations, exercises and discussions. The current paper will focus on the process of developing a common framework and will pay particular attention to the tension between the predetermined environmental goals and the ambition of citizen participation. Applying an emic discourse perspective and drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2010) and Mediated Discourse Analysis (Scollon, 2001), the paper will analyze how the tension is articulated and negotiated by the participants, not least how agency is ascribed to citizens, experts and municipality representatives. Moreover, it will be analyzed how the exchange of experiences across municipalities and nations contributes to dealing with the tension. As for data, three key incidents involving different genres and modalities have been selected for analysis; a plenum discussion at workshop 2 were the tension is raised by the participants as a key issue, a group exercise at workshop 3, arranged by the university participants, where the participants are asked to discuss and take a stance on the tension, and finally a set of reflection papers from each local partners, leading into workshop 4, where they reflect on their decisions at the previous workshops and relate to their local challenges. By this selection of incidents, the paper will analyze how the tension is a) articulated discursively and made meaningful as an issue, b) negotiated by and between the partners, and c) related to different local situations as well as to common challenges and issues of transferability across local contexts. References Delgado , A., Kjølberg, K.L. , and Wickson, F. (2011). Public Engagement Coming of Age: From Theory to Practice in STS Encounters with Nanotechnology. Public Understanding of Science 20 (6), pp. 826-845. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis. The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Lassen, I., Horsbøl, A., Bonnen, K., and Pedersen, A.G.J. (2011) Climate Change Discourses and Citizen Participation: A Case Study of the Discursive Construction of Citizenship in Two Public Events. Environmental Communication (5) 4, pp. 411-427. Phillips, L., Carvalho, A., & Doyle, J. (Eds.) (2012) Citizen Voices: Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication. Bristol: Intellect Ltd. Scollon, R. (2001). Mediated Discourse Analysis. The Nexus of Practice. New York: Routledge.