Environmental Co-governance, Legitimacy, and the Quest for Compliance: When and Why Is Stakeholder Participation Desirable?

Abstract

Deliberative forms of stakeholder participation have been widely embraced as a key measure for addressing legitimacy deficits and non-compliance in environmental governance. However, the great significance of such collaborative structures for state-stakeholder interaction is much too often accepted uncritically as an established truth in the environmental policy discourse. Building on examples from the literature on fisheries co-governance, this article constructs a conceptual and normative framework for interpreting and assessing such views about co-governance, legitimacy and compliance. Analysing central claims in this discourse in relation to different concepts and standards of legitimacy helps us identify and distinguish many powerful reasons to welcome co-governance. However, the article defends the need to do so cautiously and reflectively. It is conceptually misleading to suggest that more intense forms of co-governance will generally improve the overall level of social legitimacy and, thereby, compliance rates among stakeholders. Furthermore, it is argued that the democratic value of co-governance is not fundamental. The democratic desirability of such arrangements should be primarily assessed on instrumental-pragmatic grounds, focusing on their capacity to serve the wider ideals of equal citizenship and public reason.

Key Words:

• Collaborative governance
• stakeholder participation
• legitimacy
• fisheries
• compliance

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Wijnand Boonstra, Andreas Duit, Sverker Jagers, Henrik Österblom, and the members of the Political Theory Workshop at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University for valuable comments on early drafts of this article. I am also grateful for the constructive input of the editors and two anonymous reviewers of this journal, and the participants of ‘The Quest for Policy Integration’ workshop at the Nordic Environmental Social Science conference in Copenhagen 2013.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The terms governance and management are often used interchangeably in these debates. Like Ansell and Gash, I will generally use governance as the overarching concept since it is broader and ‘encompasses various aspects of the governing process, including planning, policy making, and management' (Ansell & Gash, 2008, p. 548), while management usually refers specifically to the more instrumental and practical issues of implementation (Kooiman et al., 2008, p. 3). Many contributions to this literature also use the expression participatory governance/management to describe these forms of interaction. Since I am here focusing on claims about deliberative forms of stakeholder participation, I will use the word collaborative governance to name these initiatives. The reason for this is that stakeholder participation is a defining component of co-governance but co-governance also expresses more explicitly that deliberation is a central feature of the type of participation we should be looking for.

2 For an interesting contrasting example, where all the components of overall legitimacy and compliance rates are low, see King and Sutinen (2010).

3 At the same time we must recognize that this may often seem increasingly unfeasible. Indeed, the case for the democratic value of co-governance and stakeholder participation is particularly influential in the complex, fluid and multilayered landscape of transnational governance, where traditional channels of formalized, electoral, state-citizen modes of representation are weak or ineffective. Alternative forms of participation may then be welcomed as key instruments to compensate for such a democratic deficit. However, none of this implies that the ideals of political equality and public reason discussed here can be dismissed as core elements of a normative yardstick for how best to interpret and approximate the ideal of deliberative democracy in such arrangements.

Additional information

Funding

This research is a contribution to the project ‘Regime Shifts in the Baltic Sea Ecosystem’, funded by FORMAS. Financial support was also provided by MISTRA, through a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.