Stakeholder Participation as a Means to Produce Morally Justified Environmental Decisions

Abstract

Stakeholder participation is an increasingly popular ingredient within environmental management and decision-making. While much has been written about its purported benefits, a question that has been largely neglected is whether decision-making informed through stakeholder participation is actually likely to yield decisions that are morally justified in their own right. Using moral methodology as a starting point, we argue that stakeholder participation in environmental decision-making (if adequately designed) may indeed be an appropriate means to produce morally justified decisions, the reason being that such participation may constitute an efficient way to satisfy the standard requirements on moral reasoning and moral justification. This finding also emphasizes the importance of identifying those settings most conducive to allowing different stakeholders to both challenge each other’s arguments and to adopt each other’s perspectives in order to make effective use of participation in environmental decision-making for the purpose of reaching morally justified decisions.

Acknowledgements

Part of this research was funded by Future Forests, a multi-disciplinary research program supported by the Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (MISTRA), the Swedish Forestry Industry, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Umeå University, and the Forestry Research Institute of Sweden. We are grateful to the persons who organized and took part in the Future Forests Exotics workshop series and contributed knowledge and ideas that inspired this study, in particular Ola Rosvall, Erland Mårald, and Camilla Sandström.

Notes

1. There are, however, reasons to believe that democratic approaches can help produce better decisions (in the sense that we are interested in in this paper) (see e.g. Bocking, 2004, p. 203).

2. Justification comes in degrees: we can be more or less successful in our application of the methods of moral reasoning. A difficult question is to what extent one has to satisfy the requirements on moral reasoning for one’s moral decision to be considered justified. However, we need not attend to that question here. Our claim is only that to make justified decisions one has to apply the methods of moral reasoning, and the better one satisfies the requirements on moral reasoning, the more justified is ones decision. We need not take a stand on what is required for success.

3. Fennell, Plummer, and Marschke (2008) raise the question whether adaptive co-management is ethical. But their discussion concerns the value of the process, not of its outcome.

4. Just to be clear, this line of reasoning is purely theoretical. It does not rely on empirical studies aimed at investigating whether stakeholder involvement in decision-making actually has led to the satisfaction of these requirements. Indeed, the nature of these requirements makes such studies difficult to perform (how could one know whether one possesses all relevant knowledge, for instance?). But to the extent that such studies are executable, a natural next step––provided that our line of reasoning is sound––would be to design (and then apply) stakeholder participation processes with a focus on these requirements, and then investigate whether these processes are successful in relation to the goal of meeting these requirements. We can also note here that some empirical studies seem to point in the direction of stakeholder involvement being a good means to meet some of these requirements (some of which are presented in works cited in this paper; e.g. Beierle, 2002).

5. Non-humans, and humans who lack the capacities necessary to participate, pose special problems that we shall not consider here.

6. Like others who take interest in questions about the merits of involving stakeholders in decision-making, we believe that these difficulties can be overcome to a sufficiently high degree for it to be meaningful and fruitful to investigate the ethical merits of participatory approaches to environmental decision-making. Just to take one example: when a decision is to be made regarding some forest management policy, among those to be represented are at least the residents of the areas that will be affected by the decision, the forest industry, and environmental organizations and other relevant interest groups.

7. There may be more requirements than the ones accounted for below that a morally justified decision should satisfy, but these are the ones we take to be fairly uncontroversial (thus considering them standard requirements). Any more substantive requirements are likely to meet resistance from some direction or other.

8. For a useful discussion of vividness, see Kagan, 1989, pp. 283–291. See also Brandt (1998, pp. 58–64), who gives several examples illustrating the importance that philosophers historically have assigned to vividness. As Glover (1990, p. 29) points out in relation to this sort of method: ‘It can sometimes be right to avoid contact with people affected by your own actions, where this might generate a bias in favour of their interests relative to those of other people.’ While this shows that applying this method may not always be easy and straightforward, it does not undermine the method as such. All things being equal, we ought to try to visualize as vividly as possible the circumstances of those affected by our decisions.

9. As Shelly Kagan notes, it is not easy to tell precisely what vividness amounts to. He writes: ‘It seems possible that vividness simply is a matter having a wealth of details. Or it might be more directly a matter of how adequately the belief is displayed in the representational system of the mind––where the influx of information simply acts as a stimulus for more adequate representation of the belief itself. These are tricky issues […] But I believe that we can leave them to one side without ill effect’ (Kagan, 1989, p. 284). We believe this to be the case with respect to our investigation as well.

10. This last point is familiar from the frequently emphasized interaction between applied ethics and general normative ethics. We evaluate theories in normative ethics partly on account of their implications when applied to particular cases. See also John Rawls’s reflective equilibrium (Rawls, 1971, pp. 20–21).

11. Universalizability should not be conflated with impartiality. For instance, ethical egoism can be formulated so as to respect universalizability but it is obviously a partial theory. Simplified, as long as a theory allows the same amount of partiality for everyone it may respect universalizability. Universalizability is hence a strictly formal requirement on moral reasoning, whereas impartiality is far too strong to be such a requirement. A requirement of impartiality would prematurely reject too many kinds of view; not only ethical egoism, but also, e.g., ‘common sense morality’ and ethics of care.

12. The terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘cognitivism’ are used in different senses by different philosophers. For our use, see Parfit, 2011, pp. 265–266.

13. One worry that is sometimes expressed is that stakeholders may misunderstand scientific information, thus obstructing the input that experts bring to the decision-making process. There is, however, reason to believe that this worry is exaggerated (e.g. Beierle, 2002).

14. See Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory (e.g. Habermas, 1998). As James Bohman and William Rehg write in their presentation of Habermas’s theory, ‘one may plausibly claim to take an impartial moral point of view only by engaging in real discourse with all those affected by the issue in question’ (Bohman & Rehg, 2011, section 3.4).

15. On this point our approach opposes that of some environmental pragmatists who want us to steer away from such fundamental value questions (in particular the question of whether nature possesses intrinsic value) because they believe that ‘theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives’ (Light & Katz, 1996, p. i). We hope that our approach to decision-making reveals how theoretical questions such as that concerning intrinsic value in nature can play a legitimate role in sound environmental decision-making in a non-dogmatic way. Just as different relevant scientific views may fuel the decision-making process with non-evaluative input (and arguments for that non-evaluative input), different normative views (e.g. theories in environmental ethics) may fuel the process with evaluative input (and arguments for that evaluative input).