The Methodologies of Empowerment? A Systematic Review of the Deployment of Participation in the Coastal Zone Management Literature

Abstract

Participation (e.g., stakeholder involvement) has become a central concept in the practice of environmental and coastal zone management. Research has shown that the integration of participation in coastal zone management has positive ecological and social outcomes. In the literature, however, participation is often reported in an unstructured and uncritical manner. Therefore, to find out whether and how there is a useful way to structure and characterize the way the coastal zone management literature deals with participation, we have conducted a literature review. The review was conducted and the literature structured through three central dimensions of participation, namely: power, knowledge, and (visions of) nature. The article concludes that this structured approach to participation enables us to study more systematically the role of participation and might facilitate the governance and learning processes of coastal networks.

Keywords:

• coastal zone management
• environmental governance
• knowledge
• nature
• participation
• power

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Jac. A.A. Swart and Dr. Henny van der Windt, Science & Society Group, University of Groningen, for the comments.

Funding

This research has been conducted at the Science & Society Group , University of Groningen, the Netherlands, as part of the project “Case studies on governance and knowledge sharing in the Wadden Sea area.” The work is part of The National Ocean and Coastal Research Program, which is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Notes

There have been some efforts made to structure the use of participation in environmental management literature (e.g., Reed 2008); the focus here, however, is in CZM literature. To search relevant (mainly scientific articles) literature, we have used bibliographic databases (e.g., SCOPUS, JSTOR, Web of Science, PiCarta, PubMed, The Digital Library of the Commons) using key words (and combinations thereof) such as “participation,” “stakeholder involvement,” “CZM”; and the (reverse and) snowball method.

http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc.

The fourth dimension (i.e., the spiritual dimension), as defined by Reason (1998), can be understood as the sum of the other three, and is beyond the scope of this analysis. He defined the spiritual dimension by suggesting “that one of the primary purposes of human inquiry is to heal the splits which characterize modern Western consciousness […]” (149). He referred to the splits within humanity (politics-power), between different types of knowledge and worldviews, and between human and nature.