Listening to the Public – Enacting Power: Citizen Access, Standing and Influence in Public Participation Discourses

ABSTRACT

Public participation in environmental governance is typically associated with citizen access to power despite many closures and limitations having been identified in participatory processes. This article proposes an analytical framework to analyse discursive practices involved in public consultation processes. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine and appraise citizens’ access, standing and influence. We apply that framework to a ‘notice and comment’ process on a hydroelectric power plan in Portugal and show that it was discursively managed to justify the decision of constructing 10 large dams and to reject critical or alternative views. Citizens’ access, standing and influence were constrained through diverse discursive practices which (re)produced very unequal power relations between policy proponents and participating individuals. More generally, the article illustrates the potential of Critical Discourse Analysis to assess voice(s) in policy processes. Focusing on argumentative, interactional and rhetorical levels, and how they are interwoven in public consultation discourses, the proposed framework is conceivably applicable in other studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Public participation
• critical discourse analysis
• power
• notice and comment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In a different tradition, Forester (1993) had previously employed Habermas’ ideas on communicative rationality to the analysis of planning and policy-making.

2 Although distinguished here, the three levels are deeply entangled in discursive practices: for instance, interactional aspects of discourse are weaved together with discursive constructions of knowledge and other types of claims/arguments, and are also reflected on rhetorical strategies used. Therefore, we have not always isolated these levels in the analysis and often chose to show their interconnections.

3 The vast majority of submissions do not contain any references to the text of those documents.

4 ‘Some proposals were not taken into account’, the EIS maintained (much like the PC Report had done) because they did not ‘fit the strategy set out in the Programme’ or the ‘integrated’ assessment that had been put forth, a claim that would be worth thorough critical analysis.

5 For instance, the analysis Portugal's political and citizenship cultures would also be relevant to this study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was developed for the project COMPOLIS: ‘Communication and Political Engagement with Environmental Issues’ and supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) [grant number EXPL/IVC-COM/1717/2012] through national funds (PIDDAC) and co-funded by the European Fund of Regional Development (FEDER) through COMPETE – Operational Program Competitive Factors (POFC).