The Structuration of Public Participation: Organizing Environmental Control

Abstract

A growing body of participation literature muses over why current mechanisms of public participation persist when they so often fail; calls for expanding the conceptual boundaries of participation beyond institutional mechanisms, and highlights the role communication, and allied concepts such as discourse and rhetoric, play in participatory processes. Given these diverse calls, environmental public participation can benefit from building a mid-level theoretical terrain. In this essay, I draw upon the sociological tradition of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and parallel systems thinking which foreground a structure-action mode of analysis. Through this lens I articulate the basic premises of a structuration model for environmental public participation, pointing especially to issues of agency, which involves ontological security and ontological competence, social systems, and various elements within duality of structure, with an eye toward communication-centered research. This theoretical space further indicates the possibilities of connecting the material realm of action/practice with the symbolic domain of environmental self.

Keywords:

• Anthony Giddens
• Structuration
• Environmental Communication
• Critical Organizational Communication
• Multi-stakeholder Conflict
• Bureaucratic
• Post-bureaucratic
• Power
• Dialectic of Control

Notes

1. A genuine interrogation of this concern leads necessarily involves the emergence and ascendancy of capitalist exchange and the enclosure movement that marks this trend. It is a fascinating subject because we find that people gain private rights to public resource through and within discourse—i.e., discourses of property.

2. The connection between Luhmann and Giddens is appropriate in the abstract sense of broader systems of practice. The devil is in the details, and at a more nuanced level there are considerable differences between these two scholars. These shades of dissimilarity do not disrupt their use here.

3. I undoubtedly skim some of the complexity that each of these scholars make in their own work. This overview is meant as a summary in an effort to build theory across these cases.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Todd Norton

Todd Norton is assistant professor at The Edward R. Murrow School of Communication, Washington State University