Public participation and policy integration

We are excited to announce a master thesis project that will investigate the potentials of public participation to foster policy integration, and ultimately to lead to positive environmental governance outcomes for complex environmental nexus problems.

It is a characterizing feature of many of today’s urgent sustainability problems, such as the climate crisis, biodiversity loss or the Dutch nitrate crisis, that they can be hardly contained within conventional administrative and sectoral boundaries. Their effective governance requires instead structures and processes that accommodate such complexity, posing particular challenges for established environmental governance systems.

Public participation is discussed as one potential governance mode to address this complex challenge of policy integration. For instance, by involving citizens and stakeholders into decision-making, public participation might internalize complex problem structures in its governance processes, allowing for a more holistic view on the complex issues at stake. Also dynamics such as deliberation, social learning or conflict resolution, often spurred within participatory processes, are believed to have a positive impact on problem-solving capacities under complex conditions.

Despite the high hopes and positive assumptions, the actual impact of public participation on policy integration is theoretically contested and empirical evidence is sparse. Hence, this master project aims to address this gap and investigate how and under which conditions public participation fosters policy integration and leads to positive governance outputs for complex problem.

For this thesis, you will rely of the SCAPE database on participatory and non-participatory environmental decision-making, which contains more than 300 cases of (more or less) participatory environmental decision-making. The database was set up with the main purpose to study the effect of different modes of citizen and stakeholder participation on environmental and other outcomes of decision-making. It will provide a prime entry point also to study the role of public participation under complex problem contexts.

The successful candidate will in their thesis conceptualize the interlinkage between public participation and policy integration, operationalize this relationship into a set of testable hypotheses and evaluate these by means of statistical (or set-theoretic) inquiry.

Applicants with a background in policy studies, sustainability, or related fields are encouraged to apply. Proficiency in quantitative (or set-theoretic – QCA) research methods is desirable. The findings from this research are intended to result in an eventual scientific publication contributing valuable insights to academia, and to inform recommendations to decision-makers in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Interested candidates are invited to submit their applications, including a CV and a brief research proposal outlining their approach to study the connection between public participation and policy.

For further inquiries, please contact dr. Nicolas Jager and dr. Jeroen Candel.