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Designing a Participatory Process for Stakeholder Involvement in a Societal Decision

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Abstract

For many societal decisions, governments and public bodies are beginning to involve stakeholders and the general public to a far greater extent than previously in the decision process. Stakeholder workshops, citizen juries, focus groups, electronic forums, web-polling and many other means of consultation are being used to draw citizens into the process of deciding between different options on the management of their communities. Politicians are drawn to such instruments because greater public involvement seems to achieve greater acceptance of the ultimate decision and, arguably in more objective terms, a better decision. Many academic studies have investigated participation and wider aspects of deliberative democracy and found that the politicians’ intuition is borne out in practice. However, while there have been many studies focused on specific instruments of participation, few have compared different ones. Moreover, there seems to be a dearth of advice on how to assemble a set of different instruments into a complete participatory decision making process. This paper offers a decision modelling framework which, firstly, provides a methodology which may be used to design participatory processes and, secondly, raises a number of questions which future comparative studies will need to address.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been conducted as part of the RELU-RISK project, which is funded under the the UK Research Councils’ Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) Programme (Project: RES 224-25-0090). The RELU programme is supported jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council, with additional funding from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department. We are grateful for their support. We have had many helpful discussions with our partners in the RELU-RISK project: Gary Barker, Angela Cassidy, Andy Hart, John Maule and Richard Shepherd. We have also benefited from discussions with the workshops and events in the European Science Foundation Towards Electronic Democracy(TED) Programme (http://www.esf.org/ted). A reviewer of an earlier draft made many thoughtful and provocative comments, for which we are very grateful: see our comments in the introduction.

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  1. Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK

    Clare Bayley & Simon French

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  1. Clare Bayley
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Correspondence to Simon French.

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Bayley, C., French, S. Designing a Participatory Process for Stakeholder Involvement in a Societal Decision. Group Decis Negot 17, 195–210 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-007-9076-8

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