into the fog? stakeholder input in participatory impact assessment
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Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal
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Into the fog? Stakeholder input in participatoryimpact assessment
René A. H. Monnikhof & Jurian Edelenbos
To cite this article: René A. H. Monnikhof & Jurian Edelenbos (2001) Into the fog? Stakeholderinput in participatory impact assessment, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 19:1,29-39, DOI: 10.3152/147154601781767212
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3152/147154601781767212
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Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, volume 19, number 1, March 2001, pages 29–39, Beech Tree Publishing, 10 Watford Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 2EP, UK.
Stakeholder input
Into the fog? Stakeholder input in
participatory impact assessment
René A H Monnikhof and Jurian Edelenbos
A new development in the more formal and theinformal procedures for assessment and projectappraisal in the West is the renewed attentionpaid to citizen participation. The bottleneck inmany of these participatory processes is the con-vergence and selection of the variety of stake-holder inputs (that is, values, interests,suggestions, criteria and opinions) that oftenlead to results not (wholly) recognisable to par-ticipants. The production of a spatial plan in themunicipality of De Bilt, the Netherlands, is dis-cussed, to illustrate and analyse the elementsthat determine the survival of stakeholder inputin impact assessment and project appraisal inparticipatory public policy-making.
Keywords: participatory process; project appraisal; impactassessment
René A H Monnikhof and Jurian Edelenbos are in the Departmentof Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University ofTechnology, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, Netherlands; E-mail:[email protected] [email protected].
IMPACT ASSESSMENT AND PROJECT orplan appraisal processes in the western industrialworld have been shifting for a while towards a
more participatory approach, creating room for con-tributions from those people and organisationsaffected by policy proposals (Barker and Wood,1999; Niekerk and Voogd, 1999; Rothman and Rob-inson, 1997). The idea behind this is to have stake-holder input play a larger role in the final policyproposal. The bottleneck in many of these processes isthe convergence and selection of the variety of stake-holder contributions (that is, stakeholders’ values,interests, opinions, suggestions and criteria) in thepolicy process (Monnikhof and Edelenbos, 2001).
This article describes and analyses the way the va-riety that was created by stakeholders fared in the par-ticipatory production and assessment of a municipalspatial plan. We analysed who created and selectedvariety, when, in what way, for what reasons andwhat this whole process meant for the incorporationof the stakeholder input in the final results of theparticipatory process.
Rise of participatory assessment and appraisal
Public policy-making in the Netherlands, as else-where in the world, is in a state of flux. A movementfor policy renewal, which came up after a disappoint-ing turnout at the local elections in 1990, hasdeveloped into a series of initiatives for diminishingthe (perceived) gap between policy-makers and theirelectorate.
One initiative is the introduction of new forms ofpublic participation in policy-making (Edelenbos,1999; Kickert et al, 1997; Klijn et al, 1994). These
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new forms aim to involve citizens in the early stagesof public policy-making, where they can have inputinto the problem-defining process and the develop-ment and appraisal of solutions.
In contrast, in earlier participation procedures, thedoors did not open for citizens until after a decisionwas made or a memorandum drawn up. Participatorypolicy-making experiments include community man-agement projects, user panels, urban conferences, tri-bunals, public forums, environmental conferences,scenario workshops and citizens’ panels (Veldboer,1996; Renn et al, 1995).
The new experiments are the result of widespreadconcern, in particular among power-holders, aboutseveral developments in politics. Among these are aperceived failure of government to operate as a demo-cratic forum for public opinion and decision-making,and a decline of active support for political decisions,evidenced by a dramatic decline in party political par-ticipation and electoral turnout in the past few de-cades. Solving this would necessitate a (further) shifttowards policy-making by debate and negotiation(‘t Hart and Kleiboer, 1995; Krouwel, 1999).
In the Netherlands, most of these participatory pro-cesses take place in the fields of spatial policy, trans-port and infrastructure policy. They are conducted inpolicy processes both with and without formal EIAprocedures. In cases where there is an EIA procedure,a clear link between the environmental impact assess-ment, embedded in the official procedures and theparticipatory process is often not established. The par-ticipatory generation of values, criteria, impacts andso forth hardly seems to influence the professionaltrajectory of engineers developing solutions(Monnikhof and Bots, 2000; compare Valve, 1999).
In policy processes where an impact assessment isnot mandatory, participatory processes are used tofind out what values stakeholders hold with respect topolicy proposals and what criteria they consider im-portant. Sometimes stakeholders are also allowed tocome up with options themselves, state the impactsthey see of these options and how they value these.These processes can either work partially as a preludeto a (non-mandatory) in-depth impact assessment, oras a (partial) replacement for it.
Research approach
During 1997 and 1998, we took part in a research pro-ject, ‘Testing Grounds of Democracy Project’, intothe development of participatory project appraisal atlocal government level. Invited by the Institute forPublic and Politics (IPP), researchers from five uni-versities collaborated in research into projects inseven different municipalities in which the IPP as aprocess architect and process manager was involved.
We researched a number of elements simulta-neously, such as the suitability of the problem selectedfor a participatory process, the influence of existinginstitutions on the process, and the degree of
participation (using an adaptation of the participationladder of Arnstein (1969)). We also looked into theoutcomes of the participatory processes and tried todiscern how and to what extent stakeholder input sur-vived in these outcomes during and after the participa-tory process.
We carried out three measurements at three differ-ent times in the participatory process. The first, at thebeginning of the process, was through interviews withthe stakeholders involved. We used a written surveyfor the second measurement, conducted during theprocess, among participants, politicians, administra-tors and civil servants (n=73, response 40%).Throughout the participatory process, we held addi-tional ‘update’ interviews with key persons such asprocess managers and civil servants. After the processhad ended, we carried out the third measurement,again through interviews. Before, after and in be-tween these measurements, we followed the course ofthe processes through observation and documentanalysis of reports, letters and so on.
Analysing participatory assessment processes
Many possible benefits have been put forward overthe years for stakeholder involvement in plan makingor project appraisal. Three main arguments are usedfor starting a participatory process (Pelletier et al,1999):
�• enhancing (the involvement of specific socialgroups in) democracy as a system;
�• increasing support for policy proposals; and�• improving the quality and effectiveness of policy
proposals.
Other aspects often brought forward, such as promot-ing social learning, more democratic decisions andresponsibility (Renn et al, 1995), can be shown to becovered by these three main arguments.
Improving democracy is a prominent motiveamong those advocating public participation (Danekeet al, 1983; DeSario and Langton, 1987; Fiorino,1989; Lynn, 1990). Participatory policy-makingcould contribute to ‘raising’ and ‘educating’ people tobe good citizens, adopting a co-operative attitude in-stead of one geared to individual interests. By their di-rect involvement in policy-making, citizens wouldenlarge their knowledge of, and experience with, thepolitical system, which would strengthen their role asdemocratic citizens and with that the quality of dem-ocracy (Renn et al, 1995). The other side of the coinis that, through the improved democratic character ofits decision-making procedures government wouldenhance its legitimacy.
A second prominent motive for involving stake-holders is to enhance the support for proposals (van dePeppel, 2001). Participatory policy-making wouldlead to enlargement of the support for policy, becausecitizens develop more understanding for the
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appraisals that the administration has to make and willbe more inclined to accept policy that has come aboutwith their involvement (Webler and Renn, 1995, page28).
Finally, a third major motive for involving stake-holders in policy-making is to improve the quality ofpolicy proposals. Participatory processes would leadto ‘enrichment’ of the quality of policy by a number offactors (Lopez Cerezo et al, 1996): members of thepublic have information that would otherwise not beavailable, knowledge about the environment in whichthey live as well as professional knowledge, and theymay come up with innovative solutions. Also, be-cause participants can put forward their preferences,wishes, problems and fears, they can ensure their val-ues are better represented in proposals. Because ofthese different contributions of participants, policywill be developed of a better quality, which fits betterwhat people want.
In this article, we focus on the third motive for par-ticipatory processes — improving the quality of theresulting policy proposals. One reason is that the lim-ited research that has been conducted indicates thatstakeholders on average participate in these processesmainly because of their interest in the outcomes. Theirsupport for these outcomes is crucially dependent onhow they perceive their quality in terms of their ownpreferences (Hartman, 1998; Monnikhof andEdelenbos, 2001).
Also, since outcomes are so crucial, their goodquality seems crucial for achieving participation ofpeople at all, and the attendant enhancement of theworking of democracy when so desired. Therefore,enhancing the quality of policy proposals through par-ticipation seems instrumental as well as crucial inachieving the other two motives.
Concomitant with the many supposed advantagesof participatory appraisal, through time a large num-ber of criteria have been suggested to evaluate partici-patory processes. Well-known are those for the ‘fairand competent’ participatory process developed inRenn et al (1995), that derive from a Habermasianstrive for an ‘ideal speech situation’. Similar criteriaabout rules for ‘a good dialogue’ and non-coerciveand non-final processes of opinion formation in an un-restricted public sphere were developed by Benhabib(1996, page 76).
Four ‘D’s of stakeholder input
Since our focus is on the extent to which the qualityof policy proposals is improved by including stake-holder input in the process, we do not use these cri-teria, which are to a large extent geared toward the othertwo main motives for participatory policy-making.Instead we focus on the ways in which stakeholder in-put could find its way in policy results. For this, we seefour main ‘routes’, which we termed the ‘four Ds ofstakeholder input’. These are:
���• Demand: finding out what stakeholders want andpossibly what that is worth to them (for instance,through polls or interviews) and trying to incorpo-rate this into the policy alternatives, often inter-mediated through criteria-elicitation (Baxter et al,1999; Keating, 1996; Keeney, 1988; Tunstall et al,1999).
�• Design: letting stakeholders themselves participatein the creative process of (re)designing solutions,but also in (re)designing the problem statement(Enserink et al, 1999; Monnikhof and Bots, 2000).
• Deal: this is the process of looking after interests.Stakeholders can be involved (or represented) inbargaining about solution packages that aim at thehighest number of ‘win–win’-solutions, throughmitigation, combining a number of solutions fordifferent problems and/or compensation (‘t Hartand Kleiboer, 1995).
�• Decide: this involves more than the final decisionto be made about the solution to be chosen. A pol-icy process is strewn with smaller and larger deci-sions (about which solutions to consider, selectionof participants, information and research needed,screening of solutions, establishing a problemstatement to be worked with, and so on). For eachof these decisions, involvement of stakeholderscan be an option (Baxter et al, 1999).
The four activities cannot be attributed to specific‘stages’ of the policy process, but will be combinedand intertwined throughout, although the emphasisamong the activities will shift. The extent to whichstakeholders are involved in these four activities de-termines to what extent which stakeholder input willbe represented in the final policy decision.
Each of the four ways of getting stakeholder inputrepresented in policy outcomes brings its own re-search question with it:
�• Demand: were the stakeholders’ wishes, interests,criteria and values explored during the participa-tory process, and what instruments were used to dothis?
�• Design: did stakeholders have the opportunity toparticipate in the creative process of (re)designingsolutions, and also in (re)designing the problemstatement?
�• Deal: were stakeholders involved (or represented)in bargaining about the construction of solution
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2001 31
Stakeholder input in participatory impact assessment
By their direct involvement in policy-
making, citizens would enlarge their
knowledge of, and experience with, the
political system, which would
strengthen their role as democratic
citizens and with that the quality of
democracy
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packages, mitigation of effects or compensation?�• Decide: were stakeholders involved in selecting or
screening problem statements, solutions, partici-pants, information and research needed, and/or(final) decisions about the solutions adopted?
Finally, since in the end we are interested in the effectof stakeholder input on the quality of policy out-comes, a fifth research question can be formulated:How is the quality of the policy outcomes influencedby the involvement of stakeholders in the policyprocess?
We will use these five research questions as an ana-lytical framework for analysing a case of local spatialplanning, the participatory production of a spatialplan in the municipality of De Bilt. Usually, theselocal spatial plans do not require an EIA procedure inthe Netherlands, although one can be applied on avoluntary basis. This was, however, not done in thiscase.
Developing a spatial plan in De Bilt
The case presented here involves the drawing of a mu-nicipal spatial plan for the distant future in the munici-pality of De Bilt in the Netherlands. In the beginningof the 1990s the political parties represented in thecourt of Mayor and Aldermen in De Bilt were dividedover the need for a more coherent policy in urbanplanning, which should find expression in a spatial‘structure plan’. Two attempts to agree on an integralspatial plan failed, resulting in a political deadlock. Itwas clear something different had to be done.
A new approach
Towards the end of 1996 the Court of Mayor and Al-dermen decided on a new approach. The project wasput in the hands of the Mayor and a new form of resi-dent participation was adopted: public participatorypolicy-making. It was hoped that the participation ofinhabitants of De Bilt would lead to depoliticising ofthe discussion and, as a consequence, breaking of thestalemate.
As a start, the brochure “De Bilt in motion”(Gemeente De Bilt, 1997) was published. In this, theCourt gave an inventory of the most pressing spatialproblems in the municipality and outlined a number ofalternative solutions. The Court engaged the Institutefor Public and Politics (IPP) to design and manage theparticipatory policy process.
A temporary organisational structure
The process was harnessed with an elaborate tempo-rary organisational structure (Figure 1). The steeringgroup consisted of a small number of key civilservants, the Mayor and IPP staff: it supervised theprocess. This group was assisted by a group of civilservants, while the Mayor was in charge of the
political responsibilities and a civil servant heldadministrative responsibility. A large consultinggroup was installed to have the various actors relateand discuss the progress of the process.
Planned workshops would be discussing a great va-riety of complex subjects (policy problems and solu-tions), so an expert-meeting was also created. In this,representatives of the various workshops, the chair-men of these workshops (IPP process managers), thecivil project leaders and external experts wouldattempt to attune the different workshops. Finally,an internal project group of civil servants wasformed, which actually stood outside the temporaryorganisational structure of the participatory policyprocess (and is therefore not included in the figure).
Process design
The process was divided into four stages. The firstwas directed towards problem research and opinionpolling. In this stage, insight had to be achieved intothe citizens’ agenda, and a list of starting points for theprocess derived. At the end of this stage, both theCourt and the Council would have a chance to add al-ternatives to the starting points and solution directionsoffered.
The second stage consisted of the elaboration of al-ternative solutions in several workshops attended byrepresentatives of interest groups or unorganised citi-zens. After examination of the ideas offered in thelight of financial, technical and spatial criteria, in thethird stage the proposals would be summarised in a‘note of decision points’. A survey of local support aswell as a public discussion should then clarifywhether the proposals of the workshops had sufficientbasis in the community.
Final decision-making in the fourth stage wouldtake the form of a proposal by the Court, in which itwould specify the grounds for accepting or rejectingcertain proposals from the workshops. At this point,citizens would have a public debate with the citycouncillors about the proposed measures. Only thenwould the decision become definite.
In summary, the participatory process in De Biltwas set up as shown in Box 1.
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Stakeholder input in participatory impact assessment
Figure 1. Temporary organisational structure of theparticipatory process
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Stage 1: exploration of the problem
Talks with key persons
After the publication of the brochure, talks were heldwith key persons of the local community, to clarifywhether there was enough interest in a participatoryapproach towards the spatial plan. The intervieweeswere enthusiastic about the process, but had manycomments on the ideas in the brochure. They alsostressed how important it was that the views of the cit-izens would really make a difference.
Deriving the citizens’ agenda
The participatory process started in September 1997with an opinion poll (in writing and by telephone)among the citizens. Almost 10% of De Bilt’s citizenssubmitted the written survey (some 3000 people). Theopinion poll revealed great discontent about the citi-zens’ scope for influencing municipal decisions in thepast.
Opening conference
More than 450 interested citizens attended the open-ing conference and eventually around 200 peoplesigned up for participation in one of the seven work-shops, each covering a different element of the struc-ture plan. Originally, six workshops were intended(Green corridor; Centre area; Mobility, traffic andtransport; Building, living and environment; De Bilt-west; Hessen road). One extra workshop, People,
was created spontaneously at the instigation of thepeople present at the opening conference to improvemapping of the social aspects of the various policyplans.
Stage 2: elaboration of possible solutions
Workshops: debate without design
The mission of the workshops was to generate alter-natives for the problems put forward during the con-sultation talks, surveys and opening conference,using the starting points that had resulted from theagenda-setting stage. There were two rounds ofworkshops, interrupted by an interim presentation. Intotal there were, for most workshops, seven sessions.
The workshop meetings were each led by a mem-ber of IPP, supported organisationally by a civilservant, operating as project leader within the civilservice. Also, for most workshops one or more exter-nal experts were present to support the sessionswith their expertise. Every session was prepared byconsultation between the process manager, the civilservant and the external expert.
The sessions usually started with a presentation bythe external expert(s), sometimes followed by a pre-sentation of invited special interests, of the problemissues to be discussed that evening, possible solutionsfor those problems or evaluations of those solutions.Participants themselves could also sometimes give apresentation of their own solutions, evaluations orviews. However, the time allotted to them was farshorter than that given to the experts, and their pres-entations were not supported with professionaldrawings.
The rest of the evening was usually used for ple-nary discussion or discussion in smaller groups onwhich problem aspects should be dealt with, and thepros and cons of several aspects of circulating solu-tions. Alternatives were not designed during the eve-ning. Sometimes, at the beginning of the evening,participants presented alternatives they had devised inbetween the meetings, which were added to the poolof alternatives considered.
There was no explicit selection of alternatives untilthe last meeting, in which the IPP process managers
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2001 33
Stakeholder input in participatory impact assessment
Box 1. Process design of a spatial plan forDe Bilt
Stage 1: exploration of the problem� Brochure “De Bilt in Motion” (Council’s agenda)� Consultations with key persons of De Bilt’s community� Opinion poll among population and box for ideas (citi-
zens’ agenda)� Public opening conference (stocktaking of problems, de-
scriptions of problems to be elaborated on and indicationof possible solutions)
Stage 2: elaboration of possible solutions� First round workshops (elaboration of points of departure
and possible solutions)� Public presentation of interim results and study of the
feasibility of the various proposals� Second round workshops (making a list of decision
points)� Final presentation of proposals (transference meeting)
Stage 3: preparation of decision-making� Summarise decision points based on the workshops’
results� Representative survey of opinion on, and support for,
these results among the population
Stage 4: decision-making� Court of Mayor and Aldermen presents definite proposal
to Council� Public debate (informal Council meeting)� Decision(s) by Council
Workshops usually started with a
presentation by the external expert:
participants could sometimes give a
presentation of their own solutions,
evaluations or views, but they had far
less time than the experts, and did not
have the support of professional
drawings
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made a final report with recommendations and a ‘listof decision points’ largely based on ‘gut feeling’.These were, however, checked with the participants,first with an ‘editing group’, later by all workshopmembers on the final evening.
Politicians do not deal in public
An interim presentation of the workshops’ resultstook place in January 1998. The announced discus-sion about these tentative results between and with theparty leaders, however, did not materialise. The poli-ticians present were unwilling to give clear statementsabout the results so far, and about the way the final re-sults would be handled. This approach had beenagreed in the ‘consulting group’. One of the reasonsfor this was that the different political parties did notwant to make the process into a ‘political’ topic, on theeve of imminent local elections.
This reservation of politicians led to distrust amongthe participants. Some suspected the politicians andadministrators of having a ‘hidden agenda’, makingdeals behind closed doors with a number of (commer-cial) actors not participating in the process. Therewere, in fact, parallel talks going on between specificaldermen, project developers and representatives ofthe railroads alongside the participatory process.Some participants even accused the external advisorsof manipulation and misleading the participants. Theywere thought to exercise a high degree of influence onthe process and the content.
In March, shortly after the municipal elections,the final reports of the workshops were presented. Ina public ‘transference meeting’, representatives ofthe workshops could offer their recommendations tothe newly elected councillors. After the presenta-tions, a discussion on the status of the proposalsdeveloped.
A confusing element in this discussion was that theworkshops had come up with a variety of outcomes,differing in abstraction level, which some participantsinterpreted as policy options and others as the ‘welldefined opinion of the workshop’. Participants of sev-eral workshops did admit that the outcomes were alsoperhaps not representative of the population as awhole. The planned opinion poll among De Bilt’s in-habitants would have to show whether the proposalswere broadly supported.
The Mayor declared that the Court would propose afurther elaboration of the plans and a financial under-pinning. The aim was to have a Council decisionbefore the summer.
Stage 3: preparation of decision-making
Poll incident
In April, a local newspaper published articles statingthat both Court and Council were refraining from theplanned opinion poll among inhabitants. In the
consulting group, the party leaders and the Mayordefended skipping the opinion poll by pointing out thecomplexity of the problems, the lack of added value ofsuch a poll, and a lack of time.
According to the Mayor, the differences of opinionin some workshops had resulted not in concrete pro-posals but in a general, open discussion paper un-suited for a poll. Some problems would be toocomplex to present to the public in a simple way. Also,consulting the public on the results of the workshopswould arouse too many expectations regarding the de-cision-making. The Court now first wanted to writetheir proposal to the Council.
An abstract final document
In May, consultation took place between the Mayor,the city secretary and some workshop representatives,who by their own initiative had united in a ‘sounding-board group’. To find another way of measuring thelevel of popular support for the workshops’ proposals,the Court, through the city secretary, made the sug-gestion to present the results of the workshops and thecontents of the draft Council decision to the largerpublic with an exposition. At this day it would be pos-sible for citizens to offer their reactions to the policyproposals.
At the end of August, members of the sounding-board group were allowed to read and comment on theparts of the draft Council decision that were intendedto reflect the outcomes of the workshops. Some par-ticipants found that the results presented reflectedmore the opinion of the external expert that hadwritten the draft than that of the participants.
In September, the larger public was informed aboutthe results of the workshops and the contents of thedraft Council decision, partly through the announcedexposition. The exposition remained open ten moredays, in which period various Council parties organ-ised meetings to exchange views with their constitu-encies and other interested citizens.
For the last day of the exposition a public debatewas planned. There it appeared that not everybodywas happy with the final results. The draft Councilproposal (“De Bilt in motion. Lines towards thefuture”; Gemeente De Bilt, 1998) was very abstractand contained few concrete issues for decision. Someworkshop participants could not trace their efforts inthe texts. Others stated that their results were wronglyreflected.
On the other hand, the Mayor and some councillorsdeclared they were not impressed by the quality or de-gree of innovation of the proposals coming out of theworkshops. The Mayor did say that the more detailedworkshop results would be used by civil servants inthe more detailed planning steps following this pro-cess, and that the public would be involved in thesefurther steps. However, that evening no further agree-ments were made about continuing the participatoryprocess, and to this day no follow-up has beenconducted.
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Stage 4: decision-making
After the public debate, the draft Council decision wasrewritten by the interim administrative project leaderand the Mayor and Aldermen for treatment in theCouncil committee, reflecting the comment made onit in the public discussions and the written comment inthe exposition room. Not many comments had beenmade. In the end, the Council approved the proposalwithout any amendments.
Stakeholder input in De Bilt
Here we will analyse the case presented, structuringour evaluation by using the four Ds of stakeholder in-put described earlier.
Demand
With regard to demand we wanted to answer the ques-tion whether the stakeholders’ wishes, interests andvalues were sufficiently explored during the partici-patory process, and what instruments were used to dothis.
Several instruments were used in De Bilt to poll theagenda of the populace, such as surveys and talks withkey persons. Participants had the opportunity to statetheir preferences, wishes, interests and values with re-gard to the problems to be dealt with, the solutions tobe considered and the ‘starting points’ from which todo that. However, before all that, the municipality hadstated its agenda in the initial brochure, presenting theproblems it found most pressing, and the solutions itthought promising. Except for the addition of therather broad topic ‘People’, dealt with in a seventhworkshop, no major alterations in the agenda wereproposed.
From the several methods used to find out theagenda of the populace, a list of ‘starting points’ forthe process was derived. However, this list was neverused in the subsequent process in a transparent, ex-plicit and structured fashion, for instance, by trans-forming it into criteria. In some workshops, expertsdid develop criteria using this list of starting points,but selected and translated them, in a way unclear andsuspect to participants.
The main instrument to assess whether the solu-tions proposed represented the preferences of thewider population, was the opinion poll scheduledafter the workshops. However, the Mayor and coun-cillors cancelled the poll. Many of those interviewedattribute this to a fear of those parties that the out-comes of the process might gain too much legitimacyby such a poll, and therefore would tie the hands of thedecision-making politicians to an unwanted extent.
The sounding-board group set up in response to thecancellation of the poll had no clear mandate of eventhe participants of the workshops, let alone the widerpopulation. Nevertheless, it was the only forum ofwhich the preferences were taken into account in
transferring the workshop results into the final docu-ment. The exposition created as the alternative to theopinion poll generated almost no response.
In general, we can conclude that much was done togain insight into the participants’ demands. Severalmethods and techniques were used. The wishes andvalues of the stakeholders in the participatory processwere thoroughly explored and much variation in val-ues surfaced. Nevertheless, this variation was nottreated carefully. All in all the relationship betweenthe demands expressed by people during the agenda-setting stage and the outcomes of the workshops israther foggy.
Design
Another question we tried to answer was whetherstakeholders had the opportunity to participate in theprocess of (re)designing solutions and/or the problemstatement. Much design activity had already been in-vested in the brochure that kicked off the process.
Largely based on the problem description in thisbrochure, citizens were supposed to discuss solutionsduring the workshops. No conditions for solutionswere given beforehand. There was not much designactivity during the workshop meetings. Citizens dis-cussed solutions, but the ones they put forward wereusually ‘homemade’. On average, the discussion inthe workshops started off with the solutions put for-ward in the brochure, and they dominated much of theprocess.
The supporting experts elaborated solutions putforward by citizens. In several cases these were thesame experts that had written the brochure and pro-posed the solutions therein. Some tendency of expertsto treat those solutions, in their elaboration and/or pre-sentation, more favourably than those later brought inby citizens was distinguishable.
When the workshops had ended a host of playerswere involved in design activities. The reports of theworkshops, including the lists of decision points, werehanded over to the civil servants supporting the work-shops, and they were supposed to rewrite them intotexts suitable for an integrated final document.
However, they did not make much progress. So thetexts were passed on to the urban planner who had themain responsibility for the original brochure “De Biltin motion” (Gemeente De Bilt, 1997). His attempts to
Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal March 2001 35
Stakeholder input in participatory impact assessment
Although much was done to gain
insights into participants’ demands,
the variations in these demands were
not treated carefully: the relationship
between demands expressed during
agenda setting and outcomes of the
workshops is foggy
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make a text out of the separate reports were assisted bythe process manager and the Mayor. Also, it was de-cided to split up the final report into two main parts:one handling the main results of the workshops, andanother the vision of the Court on these results. A firstattempt at writing both was made by the urban plannermentioned earlier and the Mayor.
The Court accepted the summary of the workshopresults, but not the attempt at representing their visionon the matter. Therefore, the interim administrativeproject leader, who had replaced the ‘ill’ original pro-ject leader in the mean time, interviewed the Court.This interim project leader reworked the results of theinterviews, in co-operation with the Mayor, into thesecond part of the final document. At the same timethe interim administrative project leader wrote theCouncil proposal, several civil servants alreadyworked out some existing plans by using the materialthat came out of the workshops. It became a matter forthe civil service to put the proposals into more detailedplans.
The design activities of the participants during theparticipatory process were continued by the externalexpert, civil servants and the Mayor. In this stage, theonly design activity of the participants were per-formed by the members of the sounding-board group,which could propose alterations in the part of the finaldocument that summarised the workshop results. Theparts of the vision of the Court that directly related tothese results were ‘untouchable’.
In general, we can say that the external expertsdominated the design activities during the participa-tory process, although several participants alsobrought in their own designs. In summary, however,we can conclude that the opportunity of stakeholdersto participate in the creative process of (re)designingsolutions and problem statements was limited.
Deal
With respect to the activity of ‘dealing’ we were inter-ested in whether stakeholders were involved (or repre-sented) in bargaining about the construction of solutionpackages, mitigation of effects or compensation.
Participants had little opportunity to deal amongthemselves. The group of participants was too big toachieve this, and time during the workshops was toolimited. Furthermore, power has to be present in aworkshop to be meaningful for the results. However,people with power were absent in the workshop. It hadbeen agreed that the Court would not be present. Somecouncillors were present, but they did not speak outabout proposals, and also did not make clear what theyconsidered weak or strong points, or what to them wasessential. This might be partially a result of confusionabout their proper role. Several councillors indicatedin interviews before the process that their role was notentirely clear.
So there was no opportunity for participants tomake their solutions more ‘powerproof’ in the pro-cess. Also, several important parties were not present
in the participatory process, such as investors and rail-road organisations. They were only invited once togive a presentation of their ideas and plans, but did sovaguely, evoking frustration in participants. They alsodid not start a process of give and take between theirplans and ideas, and those of participants.
The participants themselves did not deal amongtheir divergent interests. They discussed, but did notalter or combine proposals in response to the interestsof others. Of course, this was also an effect of the lackof real opportunity for (re)design in the workshops.
Finally, in the larger meetings and conferencescouncillors also refused to speak out on their prefer-ences, partly because the Mayor exercised pressurenot to do so in the light of the coming local elections.The participatory process was not the place to fightout party political ideals. This gave participants no op-portunity to take the preferences of councillors intoaccount.
We can conclude that the opportunity to deal waslargely absent during the participatory process. Stake-holders were not involved (or represented) in bargain-ing about solutions. Such bargaining could have takendifferent stakeholders’ values into account in order toreach mutual-gain solutions, or determined mitigationof compensation for effects in case this was notpossible.
Decide
Finally, we wanted to find out whether stakeholderswere involved in selecting or screening problem state-ments, solutions, participants, information andresearch needed, and/or (final) decisions about thesolutions adopted.
The decision to have a participatory process wastaken by the Court, only formally ratified by theCouncil later. After all the problem-scoping activities,the Court had the opportunity to add starting points tothe resulting list made by IPP (a form of design power)and declared this the official starting document of theworkshops.
During the workshops, not many explicit decisionswere made. There was no scoping or screening exer-cise of options. Experts drew up their own lists of cri-teria for assessing options, but these were not used forscreening, only for clarifying. The one real exercise ofdecision power during the workshop stage was thedecree of the list of decision points for each workshopto be presented to the Court.
The approval of this list proceeded not by a votingprocedure, but by asking whether anyone objected. Aconsiderable amount of group pressure had been ap-plied to ‘dissenters’ during the process to follow thepreference of the majority in some workshops, and itis not at all clear whether the support for the ‘winning’solutions was genuine or a result of this pressure.
After the workshops, three decisions binding forthe other players were made, all by the Court. One wasto drop the poll, the other to have an exposition and thethird to determine the draft Council proposal. It is in
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this stage that the old power structures started to showstrongly through the veil of the new participatoryprocess.
We can state that the chances for participants to de-cide in the early stages of the process were predeter-mined by the external experts and the processmanager. In the latter stages, the Court made all thedecisions. The vagueness of the final Council pro-posal left the councillors with enough opportunities tomake concrete decisions in the future almost at will.Therefore, we can conclude that stakeholders werehardly involved in most, and certainly most crucial,decisions during the participatory process.
Outcomes of the participatory process
In the end our interest lies in the contribution of partic-ipatory processes to the quality of policy outcomes,something to be achieved by giving stakeholder val-ues, knowledge, ideas and creativity a place in thoseoutcomes. We dealt with the extent to which these hada place in the process in the preceding section. The lastremaining question then is what was the quality of theresulting policy outcomes?
To answer this question, we used the views of:participants in the process; politicians, administratorsand civil servants with expertise on the field; and inde-pendent experts. The outcomes can be separated intotwo main products: the results of the separate work-shops; and the final document of the process that wasbased on, among other things, those results.
The results of the separate workshops were of agreatly diverging nature, ranging from broad state-ments such as “More attention should be paid to el-derly people” to wholly worked out and detailed plansfor the so-called “Green Corridor”. Their appreciationconsequently varies. Participants themselves werepleased with the results of their efforts. Civil servantsand external experts were impressed with the qualityof proposals in some workshops, less so in others,usually depending positively on the level of detail.
The final document was in general rather abstract andconsidered ‘vague’ by most participants to the process.Of the seven crucial ‘actions’ announced in it, six werefurther studies. Civil servants and external experts werealso little impressed by it, some even considering theterm ‘structure plan’ unworthy. The Mayor and somecouncil members countered the critique by stating theywere not very impressed by the contributions of citizens.However, most council members based this critique onthe final document, since they had never seen the out-comes of the individual workshops. Concrete actions onthe basis of the final document have, at the moment ofwriting, not been undertaken yet.
All in all, the quality of resulting policy outcomesseems not to have been greatly enhanced by the partic-ipatory process. Nevertheless, we cannot know whatpolicy would have appeared without the process. Thismight have been very different, maybe of a lowerquality.
Conclusions and recommendations
Of course, a single case does not provide a very firmbasis for drawing far-reaching conclusions. Muchmore comparative research would be needed. There-fore, we will use the conclusions about this particularcase to derive specific types of (tentative) recommen-dation, namely those made for a hypothetical secondtry at the same case. How far these recommendationswould apply to other situations and cases could be partof an agenda for further research.
One overall finding stands out in the case. Manystakeholder inputs (ideas, values, wishes and inter-ests) were explored, but most of them were lost in thefogginess of the participatory process, and did not finda place in the Council proposal. This resulted in ratherdisappointing outcomes of the process.
A considerable number of reasons can be pin-pointed for this disappointing result. Most of them canbe traced back to one fundamental flaw of the process:those setting it up were not really very interested in itsspecific outcomes. The process manager (IPP) in gen-eral operates with a clear focus on improving demo-cratic participation per se, and clearly pays lessinterest to the results of this participation in terms ofproducts. The civil servants and Mayor initiating theprocess saw it largely as a tool to finally ‘push a struc-ture plan through the Council’, by giving it the addedlegitimacy of popular support. The council memberswere more or less dragged into the process, and spentmost of their time protecting their freedom to decidein the end. Only the participating citizens were mainlyfocused on influencing the outcomes.
This lack of interest in the substantive contribu-tions of the participants was translated in the set-up ofthe process, and the way it was conducted, in manyways. One of these is the rather detailed brochure withwhich the municipality started the discussions, in-cluding relatively worked-out solutions. This seemedto deny the need for other options, and the content ofthe brochure indeed has dominated the thinking anddiscussion in the process.
The lack of interest in options that participantsmight suggest was also reflected in the very limitedopportunities given to them in the workshops for de-signing those options. Options designed at home weretreated less seriously than those designed by ‘theexperts’ (although several participants were in posses-sion of the relevant expertise themselves; many wereengineers, economists, and so on).
The fact that the process was not provided with con-ditions meant that an important check on the feasibilityof options was absent. Further, the content developedin the process was not structured well by means of ana-lytical support, which meant, for instance, that it washard to work on overlap and dependencies betweenworkshops. The rather extensive information obtainedon the views and demands of the participants and widerpopulation (in the shape of ‘starting points’) was notused to screen options and thus keep the process fo-cused on the more ‘serious’ options.
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Options could not be made ‘powerproof’ or suffi-ciently commercially interesting, because councilmembers as well as the relevant commercial interestseither were not present or refused to take standpointson the options discussed. Participants could not evendeal among themselves to make options more feasi-ble, since a ‘general interest’ point of view was con-tinuously stressed, making bargaining betweeninterests out of line.
In line with the foregoing, it seems improvementsto this process would have been possible in a numberof respects. All improvements should, however, bebased on one crucial recommendation: the processshould have been set up with sufficient interest in itsoutcomes, not just for ‘political–instrumental’ or‘democracy enhancing’ reasons. Based on this start-ing point, the following improvements seem possible:
�• Openness to the contributions of participants couldbe enhanced by starting with a more general prob-lem description and maybe some rough solutiondirections. Also, the roles of those developing thegeneral problem description and rough solution di-rections and those supporting the further processshould be separated.
�• Conditions should be provided beforehand to giveparticipants the opportunity to guard the feasibilityof their proposals. For the same reason, civil ser-vants, politicians and maybe administrators shouldbe encouraged to speak out during the process onoptions being developed, preferably in the work-shops. Administrators should urge commercialparties to take part fully in such a process, for in-stance, by making this a condition for their furtherinvolvement in the working-out of proposals.
�• To keep a grip on the variety developed in theprocess and also to keep discussions focused, par-ticipants should be allowed to screen options, andpossibly problems to be dealt with. For instance,participants could translate their wishes anddemands into clear criteria, and apply them to theoptions.
�• Participants should be given a serious role in de-sign, by making this the central activity during theworkshops. Limiting the time spent on presenta-tions and discussion could free time for this. Thenecessary support for this in the shape of relevant
information, but also practical material such asmaps should be provided.
�• Clear definitions of roles and task-division alsocould have improved things considerably. Such afocus would have made it clear precisely what kindof input is expected from participants, and wouldhave made the process more efficient and productive.
Participatory policy-making and politics
One specific topic warrants some extra attention —the relation between participatory policy-making andthe existing political system. Participatory policy-making can, in principle, involve high stakes for theexisting political actors. A successful participatoryprocess can endanger the freedom of the council to de-cide freely on its results, since the mark of ‘the publicwants’ might make it hard to turn proposals down.
A poll among the population to discover the truepopular support for proposals increases this problem,which could be one explanation of why the poll in DeBilt was cancelled. This left open the possibility forpoliticians to brush away the results of the workshopsas being ‘not representative’ for the population,thereby leaving them every opportunity to pick andchoose from them at whim. The remainder of theproblem was taken care of by the administration bypostponing all real choices, and ending the processwith another brochure, considerably more vague thanthe one it started with.
Dutch political culture is well known for its ten-dency to defuse conflict at an early stage, and its con-tinuing striving to deny the political nature of choices.This habit can be endangered by a participatory pro-cess, since participants want politicians to take clearstandpoints. This tension between the desire of Dutchpoliticians to operate by depoliticising and denyingconflict and the desire of participating citizens forclarity was shown in this case most clearly when theprocess, or topics in it, was declared taboo as a politi-cal topic immediately prior to elections. A councilmember of the Green Left, that did not conform to thistaboo, was criticised by representatives of almost allother parties.
This tension between the political desire to keephands free for wheeling and dealing in the backrooms,and the desire of citizens for real influence, will oftenlead to disappointment among participants in theseprocesses. To avoid this, there seem to be two options.Either a poll should be held, and politicians shouldspecify by how much support they would be willing toadopt specific results, or it should be made clear fromthe outset that no guarantee for adoption could begiven to participants. This, however, would make par-ticipation in a process on a scale as substantial as DeBilt rather unlikely in the future.
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The main conclusions are that:
openness to participants’
contributions could be enhanced;
participants should be allowed to
guard the feasibility of their proposals
and screen options, and be given a
serious design role; and roles and
tasks should be clearly defined
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