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A strong process for a weak policy? An analysis of stakeholder participation processes in French local climate plans

Panel: 3. Local action and national examples

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Albane Gaspard, ADEME, France
François Mouterde, Planète Publique, France
Clément Lacouette-Fougère, Planète Publique, France
Christophe Abraham, Planète Publique, France
Guillaume Gourgues, Université de Franche Comté, France

Abstract

In the wake of the Aarhus Convention and the Agenda 21 principles, public participation is now widely considered by environmental policy makers as a must-do. However, its actual impacts on the environmental effectiveness of policies are still debated. This paper focuses on Local Climate Plans that were introduced a few years ago in France. It aims at answering the following questions: what kind of participatory practices take place in these planning processes? To which extent do they enhance the plan’s effectiveness?

This paper relies on both quantitative data from a survey of local authorities and qualitative data from 9 case studies. To capture the way these processes contribute to strengthening the plans, the study investigates their impacts along 3 lines: the extent to which they managed to build a local climate change policy community, to motivate stakeholders to act and to open up new policy options. It outlines that participatory processes did have an impact on creating a policy community at the local level (enhancing climate change awareness, reorganizing energy efficiency actions within the new policy frame and allowing information to circulate within this community). A fine-tune study of who takes part in these processes show that actors from the policy and institutional sphere as well as actors from civil society are more likely to be invited and to participate (participation rate above 70%) while socio-economic actors or the public in general are at the same time less invited and less likely to come if invited.

However, both the survey and the case studies struggle to find impacts on opening up new policy options or actually motivating key climate stakeholder to change their behavior or strategy. The paper then discusses whether this lack of impact is due to the way these processes were designed - outlining factors that could strengthen them (topics and participants selection, process design…) - or to the nature of the policy itself.

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