ID: 1566
Presenting Author: Philipp Kerschbaum
Session: 520 - Connecting infrastructure and IA – Assessing impacts in contested planning
Status: pending
This paper offers a conceptualisation of informal participation in Environmental Assessments, given the weakening of formal participation. Infrastructure development is used as a case.
Global efforts to accelerate infrastructure development increasingly challenge the role of formally mandated Environmental Assessments (EAs) (Fischer et al., 2023). In Germany, recent policy adaptations imply a weakening of participation, despite a lack of clear empirical evidence linking such processes to project delays (Geißler & Jiricka-Pürrer 2023). Nevertheless, within academic discourse and broader societal contexts, there is widespread agreement that public participation is vital for upholding democratic principles and fostering acceptance and legitimacy for infrastructure development. (Orsi et al., 2023, Buhmann et al. 2024).
Despite its theoretical potential, formal participation processes in practice often fall short of achieving the criteria of meaningful participation (Sinclair and Burdett 2024). Given the contemporary decline of formal arenas and the need for enhanced public involvement, informal participation is likely to gain importance (Suškevičs et al., 2023). However, there is a lack of research exploring the interactions between informal participation, formal procedures, and overall quality of EAs.
This contribution presents a concept of informal participation, utilising EAs for linear infrastructure projects as a case study. The unregulated, informal nature allows various actors to employ different forms of participation with different objectives. This leads to heterogeneous impacts on the assessment process itself, including mis- and disinformation. The objective of this concept is to render these effects tangible and stimulate further research.
Philipp Kerschbaum is a research assistant and PhD candidate in the Environmental Assessments Research Group at TU Berlin, Germany. The subject of his PhD research is informal participation.