Public participation and management of natural resources: what potential influence for participants?

Abstract

Several public authorities in Canada and Quebec’s energy and natural resources sectors have set up participatory mechanisms to integrate citizens’ concerns in planning their projects. To this end, departments have developed a corpus of texts structuring their approaches and their relationships with participants. This article aims to study how this documentation transcribes the potential influence granted to participants in decision-making processes. Based on the documentation of four Canadian (2) and Quebec (2) departments, we conduct a qualitative analysis guided by six fundamental principles emerging from the literature and testifying the level of influence granted to the participants. Our findings show that although participatory approaches open the decision-making process to the general public, they allow symbolic participation. Greater transparency and openness in the process through systematic reporting, the precision of the expert’s role, and establishing a culture of evaluation could help build more authentic participation. Suppose the small sample of this study and the choice to retain six criteria prevent generalization. In that case, our study nevertheless provides a glimpse of how public authorities in these sectors conceive participants’ influence in the decision-making process. It would be relevant for future research to see how these processes are actually set up and how participants perceive them.