Martin Westin
Our societies face the urgent challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequality. Leading scientific bodies, such as the IPCC and IPBES, assert that these challenges require fundamental shifts in how we govern societies and live our daily lives. Public participation and collaborative governance carry potential to increase the legitimacy of sustainability policies by creating space for social negotiation over the direction of transformations. In this lecture, I argue that a paradox of power hinder the potential of collaboration and participation. Based on recent research, I unpack the paradox and point to how it can be navigated through reflective governance practices.
My research shows that there is a paradox between collaboration, participation and power. Through focus groups, I found that participatory planners critically reflect on the power used by politicians and experts, but find it difficult to justify their own use of power. By analysing the theories of collaborative governance and participation, I find that the planners’ difficulties mirrors a theoretical tendency to merely critique power without supplying criteria for legitimate power use. Hence, collaboration and participation is often, in practice as well as in theory, framed as a means to replace hierarchical power relations with horizontal dialogue and learning—an idealized, power-free vision. Yet transformations are inherently contested and power can never be removed from governance; those who want to change power relations must themselves use power. Hence, my research suggests that the challenge lies in navigating, rather than doing away with, the paradox of power.
Further, my research demonstrates how a less idealistic, critically engaged approach can strengthen collaboration and participation. Instead of seeking to eliminate power, we must ask: When is power exercised legitimately? My analysis of dialogues in wild life management and forest policy suggests that the answer lies in the dynamic interactions between elected officials, citizens, experts, businesses and civil society organizations. Legitimate power can, under enabling institutional conditions and with skilful conduct of actors, arise through these interactions. The legitimacy of power is negotiated by governance actors who move back and forth on a continuum between authority and argumentation. They make situated judgments about when authoritative actions might be accepted without justification and when they instead must open space for argumentation on the process and outcome of governing. The issue at stake in these negotiations is to locate the social positions and arguments that carry the legitimate power that actors are willing to consent to.
I have applied this theoretical insight when developing The Sustainability Walk, a participatory approach to urban planning and place making intended to enable the integration of local knowledge and expertise. By facilitating meaningful conversations between planners and residents, the approach draws on the idea of authority and argumentation while helping designing living environments that support sustainable choices. In doing so, The Sustainability walk is an example of how the gap between the naïve hope for a world without power and a blind reliance on expertise can be bridged.
I conclude by pointing to the need for further research into collaboration and participation in times of social tension and resistance to sustainability policies. I allude to the usefulness of analyzing linkages, or the lack of such, between power relations in collaborative governance and decision-making in elected assemblies. I outline how the concept of authority and argumentation might be employed not only to navigate paradoxes in collaboration and participation, but also to shed light on the wider power relations involved in the making and implementation of sustainability policy.