Rhetoric and Reporting of Public Participation in Landscape Policy

Abstract

Conrad, E., Cassar, L. F., Jones, M., Eiter, S., Izaovicova, Z., Barankova, Z., Christie, M., Fazey, I. (2011). Rhetoric and Reporting of Public Participation in Landscape Policy. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 13 (1), 23-47, Article Number: PII 935334210.The involvement of the public in decision-making is established as a key feature of many planning policies. However, there is evidence from the literature of a prevailing gap between participation rhetoric on paper and participation at the operational level. We assess whether this is also the case with landscape policy and review landscape characterization and assessment initiatives in England, Norway, Slovakia and Malta, focusing on five dimensions of good practice: (i) scope of public participation, (ii) representativeness of those involved, (iii) timeliness of public involvement, (iv) extent to which participation is rendered comfortable and convenient for the public, and (v) eventual influence of public input on decisions. Reviewed reporting results indicate weaknesses in the implementation of public participation, with public involvement largely limited to consultation, with few efforts to ensure representativeness of participants, with predominantly late involvement of the public, and with limited influence of the public on outputs. Furthermore, few efforts appear to be made to facilitate participation for the public. Although the cases studied differ, none of them are fully satisfactory in relation to the European Landscape Convention's participatory targets. The reporting of public participation processes thus suggests that practices may fail to match the rhetoricPeer reviewe

Dynamics of integrating landscape values in landscape character assessment: the hidden dominance of the objective outsider

“…A similar situation exists in landscape planning practice where decisions are based on professional's outsider based values missing the intimacy and subjectivity of the insiders who directly experience the landscape (Butler and Berglund, 2014;Conrad, Cassar, Jones, Eiter, Izaovičová, Barankova, Christie and Fazey, 2011). This is made evident in the increasingly sophisticated approaches landscape modelling which remain disconnected from social realities (Ryan, 2011).…”

The state of public participation in spatial planning in the European union: public participation in spatial planning between theory and practice

“…A review of how the EU legislation translates into policies led by the EU member states has been made. From this analysis, we learn what kind of legislative support the public has for being involved in spatial planning, and how the EU legislation impacts the public participation policies led in the EU member states, as described by Baloh et al (2014), Conrad et al (2011) andVerovšek (2012). ■ The second area of research is stakeholder inclination towards participation.…”

“…All directly or indirectly call for the active participation of citizens in procedures of spatial planning and simultaneously warn about the necessity of improving the dialog between authorities, inhabitants and the economic sector. »There is, however, evidence from the literature of a gap between participation rhetoric in policies and participation as practice at the operational level« (Conrad et al, 2011).…”

“…There is too much maneuvering room when applying the standards set for the before mentioned conventions; they are interpreted too loosely during their implementation into a EU member states' legislation. Research has already been made on the state of public participation through the implementation of the ELC by Conrad et al (2011) and Eiter et al (2014). They use a 5 step grading process developed by Conrad et al (2011) to evaluate the state of public participation as described in the ELC.…”

The Role of Geographical Landscape Studies for Sustainable Territorial Planning

“…These expert-based approaches to landscape assessment-also called indirect methods-have been called into question, however, as both their production and application tend to be dominated by professionals rather than the communities in the target landscapes [89,116], and their role in policy tends to follow the "deficit model", which posits policy-makers as neutral guardians of the public trust who simply need to be provided with reliable scientific information in order to make decisions that contribute to sustainability [117]. In a review of 52 LCAs undertaken in the UK between 2007 and 2011, for instance, Butler and Berglund (2014) [118] found that many of them limited public input to responses to expert views of the landscape, with only one quarter of the assessments involving significant public engagement according to the authors' criteria.…”