Drivers of Stakeholders Satisfaction in Environmental Collaborative Governance: Content or Procedure? Evidence from three European cities

Environmental governance is increasingly collaborative (Gerlak et al. 2013; Baird et al. 2016). The involvement of external stakeholders in the policy process would improve two aspects of policies in terms of environmental justice. Firstly, the content of the policy would, in theory, be more environmentally just because the affected actors can fuel the process and their concerns can in turn be integrated in the policy (Emerson, Nabatchi & Balogh, 2012). This relates to distributive environmental justice (Schlosberg 2007). Secondly, collaborative governance would improve procedural environmental justice (Bell & Carrick 2017; Suiseeya 2020), and thus enhance legitimacy of policies (Mosley & Wong 2021). To achieve the latter, stakeholders’ satisfaction (Coglianese 2002) is essential. Yet, some uncertainty remains about the reasons making a collaborative experience satisfactory (see Lu, Sagiki & Yagi 2020 for an exception). Hence, the paper explores the perception of such processes by the stakeholders, in order to understand the reasons leading to a (un)satisfactory process in the eyes of the participants.

Regarding this matter, the literature provides two main lines of reasoning. The first appreciates the pragmatic influence of participation on policymaking, that is whether the beliefs of participants tweak decisions in their favor (Abelson & Gauvin 2006). Yet, very few studies track beliefs from participants into decisions to effectively assess the influence of their participation on policymaking (Bijlsma et al. 2011). The other procedural reason why participants would be satisfied by an experience of participation relies on the “voice effect” (Lind, Kanfer & Earley 1990). It states that the feeling of being heard suffices to satisfy participants, even though their demands do not influence policy content.

Which of these two factors – pragmatist and procedural – drives the perception that stakeholders have of a collaborative experience? The paper addresses this matter with a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Melo 2021) on 30 participants to three expert groups consulted to elaborate local policies in three European cities, Schaerbeek, Delft and Villeurbanne. The outcome to be analyzed is the level of satisfaction of participants, which is assessed by an analysis on the answers they provided during semi-structured interviews regarding the content of the policy under scrutiny. The condition ‘voice’ is measured with answers to a questionnaire item. The ‘pragmatist’ condition is measured by comparing the vision of the issue at hand expressed during the interview using mental model elicitation (Özesmi & Özesmi 2004) and the content of the policy as adopted.