Looking North and South: Ideals and realities of inclusive environmental governance

This paper addresses the dynamics of real processes of inclusive environmental governance by looking at the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. Specifically, we present a comparative ethnographic study that leads to a critical examination of Marteen Hajer's concept of technological citizenship and its role in normative models of so-called inclusive environmental governance. First, we present the Bionatur project of MST (Movimento Sem Terra/Landless People's Movement), the largest rural movement in Latin America. The project explicitly attempts to include lay/traditional knowledge into the processes of defining and protecting a regulatory space for “Creole seeds”. Second, we describe the formally open and inclusive environmental management of polluted sediments during harbour dredging in Norway. In both cases the actors are confronted with difficult problems bound by contradictory constraints of the institutional and cultural contexts. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay interplay. Embedded in these contexts, it is not always clear that non-experts want full autonomy and responsibility. In complex relationships, trust, dependency, responsibility and opposition, encompass the decision-maker/expert/lay person interplay. The results suggest that ideals, if instantiated, are reshaped within concrete contexts of action. Participatory ideals such as “technological citizenship”, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability need not be relativised, but they would better be expressed as regulative norms for practice rather than ideals from which an acontextual model or structure may be deduced.