Making a difference: On the constraints of consensus building and the relevance of deliberation in stakeholder dialogues

Marleen Kerkhof ()

Policy Sciences, 2006, vol. 39, issue 3, 279-299

Abstract: This article illuminates the contribution of stakeholder dialogues to environmental policy making. It makes a distinction between stakeholder dialogues as consensus building and stakeholder dialogues as deliberation. Although consensus building seems to be the dominant approach in participatory environmental policy making, this article questions the merits of consensus building and it uses the experience of the Dutch stakeholder dialogue project Climate OptiOns for the Long term (COOL) to explore, in a deliberative design, the shortcomings of a consensus-building approach and how they are possibly dealt with. The article presents the results of two deliberative methods that have been used in the COOL project – the repertory grid analysis and the dialectical approach – to demonstrate how a deliberative design can help policy makers to critically assess arguments in favor of and against a broad range of policy options, and deal with stakeholder conflict in an early phase of the policy process. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLP 2006

Keywords: Stakeholder dialogue; Deliberation; Climate change; Consensus building; Repertory grid; Dialectical approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11077-006-9024-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:policy:v:39:y:2006:i:3:p:279-299

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11077/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11077-006-9024-5

Access Statistics for this article

Policy Sciences is currently edited by Michael Howlett

More articles in Policy Sciences from Springer, Society of Policy Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().