Public opinion and environment

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5 pages word

anglais

sciences politiques

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publié le 12/05/2008

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niveau : expert

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Since the end of the seventies, a strong link between the environmental issues and the public involvement has been established (Kaase 1982). The resolutions 37/7 (28 October 1982 relative to the Nature World Chart) and 45/94 (14 December 1990 relative to the protection of environment) of the general assembly of the UN, the European Chart on environment and health adopted in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany (8 December 1989) insisted on the necessity of making the public focus on the main question of protection of environment. The European community has dealt with environmental policies since the seventies under the pressure of ecological mobilizations and self-organized groups which were focusing on the necessity of protecting and respecting the environment. Those environmental associations aimed at defining new participatory tools so that the public could be well-informed and conscious of this necessity.
The Convent of Aarhus in its tenth point aimed to “further the accountability of and transparency in decision-making and to strengthen public support for decisions on the environment” and was signed in 1998. The regulation n°1367/2006 of the European Parliament and Council recalled the principle of an extended information of public concerning the health and environment policies. Some specific studies were made on the relation between environmental impacts and public participation (Cadenasso, Pickett, Grove 2006) but there is a need of deepening the tools of evaluation in this field, especially after the European Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC) which provided a bigger role to the European Parliament and strengthened a coalition of environmental NGOs like European Environmental Bureau, WWF, RSPB and Birdlife (Steyaert, Ollivier 2007).
The key problem is to select the ways the public could take part in evaluating the effects of the application of a specific environmental public policy (Sbragia 2000). The participation is seen as a feed-back process where citizens can interfere with the evaluation of public policies and in particular the implementation of European directives (for instance the directive 92/43/EC from 21 May 1992 on the preservation of natural habitats). Two countries will be compared in order to analyze the evolution between the environmental policies and the public participation, Sweden and Germany. In Sweden, some participatory tools were used to associate specific focus groups to the definition of environmental norms whereas in Germany, the empowerment of citizens has been reinforced since the Reunification. Both countries propose a panel of innovative tools of participatory democracy oriented and Sweden is the leading country in environmental studies. The comparison of these two cases will help to build a typology of participatory tools applied on environmental issues in all the European countries.
The objective of this research is to explain whether some participatory tools are more adapted than others to stimulate the citizen participation on the environmental issues. The research will be conducted at the crossroads between environmental studies and political science.