| Chapter 1: | Reinventing the Political |
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shown that the dynamics of inclusion of citizens and the inevitable exclusion of many voices constrain the practice of deliberation in top-down approaches to the production of consensus.
Public participation in policy processes, in the case of WWViews, has been predominantly advocated in the context of models of deliberative politics (e.g., Dryzek, 2000; Gastil & Levine, 2005; Habermas, 1996). Drawing on Habermasian notions of communication, these models assume that it is possible and desirable to achieve consensus on collective issues through rational argumentation.2 Also designated discursive politics, this view places faith in the possibility of reaching agreement through argumentation. Communication is here viewed as mainly a process of cognitive influence through information and good reasoning. Chantal Mouffe (e.g., 1993/2005) has challenged this view of democratic politics, maintaining that rational decisions cannot be reached through communicative exchanges and that a fully inclusive consensus is not possible. As power differences always play in political relations, any consensus is exclusionary, and therefore it is an illusion that harmonious solutions that satisfy all can ever be reached. Lassen et al. (2011) and Phillips (2011) provided specific illustrations of these tensions in climate politics.
Public participation in politics is not necessarily limited to formal political arrangements in which people’s roles and the possibilities of intervention are predefined. It also can take the shape of uninvited action, such as media campaigns, public debates, or demonstrations in which “self-selected actors … turn into participants through collective actions” (Braun & Schultz, 2010, p. 407).
Whereas social marketing and formal public participation are top-down managerial practices, citizen-led political participation is initiated from the bottom up. Engagement starts with citizens who see faults in the ways formal political institutions deal with climate change and advance alternative forms of governance, whether through proposals for different governmental policies or through social and economic changes.