Abstract
This article examines how independent bodies for public participation (IBPPs) can initiate a convergence around practices among actors in the public participation field, especially sponsors of participatory arrangements and the associated participation firms. As IBPPs have the public resources and legal authority to independently organize participatory arrangements, they can play a coordinating role in the public participation field. A comparison of two IBPPs, one in Canada (Quebec) and one in France, shows that IBPPs enhance the development of the participation industry and strengthen recognition of several informal norms concerning public participation design and implementation.
Innovative mechanisms in democratic processes have been relatively well mapped in the last 20 years. This is thanks to several studies on participation processes as well as very helpful analyses aimed at classifying the many innovations in the field. However, there is still little known about the organizations and actors that operate at the heart of the public participation phenomenon. Public participation is not limited to a series of isolated practices but is organized through varied networks of organizations and actors. These actors are giving greater form to public participation through promotion, sponsorship, expertise, and other facilitation efforts (Chilvers, 2012). In the last few years, the information gap regarding public participation actors has been addressed to some extent by analyzing the role of the public engagement industry (Lee, 2015) and its professionals (Bherer et al., 2017a).
This article seeks to specifically examine the actors at the heart of the emergence of the public participation field—the “participation organizations” (Chilvers, 2012, p. 290; Pallett, 2015, p. 770) or “organizations working with participatory governance” (Fung & Warren, 2011, p. 343). Participation organizations are actors that have the capacity to coordinate and influence the development of public participation practices: “Such actors were recognized for their roles in speaking for, overseeing, coordinating, and professionalizing the public dialogue field, which included networking, knowledge transfer, developing guidance, training, and building capacity” (Chilvers, 2012, p. 296). It includes professional associations, such as the International Association for Public Participation and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation in the United States, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Involve in the United Kingdom, that act as centers of expertise.
This article specifically examines the impact of a little-researched subcategory of participation organizations that we have called “independent bodies for public participation” (IBPPs). IBPPs are public agencies established at arm’s length by governments to organize participatory forums in accordance with the provisions of their enabling legislation. This legislation usually sets out clear rules for the implementation of participatory arrangements but also gives IBPPs room to maneuver in terms of putting participatory tools in place. As autonomous public agencies, IBPPs are theoretically protected from day-to-day political intervention and have public resources and the formal power to influence public participation practices in multiple ways. This means that IBPPs can act as pivotal organizations not only in implementing participatory processes but also in consolidating public participation practices. The objective of this text is to examine some of the ways that IBPPs can influence public participation practices by comparing two of the oldest IBPPs still in operation: Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (environmental public hearings board, hereafter the BAPE) in Canada and France’s Commission nationale du débat public (national commission for public debate, hereafter the CNDP).
The concept of “organizational field” (from “organizational institutionalism” scholarship) is used to theoretically understand how IBPPs can influence public participation practices as a whole. Organizational fields have been described as “a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies and other organizations that produce similar services or products” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). These definitions emphasize relationships between actors as well as their shared understandings of power, knowledge, norms, and boundaries with respect to the field. The concept of an organizational field implies that there is institutionalization, that is, a growing recognition and increasing concentration of typical practices in the field. This article seeks to better understand the coordinating role that the two IBPPs under study can play in their respective fields by initiating a convergence around principles, rules, and practices among the sponsors of participatory arrangements and the “participation firms” that are involved in these forums in various ways. The article focuses on how IBPPs contribute to the development of institutional infrastructure, which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that prevail in a field and establish its governance. This could be the case with IBPPs, whose autonomy and public status give them the resources and capacity to create logics that help institutionalize the public participation field.
This article begins by explaining what an IBPP is, then presents a theoretical framework for understanding the contributions IBPPs make. The next section examines how the BAPE, as an IBPP, contributes within its own field, and the fourth section does the same for the CNDP. These latter two sections begin by introducing the IBPP concerned and then describe its main contributions. The final section reviews and compares the impacts of the BAPE and the CNDP to identify the processes they induce that help develop the institutional infrastructure of their respective public participation fields. Rather than evaluating the influence of IBPPs on participatory process quality, this article looks at how the two IBPPs influence the logics of production, design, and dissemination in their respective public participation fields. The article is an exploratory study that takes an initial dive into the world of IBPPs by defining them analytically and then exploring two examples to provide a framework for further investigations of this novel type of organization.
What Is an IBPP?
IBPPs belong in the administrative category of public agencies, that is, “those governmental entities that (a) possess and exercise some grant of specialised public authority, separate from that of other institutions but (b) are neither directly elected by the people nor directly managed by elected officials” (Thatcher & Sweet, 2002, p. 2). This category of organization includes such very different public entities as telecommunications or energy regulatory boards, food and drug agencies, and service provider agencies. Public agencies have greater autonomy than that enjoyed by traditional ministries in national governments. This greater freedom extends to areas such as the delegated authority, the management of financial and human resources, and day-to-day tasks.
The best-known unelected bodies are specialized regulatory agencies that have the power to independently establish formal norms and standards to regulate a given sector. As part of this regulatory power, they can also supervise and penalize the entities that they regulate. In some cases, they can also set up participation forums, but this remains a very small part of what they do. The interest here is in public agencies whose entire mandate is dedicated to public participation: that is, those given the mandate to organize participation forums in accordance with the provisions of their enabling legislation. IBPPs, like regulatory agencies, have all been established by statute and are headed by a board or a single nonministerial official. However, unlike executive agencies, IBPPs do not carry out any formal regulatory activities. On the contrary, they do have the authority to autonomously organize public forums, make information public, and provide independent specialist advice (usually based on citizen preferences). This statutory authority may cover the type of issue or project for which a participatory process can be planned, how the IBPP can (or cannot) decide on the type of issue under review, the design of the participatory process, the appointment of the person to be in charge of facilitating a specific participatory forum, the content of the public participation reports, and so on. The participatory processes that IBPPs organize remain consultative in nature insofar as the government is free to decide whether to follow citizens’ expressed wishes or not.
From this perspective, IBPPs can be defined as public agencies established by governments to organize participatory forums in accordance with the provisions of the legislation that created them. They thus constitute a distinct kind of public participation organization in the democratic-innovations literature due to their public statute and strong administrative autonomy (Fourniau, 2011; Ravazzi, 2017). In other words, as governmental entities, they enjoy considerable capacity to take action thanks to the financial, legal, and personnel resources at their disposal. These resources give them an organizational stability that underpins regularity and longevity in their interactions with their audiences. Their administrative autonomy makes them highly specialized bodies that possess distinctive expertise owing to their narrow but clear mandates combined with their technical competencies.
Among the best-known organizations that meet the criteria to be considered as an IBPP are the BAPE (created in the province of Quebec, Canada, in 1978), the CNDP (France, 1995), the Rathenau Institute (The Netherlands, 1986), the Danish Board of Technology (Denmark, 1985, subsequently converted into a think tank in 2012), the Montréal Board of Public Consultation (Canada, 2002), the Tuscany Regional Participation Authority (Italy, 2008), and Sciencewise (the United Kingdom, 2005, before being delegated to a partnership with private organizations and NGOs in 2015). These IBPPs do not necessarily operate in the same public sectors and do not use the same participatory arrangements. Their common point of convergence is that each of them is an independent body that specializes in public participation. However, very little is known about the IBPPs that are currently in operation. Even a well-known IBPP such as the Danish Board of Technology is not scrutinized to the same degree as the deliberative design that made its success—the citizen conference (see, for example, Joss, 1998). With this article, we would like to contribute to the small family of studies to date that have started to look at the organizational functioning of IBPPs and their impact on public participation practice (Chilvers, 2012; Lewanski, 2013; Pallett, 2015, 2018), by specifically comparing the respective effects of the CNDP and the BAPE. Due to their longevity, these are two well-positioned and still-operating organizations that influence the public participation field in their respective national contexts. The comparison will be facilitated by the fact that each of these organizations operates in the same sector of facilities and megaprojects. Although our findings only apply to the CNDP and the BAPE, we believe the mechanisms of influence of IBPPs that we identify in our conclusion will help deepen hypotheses in future studies on these very significant but still little-known organizations.
Theoretical Background and Methods
The objective of the article is to examine how IBPPs such as the BAPE and the CNDP contribute to the development and consolidation of public participation practices. The interest is not to look at the contributions of IBPPs at the micro level of specific participatory processes but rather at the meso level, that is, the general institutional context framing the development of public participation in a given IBPP’s organizational field. This concept implies that society is characterized by sectors of activity that develop after the creation of organizations that mutually recognize that they share the same sphere of activities and interact in different ways (collaboration, conflict, domination, etc.; Fligstein & McAdam, 2012).
From this perspective, the public participation field consists of actors that interact in the context of the implementation of public participation processes and strive to promote their vision of the practice (Lee & Romano, 2013). One category of these actors consists of public or private organizations that sponsor participatory processes to either adopt a public policy or approve a development project (real estate, facilities, planning projects, etc.; Chilvers, 2012). In this article, we call them “project proponent” or simply “proponent” to put the emphasis that they are the ones that are developers of projects for which participatory processes are legally requested. Another category consists of participation firms hired by sponsors to design and facilitate participatory processes (Hendriks & Carson, 2008). In organizational field theory, both actors represent what are called “a population,” that is, “a population of organizations operating in the same domain as indicated by the similarity of their services of products” (Scott, 2014, p. 86). In addition to the focal population, field membership also comprises organizations that influence their performance, including exchange partners, funding sources, or regulators as participation organizations.
The objectives of organizational field analysis are to understand the structural processes of a field, that is, the increase in interaction, the development of mutual awareness, the recognition of the value of sharing norms and information, and the emergence of domination patterns and coalitions among the field’s population (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012). According to field theory, IBPPs would support the structuration of the field by stimulating convergence around certain general principles, rules, and practices among project proponents and participation firms. The structuration of a field depends on the degree of development of its institutional infrastructure (Zietsma et al., 2017), which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that prevail in a field (C. R. Hinings et al., 2017, p. 167). It includes, first, the formal organizations that maintain the “rules of the game” in the field, that is, governance agents that monitor, enable, and constrain a field’s activities (C. R. Hinings et al., 2017, p. 168). Typically, they are professional and industry associations, certification bodies, or governmental regulators, that is, organizations that help oversee and police the field by generating and disseminating relevant information, adopting formal and informal standards that regulate the activities of the members, providing administrative services, and monitoring access to the field (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012, p. 78). Governance agents are, in fact, very similar conceptually to the participation organizations highlighted in the democratic-innovations literature. The institutional infrastructure also comprises the set of dominant values and beliefs that prescribe behavior within fields. They represent informal norms, meaning, status differentiators, relational channels, field-configuring events, and organizational models (partnerships, hybrid organizations, etc.) that flow in the field and help actors to connect and interact. Sociological institutionalist theories have always considered that behavior is not only shaped by explicit rules but also by cognitive and normative structures (Scott, 2014). Governance agents and informal norms mutually reinforce each other in a permanent interaction between the two (C. R. Hinings et al., 2017, p. 169). A formal governance system materializes in various elements as norms, labels, and practices that were previously more informal. Informal components are gradually taken for granted by the population of actors operating in the field through their repetition and the institutional work of governance agents, which are also guided by the cultural beliefs that circulate and become progressively relevant in their social context of action. Overall, “institutional infrastructure links different actors and, critically, provides governance and regulation and establishes legitimate logics and courses of action” (B. Hinings et al., 2018, p. 55).
On the basis of this theoretical approach, this article examines how IBPPs help the public participation field converge around certain norms and practices that progressively become a recognized element of the field’s institutional infrastructure. Two levels of analysis will allow this. The first is to see how IBPPs impact the behavior of the field’s population, that is, the project proponents and the participation firms, with a focus on the micro-practices that arise within and between organizations. The second level of analysis is to consider how this transformation of practices at the micro level leads to the structuration of the public participation field at the meso level, by supporting the development of formal or informal dimensions of the institutional infrastructure. This two-level analysis is intended to connect IBPP activities to field transformations by analytically reconstructing change pathways and by showing how new practices are adopted by the proponents and the participation firms that “move up” to the level of the field and stimulate a structuration of the institutional infrastructure. As IBPPs rely on legal, personnel, and financial resources to deploy a range of actions that are repeated over time and are based on public participation expertise, they can be expected to exert a coordinating impact on the public participation field.
In line with field theory studies, we used several data sources to develop a rich account of different aspects of the respective contributions of the BAPE and the CNDP to their fields. We first conducted interviews in 2013 and 2014 (39 in Quebec, 15 in France) mainly with public participation professionals (hereafter “PPPs”), and a few other actors involved in the implementation of the two IBPPs’ activities (more interviews were conducted in Quebec because they were part of a larger research project on the professionalization of public participation). PPPs are individuals hired by proponents and participation firms to design, implement, facilitate, or evaluate public participation. The interviews concerned the PPPs’ activities, their career trajectories, and their vision of both public participation and the participation industry, as well as their understanding of the IBPPs’ role. Our first material, then, is the interpretations of the PPPs on how the actions of the BAPE and the CNDP initiate processes that lead proponents and participation firms to adjust. To clearly define these mechanisms, interviews were supplemented by an extensive literature review, including websites, given that both the BAPE and the CNDP have published many documents and have been the subject of research and advocacy activities. We used these documentary sources because they provided insights into the different dimensions of field-level change and helped us deepen the interpretations made by the PPPs about micro-practices. The following two sections present the most important contributions of the two IBPPs.
The BAPE
Background
In Quebec, public participation initially developed in the field of environmental and land-use planning. In 1978, the provincial government intended to amend the Environment Quality Act (1972) to include citizen involvement in environmental protection. This reform led to the creation of the BAPE in 1978, which was the first important institutionalized process of public participation legally enacted in the province (Gauthier & Simard, 2017). The BAPE is an independent organization that operates in the environmental impact assessment field. Its mandate is to hold public hearings on large projects and be responsible for the participatory phases of the entire process. When a public or private proponent is interested in developing a large project that meets certain legally defined criteria, and if any citizen, municipality, or NGO (even only one) requests a public inquiry, the Quebec Environment Minister mandates the BAPE to hold public hearings. BAPE statistics show that over the last 30 years, citizens have asked for a public inquiry for 45% of the projects that met the legal criteria (BAPE, n.d., p. 3). The public hearing process takes place over a period of no more than 4 months and is divided into two parts. The first set of hearings is designed to provide citizens with information, hold discussions, and address questions to the project proponent. The second set of hearings gives citizens an opportunity to express their opinions, mainly through the submission of testimony (oral or written).
The BAPE is composed of a president, a vice-president, and four full-time commissioners, who are all appointed by the Environment Minister. When public hearings are required, the BAPE president chooses nominees from among its team of commissioners to be in charge of the hearings. After the second part of the hearings, the commissioners draft a report on the public hearings. This report contains a presentation of citizens’ views, an analysis of the issues, and a series of recommendations to the Minister with respect to accepting, modifying, or rejecting the project. The Minister makes final recommendations to the government, which, in turn, is responsible for making the final decision to either authorize the project, under conditions that it determines, or reject it. The BAPE receives an annual budget equivalent to US$4.5 million from the Environment Minister. It has a staff of about 45 employees (BAPE, 2018).
BAPE Contributions to the Development of the Quebec Public Participation Field
Over the years, the BAPE has made many contributions to the Quebec public participation field as a result of the legal requests it has received and the repeated and regular nature of its activities. First, the legal environment that enacted the BAPE and its status as a permanent institution mean that it can have a coercive effect on both public and private project proponents who have no choice but to adapt to this new context by hiring participation firms. This, in turn, contributes to the emergence of several firms offering participatory services. Some very important proponents in the field will also draw on their own specialized staff to develop a unit inside the organization. They will also hire permanent staff who have already begun their careers in small participation firms. Second, the BAPE contributes to the establishment of two-step public hearings as the main public participation method in Quebec. Third, the BAPE has contributed to the process of standardization and the sharing of norms and practices that derive from its activities, especially the norms that have been gradually developed by the public reports drafted by the hearings commissioners. Finally, the organizational autonomy of the BAPE also influences the organization of public participation at the municipal level.
The most important impact of the BAPE is on the field’s population: the participation firms and the project proponents. As a public hearing process is a compulsory requirement when a large project meets certain legally defined criteria, proponents have had to make major adjustments to this new legal context. The context resulting from the establishment of the BAPE has directly contributed to the creation of firms that can help proponents navigate the two-step public hearing process. Proponents are generally apprehensive about citizens’ reactions to their development projects, apprehensions that can be accentuated as a result of media coverage of the open and public hearings involved. BAPE recommendations can also have an effect on a proponent’s project: If the BAPE’s recommendations are negative or call for major modifications, the government cannot easily approve the project in question. For a proponent, hiring a participation firm is in fact a way “to better control” the uncertainty surrounding the BAPE’s intervention (Simard, 2008). Since the creation of the BAPE, the list of legally defined criteria has been extended several times, meaning that the population pool of the proponents affected by BAPE activities has grown, as well as the relevance of participation firms in this context.
This new context created by the establishment of the BAPE has opened up new opportunities for participation firms, who can now offer a range of services to help proponents obtain public approval for their development projects. The first type of service consists in coaching the proponent to be a “good player” during the public part of the hearings. This involves documenting every issue related to the project, writing summaries of the environmental impact assessments in a style that is accessible to citizens, preparing for question-and-answer sessions, simulating a public hearing with concerned citizens, and so on. This type of service was developed in the early 1990s when the first participation firms in Quebec noticed that proponents often came to public hearings very poorly prepared (Participant 18, October 30, 2013). These services were initially developed by the largest proponents that have been involved in several BAPE public hearing processes from the outset (Participant 31, November 19, 2013; see also Simard, 2006). Participation firms bring expertise and know-how about the BAPE process to the equation. The second type of service consists of client-oriented services designed to inform the proponent about the context and identify the stakeholders. These services include media monitoring, social media analysis, stakeholder mapping, conflict analyses, focus groups, surveys, or the development of a storytelling approach. They can also include communication plans and social media management. Overall, participation firms build their services around this repeated and reputedly credible participatory mechanism.
The second important contribution of the BAPE is to make two-step public hearings a benchmark public participation process among civil society, project proponents, and elected representatives at all levels of government. This impression stems from the permanent and repetitive nature of the public hearings: Although there were fewer participatory processes during the BAPE’s early years, an average of eight public hearing processes were conducted per year between 1990 and 2014 (with four the fewest and 13 the most part). The repetitive nature of BAPE public hearings gives them visibility and a place in the political environment that helps to build trust around the organization and the usefulness of its public hearings. In a survey conducted in 2012, 66% of the respondents stated that they were familiar with the BAPE; of these, 93% felt that the BAPE was a credible organization (Montpetit & Lachapelle, 2013, p. 23). The BAPE’s visibility can be explained by the fact that BAPE public hearings and reports usually receive very good media coverage.
The process that leads to Quebec society’s positive image of BAPE public hearings was well explained by several PPPs we met. In their opinion, as the BAPE is a long-standing organization that has made ample and consistent use of a two-step public hearing mechanism, citizens, activist groups, and project proponents are aware of, and can anticipate, the participation process (Participants 13, 15, and 19, July 10, 2013; October 3, 2013; November 21, 2013, respectively). They know how the process works and how to prepare for it: “The BAPE is very reassuring; people feel very comfortable being associated with the BAPE. The process is always the same: it’s really open to every citizen” (Participant 15). For proponents, the public hearings can be seen as a time-consuming process but one that also gives some credibility to their project and can help reassure citizens (Participants 15 and 33, March 15, 2014). Requests for a “BAPE” often come from municipalities or civil society for some projects that do not appear on the list identified by the regulation. In the first decades of the BAPE, some proponents and public authorities also adopted two-step public hearings. This was—and still is—the case in Montréal and Québec City, the two most populous cities in the province (Bherer & Breux, 2012). The fact that public hearings became the main participatory method in Quebec also explained why two worldwide democratic innovations—citizen juries and participatory budgets—spread very tentatively across the province, to the point where one designer of the BAPE model noted critically that “the BAPE became the sole defender of public expectations, as if its approach was the only valid and legitimate one” (Beauchamp, 2006, p. 45, authors’ translation).
The third important contribution of the BAPE is the sharing and standardization of norms that it induced and which helped frame Quebec’s public participation field as it is today. This is a sophisticated process that starts with the public reports made by the hearings commissioners (Participants 1 and 5, August 5, 2013, and June 11, 2013, respectively). Based on citizens’ views and an analysis of the issues, the report includes a general recommendation as to whether to authorize the project, a series of specific recommendations concerning the project, and more general comments about related laws and practices. These recommendations are based on explicit norms and criteria that commissioners express to justify their advice. These recommendations are addressed to the Environment Minister who is responsible for reviewing them and then transmitting them, as applicable, to the project proponent concerned. This transmission is made via a governmental decree that lists the conditions the proponent must meet to implement its project. About 24% of final recommendations reject the project concerned, whereas 73% either accept it or request changes to it and 3% contain no opinion about it (Gauthier & Simard, 2019). Even when the Minister does not follow the BAPE’s final recommendation not to authorize a project, the Minister usually adopts some of its specific recommendations. However, the Environment Minister’s decision does not mean that BAPE public reports disappear into oblivion. They are read by a diverse group of actors: proponents in the same economic sector or a related one, public servants from other departments, and participation firms (Participants 18 and 19). All these stakeholders are interested in knowing the issues raised by citizens that could have an impact on specific future projects. These actors also look at the procedural dimensions of the public participation process. What are the commissioners’ concerns? What additional information did they ask the proponent to publish? How did the commissioners interpret citizens’ opinions? What suggestion did they make to a proponent who failed to inform and consult citizens? For all these actors, BAPE public reports contain useful information for adapting their strategies. In other words, the proceedings of public hearings are influential and expected (Participants 1 and 5).
Over time, some of the commissioners’ recommendations and remarks have become established norms that transform practices. This process has similarities with the way jurisprudence develops in the legal system. Three mechanisms help some recommendations become recognized in the field as the new modus operandi. First, the various actors pay attention when recommendations are repeated several times by different commissioners from one public hearing to another. Commissioners learn and discuss the work of their counterparts, either informally or by rereading the committee reports created for each public hearing (Participants 17 and 27, March 26, 2014, and October 17, 2013, respectively). This mechanism creates a mutual process of sharing that allows commissioners to echo the same concern in their next public hearing. The second mechanism is simply when a recommendation is turned into a decree by the government because this shows that the government will be receptive to BAPE proposals for the next public hearing. Third, citizens and civil society give recommendations a second life by either using them as a reference in a subsequent public hearing or in their advocacy work. All the reports, public hearing transcriptions, citizens’ testimonies, and other information produced since 1978 are available on the BAPE website. These databases are very useful for civil society, participation firms, and/or other actors in terms of enabling them to quickly understand the issues associated with certain kinds of projects.
This sophisticated process of standardization and learning has developed over a long period, and all the ramifications of the public reports can be difficult to trace. However, based on our interviews with PPPs, three effects can be defined. First, the public reports have played an important role in the development of voluntary participatory settings at the early stage of project development or its implementation stage. In the years since the BAPE’s first decade, commissioners have criticized proponents on several occasions for their lack of interaction with the citizens affected by a project. They suggested that proponents not wait until the public hearings to provide information and involve citizens in the project. These repeated criticisms taught proponents the importance of informing communities and initiating the dialogue process earlier in the project development process. They came to understand that pre-consultation has become an informal BAPE prerequisite and that commissioners will be less critical of proponents who show this kind of openness (Participants 13, 15, 18, and 19). Over time, recommendations focused not only on the usefulness of the pre-consultation phase but also on the methods used. Proponents had to be convinced to try to reach out to everybody and provide relevant information.
This shift has led participation firms to add pre-consultation to the participatory services they offer. The same kind of incentive can be found in the adoption of follow-up committees, a practice that has since also been embraced by proponents and participation firms alike (Participants 13, 15, 18, and 19). In 1985, a public report on an electrical facility request mentioned that a follow-up committee was created to ensure implementation of the BAPE’s recommendations. In the wake of those public hearings, the BAPE commissioners started to introduce follow-up committee proposals in their recommendations, which were then also formalized on several occasions by governmental decrees authorizing other projects. Since then, participation firms have appropriated and transformed pre-consultation and follow-up committees in more open community dialogue settings that are now being used in participatory processes where the BAPE is not required to be involved (Participants 16 and 20, October 10, 2013, and March 20, 2014, respectively). This development also led participation firms to offer community relations services. A similar process of learning and standardization was found for transparency activities. In due course, BAPE commissioners also requested that proponents provide commitment and follow-up letters to citizens and local representatives, once the public hearings were finished. Following this new practice, participation firms recommended to their clients that they publish project information and data throughout the project to avoid being accused of hiding certain facts (Participants 16 and 23, November 29, 2013). Overall, follow-up, commitment, and transparency requests have helped equally as much as pre-consultations in developing more sophisticated participatory arrangements both for situations where BAPE public hearings are requested and for situations where there is no legal requirement for them (Participant 1).
Finally, the process of standardization also concerns the role now played by social acceptability norms in the evaluation of every megaproject. Ever since the first BAPE public hearings, the commissioners have invoked the need for social acceptability. Social acceptability is a criterion that is different from the request to have pre-consultation or a follow-up committee insofar as not only must the proponent show that it has interacted with citizens but also that its project has obtained an appreciable degree of consent in the community. Over time, this criterion has become more prominent in public reports—from a simple mention in a section to an entire chapter dedicated to the evaluation of social acceptability in the most recent reports (Simard, forthcoming). Since the 2010s, lack of social acceptability has been the principal reason for the BAPE to recommend rejecting a project. The challenge is to know whether a particular project is worth carrying out given the risk of conflict within a community (Participants 23 and 24, October 3, 2013). As social acceptability is difficult to assess objectively, many events and guides have been prepared by economic actors in the last 15 years. For the majority of the PPPs we met, using the term social acceptability is now becoming a strong selling point for participation firms when introducing their services.
Another BAPE contribution is related to its organizational autonomy and the impartiality that it contributes to the public participation process. In 2002, the BAPE was a clear inspiration for the creation of the Montréal Board of Public Consultation, which is also an IBPP (Participants 5 and 10, May 28, 2013). In 1986, the City of Montréal created a service dedicated to the public engagement process, but it was not autonomous. A subsequent mayor elected in 1994 abolished this service and stopped using two-step public hearings. Montréal civil society then mobilized to demand an IBPP similar to the BAPE, which was obtained in 2002 following the amalgamation of the new City of Montréal and the intervention of the Quebec Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing (Bherer & Breux, 2012). Since then, the need for an IBPP is always on the table in the few Quebec municipalities that have established a public participation department (e.g., Gatineau, a city of around 300,000 inhabitants, where an IBPP is currently being developed).
The CNDP
Background
The CNDP was created in 1995 to modernize a very old tool inherited from the 19th century: the enquête publique [public inquiry] (Fourniau, 2011). The CNDP was converted to an independent public agency in 2002 through the Loi sur la démocratie de proximité [Local democracy law]. The CNDP is mandated to organize and supervise the implementation of participatory arrangements on large projects and certain public policies of a strategic nature (Revel et al., 2007). The projects reviewed by the CNDP can be private or public, or from local or national agencies, and concern the construction of facilities, as well as planning and development involving potentially important socioeconomic issues and environmental impacts. The CNDP consists of the president and two vice-presidents, appointed by the government, and 23 other members chosen by and from three sectors: (a) Members of Parliament and local representatives, (b) judges from various courts, and (c) civil society organizations.
The CNDP’s role is to examine requests for participatory arrangements and to decide what kind of participatory forum is needed. Two kinds of participatory arrangements are possible. The first is a public debate, that is, an open forum where stakeholders and citizens are invited to discuss a project on an equal footing (Fourniau, 2011). The CNDP itself organizes this public debate. The second possibility is a dialogue process, called concertation in French. Concertation is a general term used extensively in France and means a small-scale participatory arrangement that can take very different forms (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2017, p. 59). When the CNDP recommends a dialogue process, the project proponent is responsible for implementing the participatory arrangement but must comply with CNDP principles and rules.
A project or a policy can be referred for a CNDP participatory arrangement in three ways: (a) Some requests are mandatory, depending on the cost of the project concerned; (b) others come voluntarily from proponents themselves, including the government (in the case of a public policy or a project led by a public agency); and (c) some come from MPs, local governments, or environmental NGOs, or by way of a petition (called a right to initiate). In each case, the CNDP will deliberate on the relevance of a participatory forum as well as on the most appropriate participatory arrangements.
When the public debate is over, the commission drafts a report of about 100 pages presenting citizens’ views. There are no recommendations similar to those of the BAPE, and the report is not given to the government but rather to the proponent. Within the following 3 months, the proponent is required to make public its decision on its project (retained, modified, suspended, or abandoned). In the case of a dialogue process, the proponents’ reports are submitted to the CNDP and published. The CNDP employs around eight people and its annual budget is €2.5 million, equivalent to around US$2.9 million (CNDP, 2019).
CNDP Contributions to the Development of the French Public Participation Field
Although the CNDP has not been in existence for as long as the BAPE, this French IBPP has also made important contributions to France’s public participation field: Its most visible impact, as in the case of the BAPE, is on project proponents and participation firms. Proponents adapted to this new legal situation by hiring from among the participation firms and individual PPPs that had emerged following the establishment of the CNDP. The CNDP also stimulated a process of standardization through its public reports. In its first decade, it also experimented with new ways of conducting the dialogue process through the creation of the guarantor role that has since been legally recognized. The value of impartiality and the role of third-party actors are also important parts of the CNDP’s ongoing legacy.
First, the CNDP contributed to the development of participation firms in two ways: (a) directly by hiring them to help it organize public debates and (b) indirectly by inducing proponents to hire participation firms to support them in the public debate process. The CNDP has formal contact with participation firms because it is in charge of one part of the debate organization process and subcontracts other activities to private firms. When the CNDP chooses to launch a public debate, it appoints a special commission of four to 10 members. This commission has a great deal of latitude in how it sets up the public debate. To set up the design it has adopted for the public meetings, the commission uses a national tendering process to hire firms with various specialties (communications, event facilitation and management, web design and management, etc.). During the first 15 years of the CNDP’s existence, these participation firms became recognized specialists in assisting public debate commissions. They are in charge of the entire process and are usually involved in a myriad of subcontracting relationships with smaller firms regarding the various aspects of the process. The CNDP also hires full-time staff for the entire public debate process, which usually lasts 6 to 7 months. At the head of this staff, the general secretary and assistant general secretary play a pivotal role in organizing and supervising a “state-of-the-art” public debate (Participant 42, March 4, 2014). The individuals occupying these positions are generally part of an informal list of PPPs who work independently. This approach leads to a strict division of labor stemming from the CNDP’s outsourcing among the individual PPPs hired to perform the strategic role of supervising the entire public debate process and the firms involved in implementing specific stages (Picque, 2012, p. 324). There is a second division of labor between firms providing services directly to the CNDP and the ones that support proponents in providing a mock public debate. As one of the French PPPs said, “It could be unsettling for proponents to be under the scrutiny of the CNDP . . . our firm brings them a little bit of reassurance” (Participant 43, March 5, 2014). Participation firms can help the proponent prepare a document that evaluates the project’s costs, socioenvironmental impacts, and economic characteristics, or draft the final document presenting the proponent’s decision as to whether the citizens’ recommendations will be followed. They also help proponents understand the legal requirements for participatory arrangements and the different forms of participatory processes. Participation firms also act as intermediaries and support proponents in their relationship with the CNDP because these firms are very familiar with it (Picque, 2012). They can make recommendations on the proponent’s public image (how the proponent’s representatives should present themselves, how to listen to citizens, etc.). Participation firms can also keep records on the project: Because the public debate process can also include the follow-up committee and the overall public participation process for a particular project can last several years, it can be helpful to designate a few individuals to follow the entire process and record the commitments made by the proponent (Participants 43 and 45, March 4, 2014). On the whole, the CNDP is clearly an important development engine for participation firms. A 2013 survey by the Institut de la concertation et de la participation citoyenne (ICPC, 2013), the main French professional association for PPPs, found that 54% of its members that responded to a survey (N = 63) were hired by—or deemed a supplier to—the CNDP.
The second contribution of the CNDP is similar to the process of norm sharing and standardization found in Quebec. As was noted for the BAPE, the recommendations made in the CNDP public reports gradually engendered change in the French public participation field (Participants 46 and 47, March 4, 2014, and March 7, 2014, respectively). Several kinds of public reports written by the CNDP or project proponents are required to be published on the CNDP website. First, at the request stage, the CNDP reviews the relevance of a participatory process and, if needed, its form. Once a public debate has ended, the commission responsible also publishes a report containing all the details concerning the implementation of the public debate as well as the citizens’ views. This report is reviewed by the CNDP president in a public document that also contains its recommendations to the proponent. Following these two reports, the proponent’s decision on pursuing the project is also published on the CNDP website. When the CNDP chooses a dialogue process at the request stage, the process is similar but proponents are free to follow CNDP recommendations and make their reports public. All these documents are read by both proponents and participation firms to adapt to the participatory process launched by the CNDP (Participants 43, 46, 47, and 54, March 2, 2014). Furthermore, the request for proponents to publish their decisions created an accountability context. With time, established norms and practices have been tried with the result that some have become legitimized and are now legally recognized.
This standardization process has incentivized proponents to initiate the participatory process themselves by encouraging concertation (after the dialogue phase; Participants 43 and 46). This possibility was first suggested in a guide to the dialogue and public participation process (La Charte de la concertation du Ministère de l’Aménagement du Territoire et de l’Environnement) published by the Environment Minister in 1996; although this guide failed to obtain legal standing, it had the merit of defining the dialogue process. However, this document did not have any practical impact until the CNDP began to recommend that proponents implement a dialogue process. This process was first prescribed to replace public debate when the CNDP examined requests for participatory arrangements and decided the most relevant forms of participatory forum. With time, the dialogue process also became a complementary tool to public debate when the CNDP president or some of the commissioners assigned to a specific public debate also recommended that the dialogue process take place both before and after the public debate. Accordingly, the dialogue process now includes both a pre-consultation phase and a follow-up process. With this shift toward more dialogue, public participation in megaprojects has not been considered as only one-off occurrences but rather as a process with a specifically designed forum for each step in developing a given project: “I’m a big fan of the CNDP! Thanks to the transparency principle and well-designed dialogue and participation methods, the implementation of the CNDP and the ‘made in CNDP’ public debate are positives in the governance of megaprojects in France” (Participant 46). This recognition of a dialogue process that occurs very early in a project and can be repeated until project implementation also explains why proponents can hire participation firms for periods lasting several years. This more frequent use of dialogue processes has led some proponents to be increasingly willing to implement participatory arrangements even when they are outside the CNDP’s purview (Participants 47 and 52, February 21, 2014). In practice, the CNDP, by often experimenting with the dialogue process during the 2000s, helped operationalize a norm prescribed by the Environment Minister in the 1990s. As a result, France’s environmental code was revised in 2010 to formally recognize this practice developed by the CNDP. In 2016, this revision continued with the addition of the legal obligation to write a public report for each dialogue process.
However, this move toward more dialogue and participation was not accompanied by more details about the design of the dialogue process. Under this term, proponents used a variety of different practices, ranging from citizen juries to a single public meeting. Some proponents had a very minimalist view of the dialogue process, as stressed by many critics in the 1990s and 2000s (Participants 45 and 47). Furthermore, when the CNDP recommends a dialogue process, it can suggest a participatory design, but the proponent is not obliged to follow it. To incentivize proponents to establish fair and transparent participatory arrangements and to explain the project in detail, the CNDP progressively experimented with an innovation in its third important contribution: the role of the “guarantor” of a public participation process. A guarantor is someone who supervises a participatory process to ensure that citizens can present their opinions to the proponent (Guihéneuf, 2017). The guarantor’s role is to protect the quality of the participatory process directly organized by a proponent. They make sure that proponents adhere to the dialogue design and timetable submitted to the CNDP, ask questions, propose improvements, request complementary studies about the relevance of the project, and so on. At the end of the participatory process, the guarantor writes a public report, which is published on the CNDP website. The guarantor is not in charge of implementing the dialogue process: The proponent does that with the help of the participation firm it hires; instead, the role of the guarantor is to monitor the process by making suggestions to improve the design of the participatory arrangements and by ensuring that citizens receive a fair opportunity to receive information and express their opinions.
The guarantor role was first suggested without any specifications in the guide to the dialogue and public participation process published by the Environment Minister in 1996, but it was the CNDP that gave the guarantor’s role and tasks concrete form in the 2000s by recommending having a guarantor when a dialogue process is required. With the rise of the dialogue process, a few proponents began to request a guarantor (Ballan & Dziedzicki, 2016). In subsequent years, the CNDP also began to recommend the use of a guarantor for follow-up steps after a public debate. For the 2002–2012 period, 19 projects had a guarantor designated by the CNDP (2012). In the early 2010s, these first experiments with a guarantor led the CNDP to collaborate with a group of actors (including the ICPC) about reforms and state-of-the-art improvements (Steering Committee, Garantir la concertation project, 2014). The legal recognition of the guarantor role followed the same path as the dialogue process with the revision of the environmental code in 2010 and the formal recognition in 2015 that CNDP is in charge of forming and training a team of guarantors. This innovation was good news for participation firms because it meant that proponents had an incentive to organize the participation process themselves by hiring a firm to help design and implement participatory arrangements and that these firms could also expand their services by becoming guarantors themselves (Participant 52).
In general, the CNDP supported a democratic innovation in its own image. Like the CNDP, the guarantor is an independent third party but embodied in an individual instead of an organization. The value of impartiality in the facilitation of participatory arrangements has always been important in public participation around the world, with PPPs being perceived as impartial actors positioned between sponsors and citizens (Bherer et al., 2017b). As impartial actors, they are deemed to avoid using practices that would bias the process in favor of a particular party or option (Moore, 2012). However, in France, the invention of the guarantor develops and consolidates the commitment for impartiality that started with the creation of the CNDP (Participant 54). This choice exemplifies how France typically develops public participation: Legislation defines very general norms without promulgating participatory design; some guides can be published by public authorities, but it is appointed individuals with special status who are responsible for disseminating public participation norms and knowledge through their monitoring (Participants 45 and 40, March 2, 2014). Being appointed and trained by the CNDP, these individuals benefit from its credibility to serve as impartial actors (Participant 52). Overall, the invention of the guarantor encourages proponents to directly implement the participatory process themselves.
Discussion and Conclusion
Based on an exploratory study of the BAPE and the CNDP, this article seeks to better theorize the interactions of IBPPs with other actors in the public participation field and the coordinating role played by IBPPs in field evolution dynamics. This coordinating role is identified with participation organizations in democratic-innovations studies. As autonomous public agencies, however, IBPPs have resources to sustain themselves and have an impact on the field. They can pursue the explicit objectives of promoting and implementing public participation, that is, play a coordinating role. The previous sections used a narrow lens to examine how each IBPP influences its respective field. A comparison of the mechanisms that enable each IBPP to influence the population of its respective field and each field’s institutional infrastructure can broaden the scope for further study of the contributions of IBPPs.
First, both the BAPE and the CNDP have strongly influenced the development of the participation industry. This is undoubtedly one of their most important impacts. Once these IBPP processes became well established and were associated with legislation and rules on how to implement public participation, public and private proponents needed to adapt to this new context by hiring participation firms (or in certain cases, developing their own participation expertise). As a result, during IBPP-organized public debate or public hearing processes in both Quebec and France, participation firms now offer project proponents a variety of support services such as coaching, legal advice, writing accessible documents, simulating participatory forum contexts, and organizing and facilitating meetings with citizens. The specific context of the implementation of the public debate process in France has also led to the development of participatory services dedicated to it. The CNDP subcontracts implementation to firms that have gradually become recognized as specialists in public debate and who, in turn, subcontract some aspects of the process to smaller firms. In short, both the CNDP and the BAPE have been responsible for the development of participation services, which, in turn, has led to professionalization and specialization in the field.
This development is also reflected in the field itself at the level of its population. The collaboration not only between participation firms and project proponents but also between the CNDP and participation firms in the case of France reinforced a legitimized organizational model in public participation, that of the delegation of the implementation of a participatory process to a third-party organization. The proponents most involved in projects that request environmental impact assessments have chosen to directly hire full-time PPPs rather than delegating public participation tasks to a private firm. Some, like the Hydro-Québec power utility or the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) rail network in France, now have entire services for organizing and monitoring participatory processes (Participants 31, 33, 46, and 47, respectively, November 19, 2013, March 4, 2014, March 7, 2014, and November 13, 2013; see also Simard, 2006; Ballan & Dziedzicki, 2016). Even if the organizational internalization of public participation exists in some major public or private proponents, the observed trend is the delegation model, which allows for third-party participatory service providers.
Both the CNDP and the BAPE also contribute to the creation of several informal norms for public participation design and implementation, which have led both project proponents and participation firms to adopt new practices. Recommendations included in public reports issued by the IBPPs generated this process of standardization and learning. The publicity for and the repetition of certain recommendations, the necessity of the proponent to justify its decision following a public report (in France), or the obligation to follow a recommendation (when adopted as a government decree in Quebec) led participation firms to recommend a pre-consultation stage and a follow-up committee to proponents. This process is similar to developing jurisprudence in a common law context: The repetition of recommendations over time eventually establishes norms. This process has several concrete effects in both cases. First, it brings proponents and participation firms to use more open community dialogue arrangements. Public reports criticized proponents for their lack of interaction with citizens, suggested adding dialogue processes and pre-consultation tools earlier in the development of a given project, and requested follow-up committees—all recommendations that with time created a kind of imperative. Participation firms would anticipate this request from the IBPP concerned and thus advise proponents to preface public debate and public hearings with a dialogue process, and then subsequently carry through the process with a follow-up committee during the project’s implementation phase. This had the effect of changing the perception of public participation as a one-time public event to a process with several participatory forums, each adapted to a particular stage in a project’s implementation. Second, the gradual experimentation with these new IBPP forums familiarizes proponents with these new practices and supports participation firms in convincing proponents to also implement these practices in processes not governed by legal requirements, thereby contributing to the development of a culture of voluntary public participation among proponents. The experimentation also reinforced a trend whereby both private and public proponents have been sponsoring participatory arrangements, rather than making this solely the responsibility of public authorities. In the case of France, this shift has been made possible by the introduction of the role of the guarantor, which was also praised in the CNDP public reports. Guarantors are individuals designated by the CNDP to monitor participatory processes and ensure the quality of the citizen participation. The team of guarantors now designated and trained by the CNDP acts as an informal governance body in the public participation field. Finally, in Quebec’s case, the process of standardization of norms also involves the recognition of social acceptability as a new evaluation criterion for assessing a project: In addition to the implementation of both a participatory process prior to the execution of a project and public hearings afterward, a proponent must show the affected community’s degree of consent.
An important contribution of both IBPPs is the organizational independence and impartiality standards deriving from their organizational originality and, in the case of France, also from the role of guarantors. In both fields, impartiality is seen as an important value to build trust and confidence in public participation. Finally, in the case of Quebec, two-step public hearings have acquired a positive image in the eyes of project proponents, elected representatives at all levels of government, and civil society as a model of public participation methods. France does not yet demonstrate the same attachment to public debate, although this could be attributed to the fact that the CNDP is a relatively new organization compared with the BAPE.
Overall, the two IBPPs essentially contribute to the structuration of the institutional infrastructure of their respective fields by supporting informal institutions whereas their actions do not help create governance agents, except for guarantors in the case of France. Both IBPPs enlarge their respective fields and contribute to their institutional governance in five ways:
The legal obligation inherent in the creation of the two IBPPs and the public participation implementation rules they both endorsed pushed proponents to adapt to this new environment by hiring participation firms, which, in turn, supported the development of a participation industry and the commercialization of participation services.
The fact that the CNDP and both Quebec and French proponents very rarely internalize public participation in their own organizations has crystallized an organizational model whereby participation process implementation is delegated to a third-party organization.
The norms enacted and disseminated by both the BAPE and the CNDP via their public reports foster the establishment of informal norms for public participation design. The repetitive and high-profile character of the recommendations made by the two IBPPs and the necessity for proponents in France to justify their decisions once a public report has been published have gradually created new prerequisites. This process of recognition is enhanced in Quebec when government transforms some recommendations into formal decrees. In France, the same process of standardization through public reports has led to experimentation, followed by the legal recognition of an informal governance body via the role of guarantor.
The presence and functioning of both the BAPE and the CNDP as novel organizations in public participation as well as the involvement of the CNDP in experimenting with guarantors has legitimized organizational autonomy and the value of impartiality in public participation.
For the BAPE, the repetitive and high-profile character of the two-step public hearing process has generated enthusiasm for this participatory method among civil society, citizens, and proponents.
In sum, the impact of the CNDP and the BAPE on their respective fields is due to the changes they can induce directly or indirectly in proponents. The legal framework in which IBPPs operate gives them legitimacy and the power to act. Their practices and experiments are repeated to such an extent that they become progressively recognized as a new principle of action, a model, or a prerequisite for the public participation process. The publicity surrounding their actions creates an accountability context that exerts pressure on proponents. This process leads to the development of a participation industry that helps proponents become accustomed to the new institutional context. In turn, the progressive intensity of the interactions between IBPPs, proponents, and participation firms over time supports a burgeoning and mainly informal institutional infrastructure in the field.
A final point to address is the degree of the respective contributions of these IBPPs at the field level. The presence of the two IBPPs helps to create convergence around norms and rules, even if their coordinating effect cannot have the same impact for every member and subsector in their respective fields. The public participation field in both Quebec and France is characterized by multiple local contexts, creating in field theory terms “discretion for organizations in their local contexts to modify practices, and misalignment of field boundaries creates openness to alternative logics” (Purdy & Gray, 2009, p. 373). This is especially true for the myriad of participation processes that exist at the local level, which are framed by laws and rules outside the sphere of either the CNDP or the BAPE (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018; Bherer et al., 2017b). The fact that the CNDP was created at a time when a participatory shift had already emerged at the local level also limited its influence (by comparison, the BAPE was born at the beginning of the participatory shift in Quebec). Furthermore, other participation organizations were also well positioned at the local level in France (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018); the same is true of Montréal in Quebec with its board of public consultation, which has had an important influence within its own institutional context.
The influence of the BAPE and the CNDP is, first and foremost, in the context of megaprojects and proponents that have considerable capacity and resources. Sometimes, participation firms that operate in proximity to the two IBPPs can also be present in other subfields of public participation and contribute what they have learned from their respective association with the CNDP or the BAPE. The differentiation among subfield niches means that innovations are likely to diffuse to some subfields but not to others, a scenario particularly true in a field characterized by a strong logic of commercialization and competition (Zietsma et al., 2017, p. 48). Both the Quebec and French IBPPs have undergone a dual commercialization process in the past decade—one of specialization of participation firms in terms of the public policy sector, types of facilities, and so on, and one of diversification and proliferation of organizations initiating participatory arrangements. The latter includes public authorities, as well as schools, hospitals, universities, unions, and so on. This trend has also been observed in the United States by Lee (2015). This has created opportunities for new firms encouraged to enter the field in the participatory boom, and for participation firms to create new niches with their own institutional logic. However, as this article shows, both the BAPE and the CNDP appear as benchmarks and contribute to a trend of significant convergence and general alignment in the field.
In sum, even if IBPPs cannot be expected over time to retain the same degree of influence in all the subfields of public participation, such as the environment and megaproject sectors, the contributions of the two IBPPs studied are direct. Although the scale of impact is more diffuse in terms of sharing general norms and principles related to participatory practices, this is still a substantial contribution for the understanding of the evolution and dynamics that align norms and practices in a field like public participation. In general, by exploring two similar cases, this exploratory research article has shown the important role IBPPs play in the overall logics of public participation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), grant 435-2012-1024.
