How to make stakeholder participation work? Constructing legitimacy in environmental policymaking

Stakeholder participation has become a popular tool in environmental policy-making. Such participation holds the promise of fostering the legitimacy of policies and thus reducing the costs of enforcement. Legitimacy can be – and often has been – assessed from a normative tradition, by means of a fixed set of procedural or substantive criteria. From the sociological tradition, legitimacy and stakeholder participation are considered a social construct, in which it is recognized that legitimacy is not intrinsic to the process or output of participation, but instead relies on stakeholders’ perceptions of both, which is also informed by past processes and experiences. We propose a novel way of understanding and assessing environmental groups’ perceptions of legitimacy and illegitimacy, combining insights and theories from political science and history, and we apply this approach to two policy-making processes: the Dutch Climate Agreement and the Integrated Approach to Nitrogen. We found that past processes and experiences influence the perception of legitimacy in current processes. Moreover, we uncovered new participation needs that positively contribute to the perception of legitimacy and that do not yet fit within the more classic normative tradition.