Public participation in the decision-making chain of hydrogen pipelines: Mapping the preference-regulation gap

Public participation is widely regarded as a key element of procedural justice in energy transitions. However, it remains unclear how participation should be designed in practice to correspond to citizens’ expectations regarding when participation should occur and which decisions they wish to influence. This article combines survey data from Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands ( N = 3000) with a comparative legal analysis of hydrogen pipeline governance. The study investigates when along the decision-making chain citizens wish to participate, which types of decisions they wish to influence, and whether the legal framework reflects these preferences. The results show that willingness to participate increases towards the end of the decision-making chain, reaching its highest levels when respondents are affected. At the same time, respondents indicate only weak differentiation between decision types. Correlation analyses further show that preferences for influencing different decision types are strongly associated with willingness to participate at all stages of the decision-making chain, suggesting a broadly distributed participation orientation rather than stage-specific expectations. The legal analysis shows that participation opportunities in all three countries are mainly concentrated at the project approval stage. While this corresponds to citizens' higher willingness to participate when affected, many strategic and planning decisions are taken earlier in the decision-making chain with limited public participation. This reveals a preference-regulation gap between citizens' broadly distributed preferences regarding which decisions they wish to influence and institutional arrangements that locate participation primarily after key decisions have already been made.