3.3 Green governance needs citizens

The term ‘good governance’ implies that ‘ordinary people’ will be involved in deciding what to do, trying to make it happen, and deciding whether it has happened (debate, implementation, monitoring). But what, in practical terms, might citizen involvement in the governance of an issue such as climate change mean? Citizen involvement in decisions and actions can mean anything from filling in a questionnaire to joining a demonstration to sitting on a committee. One helpful approach is Arnstein's ‘ladder of citizen participation’(Figure 6). On the bottom rungs are well-known and long-practised techniques for keeping the public informed; on the top rungs, power has been handed over to the public.

Figure 6 Arnstein's ladder of participation: most decision making gets stuck half-way up (Arnstein, 1969).

Most commentators would say that there is a rather utopian feel to the higher rungs of the ladder of participation, and in the developed world there is little evidence of decisions being ceded by the state to citizens. In less-developed countries there are cases where the higher rungs are being reached, partly because governments have failed to deliver, and international NGOs and agencies are leapfrogging the state to give funds to communities to deliver sustainability on the ground.