Learning from France: using public deliberation to tackle infrastructure planning issues

This paper examines the practice in France since the 1990s in working towards decisions on major infrastructure. Whilst in some European countries the drive since that time has been to press faster decision-making and deregulation, in France the response to difficulties in progressing large infrastr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International planning studies 2016-10, Vol.21 (4), p.329-347
Main Author: Marshall, Tim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Area planning & development
Citizen participation
Decision analysis
Democracy
Infrastructure
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper examines the practice in France since the 1990s in working towards decisions on major infrastructure. Whilst in some European countries the drive since that time has been to press faster decision-making and deregulation, in France the response to difficulties in progressing large infrastructure schemes was to move to more deliberative approaches, both at the project level and in relation to environmental issues as a whole. The paper considers these approaches alongside the growing literature on deliberative democracy, particularly that on deliberative systems. It is suggested that there is much scope to learn from the accumulated experience in these fields, which could help to provide a more considered, open and pluralist approach to infrastructure decisions, genuinely taking account of all alternatives, as against the tendency to move to a more demand driven and limited democracy approach which has been promoted in England and Wales in the UK and to a certain extent at EU level as well.
ISSN:1356-3475
1469-9265
DOI:10.1080/13563475.2016.1140021