Negotiation & participation

Strategic environmental management analysis (SEMA) moves away from the impression that we would all be collaborating jointly to solve environmental problems to the more realistic view of some, environmentally motivated social actors having to act strategically to make other actors change environmentally detrimental behaviour and projects. As it adopts this assymetric model of environmental management action, SEMA creates a need to account for how environmentally motivated actors interact with other actors, an interaction that determines environmental outcomes. This leads to invest in two fields of research and practice.

• Negotiation research provides a relevant framework and abundant theoretical resources for studying and guiding such strategic interaction.
• Public participation has become a widely shared field of policy experimentation and research to transform interactions about environmental issues.