Evaluation and the Environmental Democracy of European Cities

Since its early days, environmental assessment aroused high expectations about its ability to insinuate ecological rationalities into worldviews, institutions, and social practices. Besides, basic provisions for information dissemination, public participation and access to justice have been included in most environmental assessment systems. However, the actual contribution of environmental assessment to the democratization of policy making remains highly debated, yet poorly articulated in rather naive (if not entirely implicit) conceptual terms. This paper aims to broaden the theoretical perspectives on whether and how environmental assessment may foster the democratization of urban governance in Europe. The research relies on cross-fertilization with other evaluation domains, including evaluation in planning and policy and programme evaluation, with a view to expanding epistemological perspectives and to dwelling on the implications of ethics and politics. Democratization of urban governance is characterized as progress along three complementary processes: broadening environmental citizenship (with due consideration of non-humans and future generations); extending public scrutiny over policies and issues that were previously managed in purely bureaucratic or market-oriented ways; fostering authenticity by problematizing the division of evaluation labour between experts, policy makers and citizens. The alleged influence of environmental assessment is initially discussed by resorting to a typology of evaluations for democracy, which mirror well established root conceptions: the elitist, the participatory, and the deliberative. Reflections verge on a widespread tendency to keep environmental assessment within the boundaries of highly procedural, merely consultative, and mildly reactive practices. On the other hand, environmental assessment recasts a long-standing friction between claims for self-governance and calls for autocratic handling of environmental issues, against the background of controversial ethical dilemmas. It is suggested that such tensions might trigger innovation in environmental assessment theory and practice, which could prove relevant to other evaluation domains.