Addressing Climate Change Through Public Participation in Practice

Just and equitable climate change action demands collective decision-making. In response, academics, practitioners, community leaders, and others have called for public participation in order to include previously unheard voices in climate-related decisions. Public participation refers to a diverse set of activities and methods that involve members of the public in decision-making: At a minimum, actors initiate two-way communication to gather public views and values on an issue to inform climate policymaking. Researchers, funders, government agencies, and the private sector are increasingly answering calls for public participation in climate-related decisions by putting ideas and ideals of public participation into practice.

However, public participation is not a panacea to cure all climate governance woes. Public participation does not yet play a major role in private or public climate policymaking, nor has its most appropriate role in climate policymaking been determined. Further, evidence-based best practices for conducting public participation activities have yet to be systematically synthesized. Therefore, this research topic aims to generate a repository of actionable knowledge for designing, conducting, and evaluating public participation related to climate change decision-making to move public participation from a murky ideal to an effective tool.

The scope of this research topic includes but is not limited to case studies, innovations, empirical reflections, and methodological advancements that capture how public participation in climate change decision-making is and can be designed, implemented, and evaluated in practice. We encourage all authors to be explicit about their work’s context and the transferability of their findings and reasoning across other contexts. We encourage any article type on or related to the following themes:

● Case studies that detail and analyze specific public participation activities related to climate change decision-making.

● Theoretical works or methodological studies that address issues of transferring public participation practices across contexts.

● Empirical studies or practical reflections on tailoring public participation activities to specific climate-related topics or audiences.

● Empirical studies or practical reflections on designing public participation for climate change-related topics.

● Empirical studies or practical reflections on effectively using the outputs of public participation on climate-related topics.

● Methodological advancements for evaluating the success, limitations, and values of public participation.

● Innovations for including public participation in governance systems for effective climate-related decision-making.

Keywords: Public engagement, climate change, climate-related decision-making, public engagement in governance systems

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.