My name is Soren Lund, and I'm going to talk to you today about participation in environmental planning. I teach at the University of Roskilde, which is quite far from where we stand now. Today, we're standing in front of the Danish parliament. What you see in the building behind me. And just in front of us, we have an exposition where we celebrate the hundred years of a female's right to voting in Denmark. And this has got something to do with the subject that I'm going to talk to you about today, Participation. My own background is from development studies and working with environmental planning in developing countries for many years both as a practitioner and as a researcher, sorry. And what I would like to talk to you about today is why it is important for engineers to think about people. People play a role in all the environmental management systems that you could be possibly working on in your respective countries and places of work. And in the social sciences, we call people, we talk of them as social actors or, stakeholders. We have many names for them. But, any system, if we talk about an environmental management system such as a sewage system here in Copenhagen, we have sewage systems all over. Now, you have people using these systems. You have people make, responsible for maintenance. You have people, the engineers who work on putting them in place, and the people working in the municipalities, making decisions about what we can afford, and so on. So you cannot think of a technological system without people. When you work with people, bringing people into your design, you need to think about what admitting factors and there, there is a number of dimensions that we need to think about. The third thing is, why do you need to take people in they're there, but how are they there? So participation, why do you want them in? Do you want them to help you make your project more effective, or is it because they have a right to be there? Now once you've been thinking about that, and that may be something that your employer has already designed out for you. It's part of your terms of reference. But also, it might be something that you can suggest. And then you have to make that into practice by saying who is actually in here? And how will they participate? With what will they participate? In which activities will they be participating? And how do we do that? There are two basic paradigms that actively guide the thinking that I've been meeting and that you will be meeting in your professional life. One is a strategy where you actually have your idea about what is going to be done. And you want this to be done as effectively as possible. So you can call this a management strategy and you have the that having participated makes your project become more successful. It enhances the people's commitment. It creates maybe what you call ownership to the efforts and activities that you're trying to design to the system. So that's one way of looking at it. Other people might look at it as a strategy. It's a strategy of empowering the weak or creating social justice and your job as a professional engineer is to figure out what the policy situation is. Do you need to take this political strategy into account or is it purely instrumental? Whatever definition that you may find that you have to work with or come up with there are some common features that you would always find in whatever planning factors that could be called participatory, and the first one is the emphasis on ownership. Ownership of the stakeholders, ownership of the social actors that are involved in the system. And in order to do that, a second must is that you think of involving people in all stages of your planning process. From the very start of identifying the problem through the design of the actual solutions into the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation and finally maybe redesigning the project. The second main features to acknowledge that, particularly when you are in countries different from your own, what you know your own culture, norms and so on. And if you come into a different country you must be aware, try actively to find out what are the norms, and what are the cultural practices of that country? Acknowledge the knowledge that exists about how practices are done, and respect the institutions that are already in place. Institutions such as rules making institutions, boards, and maybe informal leaders and so on that need to be taken in to the process in order to do it. The third feature that is common to all is the emphasis on dialogue, on communication, two-way or multi-way communication. Negotiation of readings of the situation, the collaboration and the building up of work relations to a number of different stakeholders that are always involved in this kind of planning process. This also means playing different roles not just the role of the technical expert, but also the role of the facilitator.
