Empirical research on public and stakeholder involvement in environmental policy, planning and governance has produced numerous individual case studies with often conflicting evidence on ‘what works’. In order to allow for integration of case-based experiences and thereby to cumulate knowledge, we compiled the worldwide first comprehensive database of published case studies on public environmental decision-making. It comprises 572 well-documented cases in 24 Western de-mocracies between 1882 and 2011.
We elaborate on the methods by which we compiled this database over a several-year process of searching, refining and case delimiting. We discuss biases such as representativeness.
Mapping participatory environmental governance across space and time, we present statistics on the policy issues covered in the cases; their duration and country; the nature of participation (con-sultation, dialogue, citizen involvement); and initiation (permitting, policy implementation or ‘bot-tom-up’). We discuss the value and limitations of this database to the wider research community on (environmental) governance.
