Transformative Participation, Environmental Justice, and Effective Agrobiodiversity: a Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Today’s environmental governance processes increasingly include some form of participation. Participation in environmental governance is broadly advocated for by both researchers and practitioners, as it is generally assumed to lead to more environmental effectiveness. However, a decade of empirical research on participation in environmental governance failed to establish causal links between participation and higher environmental quality. If we are to strengthen participation as a policy goal, the concept has to be rethought, both from a political and a methodological perspective. The question to address therefore is not if participation in environmental governance produces effective results, but under which conditions it does. Borrowing from contemporary thinking on transformative participation in the development literature, it is argued in this paper that these conditions can be found by adopting a coherent normative stance, one that refocuses participation on issues of justice, empowerment and democracy. The working hypothesis of this paper is that, through its recent developments, environmental justice presents an excellent candidate for such a normative framework. By combining Nancy Fraser’s ‘parity of participation’ approach with empirical literature on participation and effectiveness in biodiversity/environmental governance, this paper outlines a research framework searching for the confluence of normative claims in favor of the empowerment of participants, and an instrumental approach to environmental effectiveness. The framework is tested on 10 cases of community-based agrobiodiversity initiatives in Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), justice-relevant conditions to participation are identified, which have contributed to improve agrobiodiversity outcomes. Control over the supply chain, autonomy from externally produced inputs, financial stability, farmer’s self-determination, diversification of knowledge systems, community-based management, and network closure all impact the capacity of community-based action for agrobiodiversity