Does the use of ‘the public’ in some debates about environmental decision making properly reflect the different publics involved in the decision making process?

The focus of this paper is a distinction between the public-in-general and publics-in- particular. It first considers Mike Michael’s (2009) argument, focused on the practice of science, that the public-in-general is far too blunt an instrument, then it adopts Michael’s schema to the analysis of debates about environmental decision making, in order to argue that the different publics involved in this decision making might be better analysed and described in terms of their particularity. Secondly, it criticises some contributions to debates about the role of lay legal advocates in environmental decision making for relying too heavily upon a notion of the public-in-general. And thirdly, by way of enhancing their approach, it discusses the advantages of focusing upon particular publics of environmental governance