The new centrality of “the public” to the governance of science and technology has been accompanied by a widespread use of public consultation mechanisms designed to elicit from citizens relevant opinions on technoscientific matters. This paper explores the configuration of legitimate constituencies in two such exercises: the UK “GM Nation?” public debate on food biotechnology, and a Swedish “Transparency Forum” on the risks of mobile telephones. We consider the apparently paradoxical combination in these two examples of a tendency to produce static images of the public with a high valuation of mobility—of citizens and their opinions—as the key outcome of deliberation. We discuss the organizers' careful delineation of a distinction between “stakeholders” and the “general public,” and their aversion to any sort of “eventfulness” in public deliberations. Finally, we introduce the classical notion of the “idiot”—the individual who minds exclusively his or her own private affairs— and argue for the need to develop a new vocabulary to evaluate the politics of “listening to the public.

An extensive literature examines political or green consumption, attending to how people make sense of their consumption relative to norms of individual responsibility and pro-environmental behaviour. Similarly, a small but growing literature addresses green governmentality, focusing on new governance forms and responsibilization processes. These two strands seldom meet, resulting in poor understanding of the links between consumption governance and people's sense-making and actions relative to the moral imperative of being 'responsible consumers'. We address this weakness by juxtaposing these two strands of literature, improving our understanding of the processes of responsibilization and some of their consequences. We argue that, to understand the effects of this form of governance, we must realize that subjects are not inevitably positioned and predetermined by a hegemonic discourse. At the same time, we must acknowledge that responsibilization processes give rise to compliance and to a range of ambivalences and forms of resistance.

This paper explores the conditions for taking the social dimension into consideration when trying to aim for increased sustainability through activities organized in projects. Among the three commonly accepted pillars of sustainable development -economic, ecological and social -the social dimension is often the most vague and least explicit in practical attempts to shape sustainable development. The aim with this study is to explore the role of organizing in shaping the balance between the pillars. The two cases examined are projects explicitly related to sustainable development goals set by the national government or parliament and implemented by other actors. The cases concern two topics: food production and electromagnetic fi elds. On the basis of relevant organizational dimensions and case analyses, the paper shows how the organization of sustainability shapes the ways in which the projects articulate the social dimension. This leads to practical advice for organizing new projects in the future.

Environmental problems that cross national borders are attracting increasing public and political attention; regulating them involves coordinating the goals and activities of various governments, which often presupposes simplifying and standardizing complex knowledge, and finding ways to manage uncertainty. This article explores how transboundary environmental problems are dealt with to render complex issues governable. By discussing oil pollution in the Baltic Sea and the gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, we elucidate how boundaries are negotiated to make issues governable. Three processes are found to be particularly relevant to how involved actors render complex issues governable: complexity reduction, construction of a spatial identity for an issue, and ascription of capabilities to new or old actor constellations. We conclude that such regulation is always provisional, implying that existing regulation is always open for negotiation and criticism.

From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as ‘legitimately concerned’ stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and exclusion as well as de/legitimization of specific actors and concerns. We propose a flexible framework for untangling the various components which in different ways influence the fine-grained power dynamics at play in such events, particularly focusing on the enactments of stakeholders that result from the situated interplay of rationales and infrastructures for participation. The guiding ambitions for the framework is for it to be applicable to a broad range of subfields of environmental planning and governance while avoiding the analytical risks of strong normative commitments from the outset regarding whether participation per se is good or bad, and offering some novel insights into the investigated cases. Throughout the paper, we utilize two case studies, from urban planning and fisheries management, to test the analytical productivity of the proposed framework while also searching for cues for the further development of the framework itself.

In this paper we discuss whether environmental impact assessment (EIA) can serve as an arena for including citizens in the decisionmaking process. Through a case study of a proposed extension of a regional airport in Sweden, the role of EIA, and to what degree different actors and arguments influenced the decision, is analysed. It is found that there are serious problems concerning public participation when it comes to projects which extend beyond the local level and which play an important part in the regional economy. In these cases there is a risk, despite the aims of EIA, that the process will be characterised by public exclusion rather than by public involvement.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of 'power' and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using 'power' as an allcovering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.

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