Meeting empowerment: How styles of discursive frames vary across participatory settings

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been a resurgence of public participation in participatory settings. Such participatory processes are often long and arduous, and sometimes involve seemingly endless meetings of deliberation between various stakeholders and citizens before a policy decision or plan of action is made. While there is much known about the social forces that constrain how people deliberate in meetings, there is more to know about the discursive frames that actors use to deliberate and legitimize in these settings. To explore this, I draw on an analysis of a debate in a small coastal town surrounding a dam removal across two municipally sponsored spheres: listening sessions and select board meetings. I found that people debated the same issue differently across different contexts using different discursive frames, and the frames developed in the listening sessions were not transferable to select board meetings, the site where a policy decision was imminent. To explain this, I analyze how a meeting's empowerment in a given participatory process influences which styles of discursive frames actors use and are valued during deliberation. Understanding this provides a piece to the larger puzzle of what constrains and enables deliberative discourse in the 21st century.