Procedural Fairness and Expected Outcome Evaluations in the Public Acceptance of Sustainability Policymaking: A Case Study of Multiple Stepwise Participatory Programs to Develop an Environmental Master Plan for Sapporo, Japan

Abstract

Measures of sustainability-related participatory programs vary according to social and cultural contexts. Thus, this study proposed a stepwise participatory program in which stakeholders and randomly chosen citizens (citizen panels) were repeatedly and sequentially involved, and the citizen panels discharged discrete functions through all the planning stages. Procedural and outcome fairness was focal to the evaluation of the participatory program because these criteria are widely deemed essential for public acceptance. Evaluation by nonparticipants was imperative because of the limited number of participants, but sustainability plans affect and mandate the cooperation of the general public. Therefore, this study undertaken during the revision of the city of Sapporo’s environmental master plan compared evaluations of nonparticipants with those of participants from three stages of the stepwise participatory program applying backcasting scenario workshops. A two-wave mailout survey was administered to test two hypotheses: (a) workshop participants would evaluate the acceptance, process, outcome, and antecedent factors more positively than nonparticipants, and (b) procedural fairness and evaluation of expected outcomes would affect acceptance. The results supported these hypotheses. Procedural fairness was associated with acceptance most robustly and consistently. The study’s primary contribution to the extant literature entails accumulating empirical evidence on stepwise participatory programs.