Conference Agenda

Public participation is a cornerstone of democratic governance and essential for ensuring effective public administration.

The involvement of stakeholders — including citizens, civil society organizations, Non- Governmental Organizations (NGOs), local authorities, and private sector actors — enhances decision-making by incorporating different perspectives, promoting social trust, and fostering shared responsibility. This approach is particularly crucial in environmental decision-making, where balancing ecological protection, economic interests, and social well-being presents complex challenges.

This paper highlights the interplay between public participation, good administration, and environmental governance, with particular reference to the Aarhus Convention. This international treaty establishes clear rights for the public to access information, participate in decision-making, and seek justice in environmental matters. By embedding these principles, governments can ensure greater transparency, accountability, and legitimacy in policy development.

A key example illustrating this approach is the French experience of Débat Public, which has been widely used in infrastructure procedures, enriching the public decision-maker's assessment horizon through the inclusion of diverse requests and perspectives. Such an instrument of participation has the merit of ensuring a confrontation between different factors (technological, natural, and human), which often draw on competing and sometimes antagonistic public and private interests.

The Débat Public process in France is a structured and legally mandated public consultation that enables citizens, NGOs, and local authorities to raise concerns and provide input into large- scale projects, particularly those with significant environmental impacts.

One notable example of this process is the public consultation surrounding the construction of the Flamanville nuclear power plant.

The Débat Public for Flamanville allowed for the inclusion of a wide array of voices, including environmental groups who raised concerns about the long-term ecological consequences of nuclear energy.

The process was instrumental in addressing these concerns, incorporating improvements in safety protocols, and proposing solutions for better waste management practices. Despite the project moving forward, the participation process ensured that various stakeholder interests were considered, promoting transparency and a deeper understanding of the broader social, environmental, and economic impacts.

In this context, the Débat Public aligns with the principles of the Aarhus Convention by ensuring public access to information, enabling meaningful participation in environmental decision-making, and fostering accountability. The process not only improved the quality of the decision but also contributed to greater legitimacy and trust in the policy-making process. Through such examples, it is evident that well-structured public participation mechanisms like the Débat Public play a crucial role in ensuring that infrastructure projects balance the interests of all stakeholders while promoting sustainable development. This method underscores the importance of integrating diverse perspectives to achieve better governance and policy outcomes in environmental matters.

By analyzing this case, the paper offers insights into how integrating the Aarhus Convention's principles with participatory governance models can enhance environmental decision-making. Strengthening these practices contributes to improved public service delivery, sustainable development, and more resilient democratic institutions.

A few years have now elapsed since, with Directives (EU) No. 2018/2001 and No. 2019/944, energy communities were introduced into the European regulatory landscape. These were established to ensure a different organisation of the energy market (renewable and non-renewable), with the aim of strengthening the Union’s energy security and pursuing economic, social, and environmental benefits not limited solely to the members of the community.

Indirectly, energy communities may be an extraordinary catalyst for the direct participation of citizens in activities of general interest, primarily the energy supply of the community, but more broadly the shared management of the territory. This very participatory dimension, which embraces a bottom-up approach fostering, in a perspective of full subsidiarity, the organised initiative of citizens in collaboration with local authorities, ought to constitute the deepest foundation of the communities themselves.

Nevertheless, observation of reality demonstrates that this phenomenon is struggling to take off. The Italian case study reveals that, in fact, the spontaneous participation of citizens, small and medium-sized enterprises, and local authorities encounters several impediments to its development.

At least three categories of obstacles to the development of energy communities can be identified. The first has an ideological background: public-private partnerships suffer from certain biases due to the absence of mutual trust between private and public actors; from this perspective, a change in mentality in public-private relations is necessary to overcome the antagonism typical of past public administration. Secondly, communities face obstacles of a technical and economic nature, as the scarcity of energy plants and infrastructures limits the proliferation of these entities; the distribution network is already overloaded, and there is a lack of available space to build infrastructures that are often very costly. Thirdly, there are still obstacles of a legal and regulatory nature: these not only concern the complexity of certain legal provisions, which prevent the broadening of entry into communities for professional operators, but above all, it is very difficult to navigate the bureaucratic phase of project implementation. Furthermore, the most appropriate legal instrument to ensure the optimal functioning and organisation of an energy community entities is not yet clear.

This paper aims to critically describe such hurdles, attempting to identify the most appropriate solutions, particularly from a legal standpoint. It is necessary to consider what measures can facilitate the entry of new citizens and enterprises into communities, while ensuring a balance in the management and control of the community by public and private entities.

Moreover, further untapped potential of energy communities may emerge, boosting citizen participation in the provision of essential public services for the local context. Indeed, despite having originated as entities within the energy market, communities could in the future play—from a broader perspective—a primary role in territorial governance, representing the ideal and physical place in which to establish a fruitful dialogue between authorities and citizens in identifying the most appropriate policies and public choices for the local community and its interests.