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.

Co-production, the collaborative involvement of governments and citizens in public service delivery, plays a crucial role in enhancing public service quality and accountability, promoting civic awareness and satisfaction, and co-creating public value (Ostrom, 1996; Loeffler & Bovaird, 2016; Cepiku st al., 2022; Jaspers & Tuurnas, 2023; Schiff, 2025).

Existing literature identifies government initiatives as key drivers of co-production (Jakobsen, 2013; Torfing et al., 2024). Prior studies have examined how institutional structures (e.g., political opportunity openness, formal regulations) and organizational arrangements (e.g., administrative compatibility, officials’ support, and representative bureaucracy) influence co-production (Ostrom, 1996; Riccucci et al., 2016; O’Brien, 2017; Alonso et al., 2019; Yu & Gerber, 2025). Policy, as a tangible manifestation of governmental priorities and resource commitments, offers a more direct and actionable lever for shaping citizen engagement compared to broader institutional or bureaucratic factors. Despite its potential, research on the policy–co-production nexus remains underdeveloped in three key areas:

1. Overreliance on experimental methods**: Studies using vignettes or lab experiments (e.g., Jakobsen, 2013; Wang & Zhang, 2023) effectively test behavioral theories but measure willingness to co-produce rather than actual behavior.

2. Policy as a mediating variable: Macro-level analyses (e.g., Porumbescu et al., 2021; Miller et al., 2023) treat policy (such as policy understanding and policy representation) as a mechanism linking other factors to co-production, leaving its independent effects underexplored.

3. Endogeneity in policy outcomes: Studies linking policy performance to co-production (e.g., Damgaard et al., 2024) face two-way causality, as citizen engagement may simultaneously drive and result from policy success.

To address these gaps, this study investigates how policy awareness influences their actual co-production behaviors. Policy awareness serves as an indicator of how effectively government intentions are communicated and internalized by the public. It also plays a key role in bridging the gap between policy implementation and behavioral change by enhancing the efficiency of information dissemination (Zhu et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019). This research further differentiates between types of policies to examine whether certain policies have stronger mobilizing effects. Specifically, we examine participatory policies, which directly encourage citizen involvement, and general policies, which focus on regulatory or technical measures. Additionally, following environmental behavior theory, we disaggregate co-production into two categories: private-sphere behaviors (e.g., waste sorting, eco-consumption) and public-sphere behaviors (e.g., reporting pollution, joining protests) (Hadler & Haller, 2011). Private-sphere actions are often habitual and self-interested, while public-sphere actions require collective efficacy and political motivation, suggesting differential policy effects. We also introduce instrumental variables to address endogeneity concerns.

Empirically, this research utilizes data from 2021 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS2021). Co-production behavior is measured following José et al. (2019), using eight indicators consolidated through factor analysis into private-sphere and public-sphere co-production dimensions. Policy awareness is measured based on respondents’ familiarity with 12 environmental policies. Control variables include self-efficacy, service demand, environmental quality, issue-specific knowledge, demographics (gender, age, education, income, residence). Self-efficacy and service demand are also tested as moderators.