Page 206 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

16 Participation: Empowerment for Sustainable Development 189

critical social learning, which is essential for the necessary transformation processes
towards a sustainable society (Siebenhüner and Arnold 2007).
Building on this involves evaluating the legitimacy, effectiveness and efficiency
of forms of participation for sustainability as well as developing innovative method-
ological designs – also regarding new media and communication technologies. In
the differentiated, pluralistic and transnational (global) society of today, our view
should not be limited to the political space and concrete decision-making processes.
We need to widen the scope to analyse and develop participation and cooperation in
other social contexts such as education, economics and science. The mass media
also play an important role in structuring content in the public communication arena
and by broadcasting information create the conditions for the participation of larger
numbers of the population and of a greater variety of different social actors. In addi-
tion to the analysis and development of sustainability-oriented participation meth-
ods on a micro-sociological level, there is a need to identify the possibilities and
limits of an institutional integration of participative activities on a meso-level and to
observe social-material sustainability effects on the macro-level. Granted the neces-
sity of continuing the just begun cultural evolution towards a participation, coopera-
tion and sustainability oriented society, there is still much work to be done in
research and development in the participative sustainability communication field.
More analysis and more impulses are needed to supplement the dominant logic of
hierarchically-based knowledge transfer and decision-making with a new logic
based on functionally specific participative and cooperative knowledge discourse
and decision-making. However, we do not have to start from zero; especially
in democratic societies, sustainability-oriented participatory approaches can be
developed out of existing cultures of participation.

The Requirements of Participation in Complex Societies

The discussion about participation, or more precisely political participation, is not
of course a new one. The history of democracy as a form of social (self-) organiza-
tion can be viewed as the history of increasing possibilities for more and more
people to participate in collective processes of opinion-making, formulating political
objectives and decision-making. In representative democracies conventional par-
ticipation takes place mainly through elections, while unconventional participation
on the other hand is found – and is guaranteed by the right to freedom of speech – in
demonstrations and protests.
At the same time there have been, and still are, repeated demands for a further
democratisation of democracy. Extended possibilities for participation and a
greater involvement of citizens in collective decision-making processes is consid-
ered essential to reduce the possibility of alienation from the political system, or
political disaffection, to find viable, socially acceptable and accepted solutions. In
particular, in many countries since the 1960s there have been numerous academic
debates and practical activities, all of which can be subsumed under the heading of