Land Use Policy 26 (2009) 755–762 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Local democracy implications for coastal zone management—A case study in southern Norway Katrine Soma ∗ , Arild Vatn The Norwegian University of Life Sciences, The Department of Economics and Resource Management, P.Box 5003, 1432 Ås, Norway article info Article history: Received 30 July 2008 Accepted 9 October 2008 Keywords: Public hearings Public values Coastal zone management Local level Stakeholder participation Interest groups Citizens abstract Stakeholder participation is frequently recommended to ensure that public values are taken into account in the decision-making processes. However, few attempts have been made to analyse the extent to which increasing stakeholder participation actually leads to better representation of the public values. The main aim of this study is to obtain more insights about reasons why the most frequently applied form of stake- holder participation, i.e. the public hearings, may fail in representing the general public views and values when applied at a local level. A case study was conducted on policy formulations and decision-making in the coastal zone on the island Flekkerøy in southern Norway. Local- and regional-public authorities contributed in in-depth interviews and with written documentation to inform about a comprehensive stakeholder participation process that took place in the early 1990s. The main findings include that landowner interests, and not public views and values, were legitimised during the participatory process because of: (1) the landowner’s strong local social power among inhabitants, (2) the design of the partici- patory processes favouring the landowner interests, (3) the personal relations between local landowners and public managers, and (4) the low representation of public views and values due to a problem of scale, i.e. the NIMBY syndrome. Based on our experience, we recommend improving representation of public views by changing the frequently applied participatory processes to also include citizens in addition to interest groups and experts. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction On the international agenda, stakeholder participation is rec- ommended for sustainable environmental management decisions as the best tool to handle concerns about public values, including environmental protection, social acceptability, economic viability and dependence security (including Post and Lundin, 1996; UNEP, 2004). Moreover, empowerment of local stakeholders is often seen as a best way to handle conflicts in the coastal zone (Hegarty, 1997; Clark et al., 1998; Davos, 1998). As a major task of coastal zone man- agement, the EU (2003) recommends that stakeholder interests, roles and concerns should be assessed and analysed. Through par- ticipation, managers as well as stakeholders have the possibilities to learn, educate, build trust, gain legitimacy of decisions, and thus improve decision-making processes (Irvin and Stansbury, 2004). It is insisted that the traditional top–down and ad hoc approach to coastal development has not worked, as it has resulted in confu- sion, conflicts and a lack of understanding among users (Hegarty, 1997). Thus, the needs for integrated coastal zone policies, based on ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +47 64965700; fax: +47 64965701. E-mail address: katrine.soma@umb.no (K. Soma). participatory approaches, are emphasised all over the world includ- ing Malaysia (Mokhtar and Ghani Aziz, 2003), Japan (Kawabe, 1998) and Scotland (Storrier and McGlashan, 2006). Frequently, state reforms that have opened for a wider and deeper participation of citizens at local level have been imple- mented, i.e. the decentralization process of which resources, power and tasks are transferred to lower level authorities (Smith, 2003). Governance can be described as ‘both a strong reform strategy and a particular set of initiatives to strengthen the institutions of civil society with the objective of making government more account- able, more open and transparent, and more democratic’ (Minogue, 1997). Political participation may be interpreted as ‘taking part of the process of formulation, passage and implementation of public poli- cies’ (Parry et al., 1992). Political participation can be motivated by enhancing the awareness of rights and responsibilities of citizens, holding elected representatives more accountable, or including the realm of direct action by starting with the articulation of grassroot needs and priorities and building popular forms of organisation (ibid.). A tension exists between strategic- and deliberative-democracy, implying that a distinction can be made of democracy with vot- ing, interest aggregation, constitutional rights and self-government 0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2008.10.002