Engagement in the Digital Age: Navigating the Technical and Ethical Debates Around Participatory Technologies in Environmental Decision-Making

Abstract

Effective engagement is key for improving environmental decision-making processes to promote more sustainable and equitable outcomes. However, whether engagement achieves its goals is highly variable and context-dependent, and there are still unanswered questions regarding the benefits of digital tools and their effectiveness at addressing the goals of engagement. While digital technologies are often promoted for enhancing democratic participation, there are increasing concerns about their potential to create and enhance barriers to inclusive decision-making. These issues became increasingly urgent during the COVID-19 pandemic which placed technology-related disparities into the spotlight. In addition, prominent existing theories for understanding engagement outcomes in environmental management have not been explicitly tested within digital contexts, and so it is unclear to what extent they can be used to guide digital engagement processes. As such, there is currently an evidence gap in understanding the benefits and pitfalls of digital tools for engagement, and how factors known to shape effective engagement might operate differently in digital and remote environments. In order to address this gap, we present findings from interviews conducted with practitioners working in UK public, private and third sector organisations. Our findings reveal a range of empirically-driven insights into the technical and ethical debates around digital tools and their effectiveness at promoting accessible and inclusive engagement, high quality social interaction, place-based decision-making, and more trustworthy and credible outcomes. Our results suggest that although current theories for engagement hold for the digital age, the explanatory factors take on new dimensions in digital compared to in-person situations. Drawing on the empirical results, we make novel contributions to current engagement theory to increase its relevance and applicability in the digital age. We then leverage our empirical and theoretical insights to produce evidence-led recommendations for environmental practitioners to improve engagement processes in digital contexts.

Keywords: Engagement, digital, decision-making, practitioners, theory, United Kingdom