Evaluating Participatory Processes in Water and Environmental Policymaking: Framework and Applications

Our intervention will draw from 20 years of experience as researchers supporting the evaluation of participatory processes in policymaking in the field of water and environmental governance. We will detail the principles and theoretical framework that we are using, as well as case studies in two countries. The theoretical framework is part of the CoOPLAGE approach, developed by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners from Montpellier (France) and beyond (Hassenforder & Ferrand, 2024). CoOPLAGE is the French acronym for “Coupling Open and Participatory Tools to Let Actors Adapt for Environmental Management”. The main assumption underlying evaluation in the CoOPLAGE approach is that evaluation should support citizens and other actors when making decisions in a policy-process. We will argue that 12 principles can be applied for evaluation to support the transparency and accountability of public policies: useful, participative, subjective, early, reflexive, adaptive, fixed, open, simple, endogenous, mixed and plural. After presenting this theoretical framework, we will illustrate its application in two cases. In the Drôme region in France, citizens participated in the participatory process and in its evaluation towards the revision of the river basin management plan. In Tunisia, more than 4000 citizens participated in the elaboration of integrated territorial management plans in 6 rural territories. The evaluation of this process raised challenges in terms of numbers of people involved, diversity of data collected, multiplicity of evaluation objectives, etc. Our intervention will highlight the challenges and lessons learnt from these experiences.