Abstract
Public participation plays a central role in sustainability transitions and addressing complex environmental challenges. However, governments face multiple challenges in enabling meaningful public participation and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Such processes tend to be constrained by legal frameworks, institutional rigidity, fragmented infrastructures, and limited capacity to facilitate multi-stakeholder dynamics. Drawing on insights from literature on transition governance and public participation, this article explores how public participation systems and infrastructures can be shifted towards what is needed in the context of transitions. The concept of infrastructuring is proposed as an analytical and design-orienting tool. Infrastructuring, here understood as an ongoing process of building social practice, could help identify the invisible elements, capacities, tools, and dynamics needed within the process of construction, maintenance, and adaptation of participatory systems. It can support the development of strategic design interventions to improve multi-stakeholder collaboration for navigating sustainability transitions.
Keywords
sustainability transition, public participation, infrastructuring, governance
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1272
Citation
Valladares, M., Pettersen, I.N., and Keitsch, M.M. (2026) Infrastructuring public participation for sustainability transitions, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1272
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Infrastructuring public participation for sustainability transitions
Public participation plays a central role in sustainability transitions and addressing complex environmental challenges. However, governments face multiple challenges in enabling meaningful public participation and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Such processes tend to be constrained by legal frameworks, institutional rigidity, fragmented infrastructures, and limited capacity to facilitate multi-stakeholder dynamics. Drawing on insights from literature on transition governance and public participation, this article explores how public participation systems and infrastructures can be shifted towards what is needed in the context of transitions. The concept of infrastructuring is proposed as an analytical and design-orienting tool. Infrastructuring, here understood as an ongoing process of building social practice, could help identify the invisible elements, capacities, tools, and dynamics needed within the process of construction, maintenance, and adaptation of participatory systems. It can support the development of strategic design interventions to improve multi-stakeholder collaboration for navigating sustainability transitions.