Constructing the public sphere in compromised settings: environmental governance in the Alberta forest sector.

Parkins, John R. ; Davidson, Debra J.

RECENT INTEREST IN CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN governance networks has invigorated scholarship on citizenship and democracy. Within particular policy areas, such as environmental politics in Canada, experiments in citizen participation designed to emulate a deliberative democratic format have been in evidence for at least 30 years (Berger 1977; Sadler 1977). This trend has escalated, coinciding with the devolution of state-led regulatory frameworks and the subsequent emergence of market-based and voluntary environmental management initiatives. Many of these formats are susceptible to distortion, however, due to the tremendous power enjoyed by private and state participants relative to citizen participants. Considering the growing citizen dependence on "stakeholder-based" processes as one of few opportunities to participate in decision making, greater attention to the social dynamics and the context of citizen participation within such constrained venues is warranted.

Treatments of public participation in environmental politics abound from scholars in numerous fields (e.g., see McDaniels et al. 1999; Ribot 1999; Dryzek 2000; Pellizzoni 2001). Dorcey and McDaniels (2001) identify several stages of what they call "citizen engagement in environmental management" in Canada. Starting in the late 1960s, a state-managerialist orientation translated into greater lay involvement in planning and policymaking initiatives--the prototype being the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (Berger 1977). This gave way to pluralist approaches to political participation, in which business and civil society play a more active role. Van Tatenhove and Leroy (2003) identify a similar transition in Europe. One mechanism driving the integration of market-based decision-making and civic engagement has been the success of third-party environmental performance standards (i.e., Responsible Care 14001), particularly forestry certification systems (i.e., Pan European Forest Certification, Forest Stewardship Council). These evolutions in regulation represent a societalization and marketization of environmental politics (Van Tatenhove and Leroy 2003), by constructing a postbureaucratic political terrain that brings together state, nonstate, and industry actors to establish standards to which commercial operators must adhere in exchange for "green" product labeling.

Empirical treatments of citizen participation in environmental politics, however, tend to overemphasize the positive transformative potential of such settings, with less attention to their structural constraints. Turner (2001:203) reminds us that academic ideal-types of a thriving civil society must be "tempered by a recognition that the sector is also shaped by economic conditions of competition and commercialism that may prove to be incompatible with the objectives of associational democracy." We offer a critical analysis of public advisory committees in the forest sector in Alberta, Canada, exploring both the structural constraints and the deliberative potential of this increasingly predominant mode of political engagement. Using deliberative democratic theory as our analytical lens, this paper provides insights into citizenship and contemporary environmental governance, by focusing on two key themes associated with deliberative democracy: political representation and group autonomy. We then discuss the politicization and transformative potential of these deliberative settings.

A THEORY OF PUBLIC DELIBERATION

Deliberative democratic theory is premised on a critique of more episodic forms of participation, which are increasingly limited to voting on the basis of issue "sound bites" and popularity contests. These episodic modes of participation are seen as lacking in opportunities for "debate and discussion aimed at producing reasonable, well-informed opinion in which participants are willing to revise preferences in light of discussion, new information, and claims made by fellow participants" (Chambers 2003:309). Deliberative democratic theory has flourished into an influential body of work, focusing on particular settings as well as more diffuse networks that extend throughout civil society through which individuals inform each other about matters of public interest and develop opinions on a range of issues. Whereas the public sphere was understood historically as a geographically specific and unique organism characterized by openness, inclusiveness, and free-ranging debate, contemporary notions of the public sphere are connected with the fluid dynamics of civil society. The public sphere is situated in an unmanaged (and perhaps unmanageable) complex of discourses between the state and the private lives of citizens (Habermas 1996; Fine and Harrington 2004; Goodin and Dryzek 2006). In this sense, civil society represents a constellation of public and private institutions and individuals that entrench hegemonic arrangements, whereas the public sphere represents a field where such arrangements are contested and occasionally rearranged (Mayo 1999).

Deliberative democratic theory presents a strong normative claim for the transformative potential of the public sphere that consist of multiple claims and counter-claims, arguments and counter-arguments, and the rhetorical and personal reflections of others. However, both Zwart's (2003) evaluation of deliberative processes in local government and Smith's (2001) discussion of institutional settings for public deliberation reflect a continuing need to theorize and empirically test the ways in which deliberative processes manifest.

CRITERIA FOR EFFECTIVE DELIBERATION

Several theorists have introduced various criteria for effective deliberation. Steiner et al. (2004), for example, describe multiple criteria, including: opportunity for participation by all citizens; the tendency among all participants to be open about their true intentions; critical assessment of all assertions and validity claims through orderly exchange; expression of the merits of arguments in terms of the common good; willingness to listen and respect others; and yielding to the better argument (see also Calhoun 1992; Dean 1996). Two criteria in particular that have received considerable attention include representation and autonomy, which will be the focus of our analysis.

Representation

While original formulations of the public sphere were premised upon small, relatively homogenous societies within which literacy and citizenship were accorded to privileged classes alone, effective representation in large modern societies characterized by multiculturalism and pronounced social and economic stratification poses a significant theoretical challenge. Many critics view the "public spheres" that do emerge in these contexts as reenforcing concentrations of political power, rather than encouraging critical debate. In response, theorists have identified several potential remedies. The first is characterized as the "role-playing approach," whereby civic-minded participants present the views and perspectives of other public interests that--because of a lack of power, pragmatic limits on group size or communicative deficits--are not able to participate (Goodnight 1992), including small children, future generations, other species, or the natural world.

Alternatively, proponents of the" common good approach" suggest that most sites of civic engagement amount to interest group politics, and are counterproductive to deliberation. In an effort to accommodate diverse interests, the search for a common good is lost in a cacophony of mutually exclusive claims and rights-based rhetoric. Any possibility of dialogue is lost as interests are set against one another in a zero-sum game among "fixed identity" groups (e.g., Elshtain 1995). Some studies have supported this perspective, showing that higher levels of discourse are achieved when issue polarization is low (Steiner et al. 2004). Complex environmental issues raised in the context of "stakeholder" committees tend to be reduced to a narrow set of diametrically opposed claims--jobs versus environment, tourism versus natural resource industries, growth versus conservation. The constitution of stakeholder committees along the lines of interest-based politics simply encourages "turf-protection," where environmentalist participants have a mandate to represent the concerns of certain environmental organizations, forestry industry employees feel compelled to prioritize the concerns of their coworkers and or superiors, and so on. Deliberative processes under these conditions can easily degenerate into bargaining or negotiation, and frequently come to a grinding halt. Proponents of the common good approach would limit discursive involvement to participants who possess a generalized set of interests, and are thus capable of giving balanced consideration to diverse perspectives.

As a third strategy, several authors advocate the "interest-based approach." Instead of detracting from democratic ends, interests that are anchored within distinct social spheres characterized by differing knowledge and levels of political power are seen as an essential resource for the development and functioning of democracy. Public interests being represented by a distant other (role-playing) or absorbed into aggregations of generalized public interest (common good) are viewed as grossly idealistic. Instead, the cultural embeddedness of specific actors is crucial to the deliberative process (Williams 1998; Young 2000). Young (2000) states that,

 a strong communicative democracy ... needs to draw on social
 differentiation, as a resource. A democratic process is inclusive
 not simply by formally including all potentially affected
 individuals in the same way, but by attending to the social
 relations that differently position people and condition their
 experiences, opportunities, and knowledge of the society. (P. 83).

Within the context of local-level advisory committees, an ideal form of representation would thus include Aboriginal people, community boosters, social critics, environmental advocates, and a host of other interest representatives who can fuel debate and critical reflection. In other words, participants who can represent the voice and history of their constituencies on equal footing, while maintaining a high level of trust within their constituency, are seen as having an advantage over those who claim to represent the "other" without a strong epistemic and moral link.

Autonomy

In addition to representation, an autonomous public sphere is essential to public deliberation (Benhabib 1996), which can only be assured with a strong civil society (Dean 1996). In its early European form (Habermas 1989), the public sphere was conceived as a locale for civic-minded discourse that maintained a high degree of autonomy, providing citizens with an opportunity to formulate personal opinions independent of church and state authorities. The contemporary public sphere, on the other hand, is a ubiquitous network of interaction and contestation that is located between state and corporate structures and the citizen, with multiple opportunities for coercion. As such, democratic theorists emphasize the need for an atmosphere of noncoercion and the absence of social controls that emerge "via the exercise of power, manipulation, indoctrination, propaganda, deception, expressions of mere self-interest, threats (of the sort that characterize bargaining), and attempts to impose ideological conformity" (Dryzek 2000). Theorists and practitioners have attempted to construct institutional settings whereby deliberations are as free as possible from manipulation and the steering potential of state and corporate interests. An ideal setting would include all competing discourses, including state and corporate interests, but without predetermined deference to authority or expertise.

The ability to ensure such an ideal setting in practice, however, is limited, particularly in the context of environmental issues where citizens regularly find themselves deferring to the authority of an expert (Baber and Bartlett 2005). Social dispositions (in the form of embodied dispositions and communication skills), furthermore, tend to systematically distort the public sphere by privileging certain cultural groups and socioeconomic classes (Crossley 2004). Regardless of these social dispositions, finally, there remains a tendency to defer to the hegemonic ideologies of those in power, which function as a form of manufactured cultural and political consensus, a "common sense that is in perpetual motion" (Eliasoph 1996:267), whereby the specific interests and values of a privileged few come to be seen as representative of the general interests of all citizens (Gramsci 1971). One might thus question the extent to which small group deliberations can have any transformative potential whatsoever, considering the extent to which many such proceedings are heavily influenced by state and corporate interests. As Gramsci (1971) originally formulated, however, the staying power of hegemony derives from the ability to keep internal contradictions associated with privileged ideologies concealed. As such, any deliberative opportunities for critical reflection of dominant positions and the entertainment of alternative perspectives, however small and/or fleeting, could be considered as an absolutely necessary, if not sufficient, condition for political transformation.

CASE STUDY APPROACH

In this study, we deployed several complementary research methods to support a critical inquiry into public advisory committees in Alberta's forest sector (Forester 1992; Thomas 1993). A 10-month field study involved detailed observations of the regular monthly meetings of three advisory committees, between September 2002 and June 2003. In addition to these observational data, document analysis and in-depth interviews with 21 committee members provided further insights into the role and functioning of committees. The study begins with a critical assessment of committee representation, both through an analysis of formal committee membership and observations of committee meetings, followed by a detailed examination of committee autonomy. For the latter, we deploy a research method that allows for analysis of what Eliasoph (1996) identifies as a "public-spirited moment," a discursive event within which one can find evidence of the potential for more critical and democratic influences on political debate. Her approach, which entails narrative analysis of deliberative events, captures "the way that citizens mingle and interact--civic practices that enable citizens to engage in freewheeling political conversation in everyday contexts" (1996:266). Such public-spirited moments provide evidence of group outcomes that are both discursively derived and more likely to achieve the high standard of a generalizable interest (Dryzek 1990). A representative selection of meeting deliberations, or vignettes, in three committees juxtaposes contrasting forms of committee representation, and the emergence of public spiritedness that serves to indicate the presence or the absence of group autonomy. By evaluating deliberative exchanges in terms of the dominance of certain speakers, the degree of contestation of privileged points of view, and the informational basis of arguments presented, we identify moments of public spiritedness, where personal opinions are challenged, discursively conditioned, and reoriented toward public opinion and civic mindedness.

FOREST SECTOR ADVISORY COMMITTEES IN ALBERTA

The forest industry in Alberta harvests over 23.5 million cubic meters of wood annually (Natural Resources Canada 2006) and is characterized by large-scale production and extensive foreign ownership (Pratt and Urquhart 1994; Timoney and Lee 2001). Companies lease public land on a long-term basis with responsibilities to manage for a wide range of benefits (i.e., recreation and wildlife) in return for secure access to wood fiber. Provincial policy requires companies to undertake ongoing public consultation, to which companies have responded by establishing public advisory committees. By 2001, there were 14 company-sponsored advisory committees provincewide. The basic mandate of all committees is to provide public comment and oversight to local forest planning activities (Parkins 2002).

Committees share several common contextual elements. First, the towns in which these committees are embedded are all heavily resource dependent. With populations between 5,000 and 10,000 residents, social and economic conditions are marked by high average incomes and a bimodal income distribution with high-income earners in the professional and extractive (energy, mining, and forestry) industries and low-income earners in the service industries. Committee membership in all cases is largely drawn from the former, with little effort made to include representation from the lower income levels (Parkins et al. 2001). Many residents of these communities enjoy the forest landscape for recreational activities, and common interests in forest-based livelihood and recreation infuse public representation on local advisory committees. In addition, all of the committee participants are selected by the companies themselves, on the basis of "key-stakeholder" identity (local actors viewed as having a "stake" in forestry). Some companies defined this list more broadly than others, including representatives from educational institutions, health services, and clergy. Membership has evolved over time, with new members selected through established procedures in most committees. Finally, all committees have a fairly constrained mandate, often restricted to procedural matters (e.g., identifying forestry objectives) to the exclusion of normative issues (e.g., the legitimacy of large-scale industrial forestry). This limitation is a point of contention for citizens with sharply contrasting views on forestry, explaining in part why their membership on committees tends to be lacking. This includes many environmentalists, and to a certain degree Aboriginal peoples as well. While many among the latter group share strong normative concerns regarding industrial impacts to the landbase, their consistent if not universal absence from local-level advisory committees is further attributed to their unique political position as autonomous groups with rightful yet contested claims to the land. As such, many would-be Aboriginal participants view themselves as far more than "stakeholders," and consequently refuse to offer their legitimacy to such processes.

Committee Representation

We begin with a conventional method of assessing the adequacy of representation, by examining committee membership (Table 1). Several company officials provided insights into their criteria for selection of committee members, which included primarily stated interests in environmental issues (i.e., environmental groups, educational institutions) or prior dealings with the forest company (i.e., trapper associations, back-country recreation users). The roster of all three committees, and particularly Committee C, suggests a fairly diverse array of representatives--from clergy to youth. A more thorough critique, however, shows that this apparent diversity masks the fact that the cultural and sociodemographic composition of people sitting around these tables is highly uniform--consisting of predominantly white, middle-class men (Parkins et al. 2001). Young's (2000) call for social differentiation as a crucial discursive resource, in other words, cannot be ensured simply through constituent diversification.

Of equal interest to the current analysis is the pronounced variation in the proportional representation of "common-good" versus "interest-based" representatives. Committee A, for instance, has a large proportion of common-good representatives in the form of elected officials from the Town and County, whose role is to represent the electorate, or the generalized views of local citizens. Committee B has a larger number of interest-based representatives, which includes groups such as timber contractors, unions, or trappers.

Beyond this conventional evaluation of group representation, this analysis includes observations of the outward behavior of committee members during committee meetings. Here the analytical approach is informed by Williams (1998) and others, who emphasize that representation goes beyond warming a chair in the assembly to include the representation of "voice"--the projection of embodied worldviews, ideas, and arguments into the discursive field. One method of gauging the realization of voice is to assess the frequency of "substantial discussions," a discursive event where at least two individuals orchestrate and engage in extended dialogue. Analysis of meeting transcripts reveals a small number of substantial discussions initiated by committee members, particularly in Committees A and B (Table 2). Furthermore, at many points during the observational period, substantial discussions were initiated and sustained by company officials. Within a single meeting of Committee C, for example, where data were recorded on the exact amount of time that each member contributed to committee discussions, committee members contributed approximately 13 minutes of discussion to a meeting that was 102 minutes in length. Company representatives dominated the remaining 89 minutes.

These observations are complemented by interviews with committee members. The interview statements below are taken from Committee C, which is observed in Table 2 to have a particularly poor track record of member-initiated discussions.

 There are a few voices that are ... minority views. But they're not
 well-articulated views a lot of the time. And there are only one or
 two people who share those views you know, so it's easy to
 procedurally kind of dismiss what's going on. Or it's common that
 that happens.

 Do they really go out of their way to hear the minority and, or
 even the majority when they speak? No. They [forest company] use
 it, I believe, as a pulse on the community to see what's driving
 the community, what areas they need to keep tabs on, tabs on in the
 community and on a greater public area.

 There are those people in those groups out there who think
 differently. But they can't come forward because they're afraid and
 they're afraid of being intimidated.

 My only thing is I think it would be beneficial if some of the
 people would speak up more.

The general dominance of company officials, silenced opinions of minority voices, group procedures that limit the influence of minority views, and outright intimidation by certain individuals were repeated sentiments expressed by these research participants from Committee C. Additionally, lack of regular contact with constituencies, limited time for citizen participants to engage in research and information gathering, the truncation of representation to include only locally affected constituents, and the lack of turnover among long-term committee membership were all identified by interviewees as constraints on discourse. These sentiments reflect some of the deeper challenges in group representation that extend beyond conventional assessments of representation and speak to the inability of many committee members to engage and find voice.

Committee Autonomy

In this comparative case study, private interests were observed to have significant power to condition local discourses on forest management. In spite of these interests, the above analysis does indicate some variation in the abilities of committee members to challenge hegemonic interests and sustain an alternative point of view. Theorists also identify autonomy as another important resource for public processes of this kind and this section puts forward a series of narratives that provide an insight into the relative autonomy of these committees. These short narratives provide a window into the interactions between committee members and committee sponsors, they point to the spaces in between committees and sponsors where public moments emerge, and they signal specific ways in which relative levels of autonomy condition the outcome of committee activity.

COMMITTEE A

Verbal exchanges in this vignette were initiated by a local trapper regarding the use of herbicides. The Alberta Trapper's Association (ATA) developed a policy paper regarding forest harvesting, including a statement of concern about the use of herbicides on forest lands. After being invited to comment on the paper, the ATA representative on the committee made a few general comments:

 We feel [forestry] should be more or less smaller scale, every
 year.... We've done this to state more or less the way we feel,
 [so] we're talking the same language.

A company representative then pushed the member for specific information:

 So what evidence do you have to support this claim about the ill
 effects of herbicide use? It seems like a pretty strong statement
 when you don't have any evidence to support it.

After some long and awkward pauses, it became evident that the local trapper was unwilling or unable to engage industry representatives in a debate. The committee agreed to invite a member from the ATA to present (and defend) the paper at the next meeting.

A month later, a provincial spokesperson for the ATA attended the meeting and outlined their position on harvest operations. In relation to the use of herbicides, he stated that:

 [there were] some fears out there amongst the membership that there
 are many factors that are not fully known. And we continue to hear
 articles, some are for and some are against, as ordinary laymen, we
 don't know where to stand.... So we'd like to err on the side of
 caution.

A forest company representative then asked:

 have there been any papers written that discuss the impact of
 herbicides on trap lines? Are we bringing science to the table or
 are we bringing folklore?

To this question, the ATA representative took exception:

 We're bringing laymen experience. It's not folklore.

In his defense, and as one of the first public members of the committee to wade into the discussion, a member stated:

 the trapper that's out there, and working on the trap line is a
 professional. And his knowledge, although not well documented, and
 not necessarily put together scientifically, in his head,
 collectively is a valuable resource that is difficult to tap into.

Although this comment appeared to have some sobering impact on the company representatives, one company representative nonetheless concluded:

 I found it, as an education thing, if you are trying to tell the
 public what is happening, I found it was misleading, and if you
 wanted to use it as an education thing for your trappers, it was
 not really telling them the truth either, so I found it misleading
 on both parts.

These exchanges illustrate the constraints faced by committee representatives who attempt to challenge the status quo, especially when their social dispositions (embodied dispositions and communication skills) reflect localized modes of expertise rather than the more narrowly prescribed modes of argument supported by Western scientific tradition. Dialogue in the meetings of this particular committee appeared in our analysis to be regularly constrained in comparison with other committee meetings. "Common-good" members on this committee expressed a particular hesitancy to engage in deliberative processes. Given that the membership of this committee is characterized by a high proportion of common-good representatives, and a relatively smaller proportion of interest-based representatives, it suggests that settings in which common-good representatives are predominant may face a higher likelihood of succumbing to the hegemonic potential of discursive settings that are tightly coupled with private interests.

COMMITTEE B

While the structural position of private interests on the three committees is equivalent, we nonetheless observed significant differences in the quality of discourse, particularly as reflected in the emergence of public-spirited moments. The extract below illustrates the social dynamics of Committee B in challenging an oil and gas industry representative on the effectiveness of interindustry communication and coordination. An expert on local oil and gas activities, the presenter introduced his topic with several positive claims:

 Once upon a time, the oil and gas company was a lot more intrusive
 on the land base than it is now--you had cat-blade width seismic
 lines all over the place. These days the impact is meant to be
 minimal. The presence on the land base is deemed to be short term
 and stakeholder consultation is required in every phase of what we
 do.

After setting the stage, the presenter was confronted with several questions from committee members. The ensuing dialogue consumed a major portion of the 1.5-hour presentation. At one point a committee member brought the discussion around to the issue of trust:

 What do you suppose contributes to the widespread mistrust of
 landsmen [oil and gas field workers]?

After a brief reply from the presenter, the member suggested that mistrust relates to the lack of transparency regarding the range of options available to residents in the area. He concluded by stating:

 It seems like the company's motives perhaps have always been
 strictly profit and not long term.

The presenter took these comments in stride, suggesting that with more than 1,200 registered oil and gas companies in Alberta, we are our own worst enemies [due to the predominance of maverick smaller operators]. Later in the talk, discussion again turned to the issue of long-term planning and the speculative nature of oil and gas development. The issue came to a head when several members resisted the assertion that oil and gas development is having less impact now than in the past. One member countered the presenter's claims by pointing out that:

 You are drilling somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 wells just on
 the Northern East slopes in this current year. He followed up by
 stating that [oil and gas impact] is a huge issue with [this
 committee]. This is something that we've talked and talked about..,
 there is still an incredible distance to go in terms of anything
 that gets to a point of being cooperative between forestry and oil
 and gas. Isn't that a reasonable statement?

In response, the presenter revised his earlier statements:

 you are right, it's a long way from being right but there are
 efforts being made to make that better.

The high number of engaged committee members represented in this narrative suggests that, in spite of the compromised setting dominated by private interest, this committee was able to maintain some degree of autonomy from company sponsors. In contrast to Committee A, furthermore, Committee B's membership is characterized by a high number of interest-based representatives, who regularly participate in meeting dialogues. These members appeared to provide the committee with a wide range of layperson and scientific expertise, providing meeting members with the capacity to assess critically the positions of industry participants, and relieving members of dependency on company sponsors for information. The ability to evoke public-spirited moments, in short, would appear to be influenced significantly by the degree to which discursive participants are able to rely on multiple autonomous sources of information, which in this case are provided to a much greater degree by interest-based representatives than common-good representatives.

COMMITTEE C

Finally, a short extract from Committee C provides further evidence of the potential for oversight by committee sponsors to stifle independent and critical thinking by committee members. During the observational period, this committee was involved in setting key performance criteria for independent assessments (i.e., third party) of progress toward sustainable forest management (SFM). Often referred to as an SFM plan, the document identifies key goals and performance indicators across a wide range of biophysical and socioeconomic domains. This document provides one of the primary opportunities for committee members and other experts and laypeople to influence forest management practices. In Committee C, however, such discussions and debates did not take place. During one meeting, a company official presented the SFM plan to committee members and invited feedback before the following meeting. At the next meeting, the company official made this statement:

 The last meeting we talked about our SFM objectives and indicators
 and passed out where we were at in that process and requested
 feedback from the members. Since that time, I have not received
 anything from any of the members, so we are continuing on with our
 process and coordinating our SFM plan.

This type of inaction (lack of voice) was common for members of Committee C. In spite of a relatively diverse set of committee representatives, from a wide range of backgrounds (Table 1), the voice of committee members was consistently stifled by committee sponsors who closely monitored committee discussions, provided most of the information for discussion, dominated meeting time, offered little room for dissenting views, and successfully cultivated a set of privileged ideologies. This lack of autonomy between committee and sponsor represents a major challenge to the emergence of public spiritedness, and challenges the legitimacy of these public processes in the forest sector.

LINKING DISCURSIVE EVENTS TO PUBLIC MOMENTS

As the right to political participation is a central component of citizenship, transformations in the venues available for citizen participation can be expected to influence politics in profound ways. Given the high potential for coercion within the context of a corporate-sponsored public advisory committee, many will justifiably question the extent to which such venues represent the public sphere at all. Indeed, in other research, environmental organization representatives in Alberta expressed their unwillingness to be involved in stakeholder groups, after perceiving such exercises to have little effect in political decision making (Davidson and MacKendrick 2004). As expected, this study provides evidence that corporate and state interests can effectively steer or control small-group settings. On the other hand, the extent to which public-spirited moments were observed in spite of the structural conditions characterizing these highly compromised settings warrants further attention. The results from this empirical inquiry signal the potential for active citizen engagement in constrained contexts, depending on two variables that may well be interactive: the resources the participants themselves bring to the table, and the degree to which company sponsors assert control over the proceedings. To return to the contrasting vignettes presented above, the example provided of public spiritedness and critical debate on Committee B highlights several facilitating factors. First, the presentation was made to a committee of knowledgeable lay individuals, many of whom had spent considerable time seeking information, thinking about and discussing industrial impacts on the forest. After challenging the major premise of the presentation, members communicated their collective wisdom back to the presenter in stating that this is something we have talked and talked about ... there is still an incredible distance to go. Second, company and government representatives played little to no tactical role in the discussion. Company representatives did not attempt to correct or disagree with committee deliberations and the autonomy of Committee B had a deciding role in the empowerment of members to influence debate. In contrast, Committees A and C offered a clear example of uncontested corporate control of committee deliberations. When the opportunity for public spiritedness emerged, few committee members were willing or able to contribute critical, informed responses, and the moment was quickly truncated by those who perceived such ideas to be in conflict with industrial interests.

Interest-Based Contributions

As highlighted in this study, interest-based advocates can open the door to public-spirited moments, but without support from other committee members, such moments tend to evaporate. By contrast, one of the contributing elements to the public-spirited moments in Committee B involved the unique qualities of many knowledgeable and motivated committee members. Fisheries biologists, educators, trappers, forest industry contractors, and others offered insights into forest management issues and experience with the forest landscape that came from sources other than the forest industry. This knowledge and experience sustained alternative points of view, a necessary first step in pushing for change in company operations and provincial policy. The committee regularly provided recommendations to the sponsoring company that reflected the interests of committee members, summarily presenting a strong case for change to existing forest management practices. Committee deliberations also exhibited a high level of collegiality between voting and nonvoting members. Finally, unlike Committees A and C, in which company representatives tended to steer deliberations toward industry-oriented outcomes, industry representatives on Committee B, who were also fewer in number, were less inclined to manage or steer group deliberations. This atmosphere of mutual respect and openness led to multiple critical debates between company representatives and interest-based representatives.

One of the important outcomes in the development of public-spirited moments was the ability of interest-based representatives in Committee B to sustain an alternative discourse. In their efforts to affect change, at various points during 10 months of field observation, the committee challenged conventional wisdom with ideas and arguments that provided a basis for critical debate. The most consistent contributors to the emergence of public moments in this analysis were "interest-based" members, who fuelled the debate with a depth of knowledge and understanding of the issues, coupled with a strong sense of conviction, which in turn restricted opportunities for company representatives to dominate proceedings. This case demonstrates the means by which citizens who identify with a range of specific interest groups can serve as an essential resource for a public sphere characterized by a high coercive potential. When public-spirited moments took shape, they were catalyzed and animated by interest-based representatives (especially those with good communication skills and access to independent information). In contrast, common good advocates played little to no role. In short, this study suggests that autonomy, as measured by the prevalence of public-spirited moments, is inextricably linked to representation.

These findings should be treated with caution, however. These deliberations were determined as much by who was not sitting at the table. Moderate environmental representatives gained access to these committees, but more radical representatives were excluded--thus suggesting access is often reserved for a narrow range of public interests who share similar fundamental ideological views regarding the appropriateness of industrial activity on the forested land base. Lower socioeconomic classes, women, and minorities, not to mention urban and international publics, were also poorly represented. These significant absences may be an indication not simply of the limited representation of the three committees under study, but of the limits to representation for local small-group processes more broadly, which, in the case of forest politics, are likely to reflect the demographic composition of the local community, and are unlikely to include an exhaustive range of public interests, citizens who are ethically opposed to industrial forestry, or who are geographically distant from small-scale advisory processes.

In short, despite evidence for public-spirited moments to arise within compromised settings, ultimate limitations on representativeness in small-group settings indicate that an overreliance on such bodies as the predominant means of citizen participation would prove detrimental to democracy. Given that truly progressive new initiatives, issues, problems, and proposals tend to be raised at the margins rather than the established center of an array of opinions (Baber and Bartlett 2005), such committees can only ever serve as one component in a broader public sphere.

Group Autonomy

One might argue that no decentered deliberative setting will be sufficiently free from subtle steering tactics and manipulation, and may in fact be more likely to serve as venues for legitimation of the hegemonic position of privileged interests than as opportunities for critical engagement. Corporate and state-driven stakeholder processes exist alongside environmental advocacy and/or science-driven academic deliberative venues that might be considered to enjoy a greater degree of structural autonomy, but all nonetheless offer considerable deference to Western scientific traditions and are subject to specific interests and biases to varying degrees.

Our findings, however, indicate that occurrences of critical debate can vary widely in small-group settings despite relatively equivalent degrees of structural dominance on the part of corporate interests, suggesting that the autonomy of the public sphere might not be determined solely on the basis of structural position. Corporate- or state-sponsored citizen advisory committees will inevitably be associated with asymmetric power relations, which simply become magnified at the local level. The results of this case study reveal that while such structural locations may indeed limit the deliberative agenda--the appropriateness of industrial forestry, for example, was not subjected to debate--the potential for the emergence of public-spirited moments in which citizens have the opportunity to openly engage in debate remains subject to the particularities of committee composition and specific company steering tactics. The question of autonomy thus becomes less an issue of insulation from state or corporate interests, and rather revolves around examining the potential for deliberative autonomy and public spiritedness despite privileged interest, how these potentialities change over time, and ultimately their influence on political discourse and policy outcomes.

While evidence of public moments should by no means be seen as a sufficient indicator of political transformation, it could nonetheless be seen as a necessary indicator. More to the point, if we view the contemporary public sphere as a ubiquitous constellation of competing discourses that exist between omnipresent structures of power and authority and the private worlds of citizens, then the autonomy of the public sphere will always be a struggle. However, the increasing density of that constellation, into what Habermas describes as a "wild complex" of discourses, may in and of itself enrich civil society's ability to defend autonomous spaces for deliberation in the public sphere. In forest politics today, this wild complex includes multiple scientific, traditional and local knowledge, spiritual and ethical viewpoints, and worldviews regarding the environment.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

The growing prevalence of private- and state-sponsored stakeholder groups, arguably a context with a high coercive potential, warrants due consideration by scholars working in the fields of democracy and citizen participation. Characterized by a decentered and privatized form of public participation, advisory committees claim legitimacy in the public sphere through representation and autonomy. This study reveals considerable deliberative weakness associated with common-good representation. Rather, interest-group members with more interest and knowledge of key issues appear to offer the most constructive resources toward more communicative forms of rationality. In addition, the degree to which company sponsors assert control over proceedings may also influence the quality of deliberation. Owing to the limitations of a single comparative case study, the relative influence of these two variables, and their possible interaction, could not be ascertained. Future research should be directed toward the extent to which, for example, the relative autonomy of a given committee is enabled by the absence of controlling influence on the part of corporate or state representatives, or whether such autonomy is actively contested, and ultimately achieved through the assertive behavior of committee members.

There are several other key issues associated with local-level political participation. First, interest-group advocates who remain involved in committees over many years face the paradox of personal transformation. Through frequent contact with other points of view, personal points of view are likely to be transformed. If nothing else, they become more understanding of and sympathetic to other perspectives. The result may be a gradual delinking of voice and trust when constituents realize that their representative has "changed her tune." While socialization is an inevitable component of contemporary governance (Van Tatenhove and LeRoy 2003), this subpolitical terrain runs a clear risk of becoming depoliticized simply through socialization. Second, the limited scope of local processes does not allow for influence at the national and global scale. Local committees provide a deliberative landscape that is amenable to what Pellizzoni (2001) identifies as a quest for more practical, local, and contextualized answers to complex and deeply contested social questions. They are much less useful, however, in connecting with elite state and international-level processes (i.e., North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] or European Union), and distinctly global phenomena, such as biological diversity loss. Ultimately, if local processes are to become more than a release valve for local public concerns or a strategic communication and legitimation device for corporate actors, issues of representation and autonomy will continue to challenge advocates for citizen engagement.

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JOHN R. PARKINS AND DEBRA J. DAVIDSON University of Alberta

John R. Parkins, Department of Rural Economy, University of Alberta, 515 General Services Building, Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G 2H1. Tel: +1 780-492-3610. E-mail: jparkins@ualberta.ca.

Table 1
Composition of Committee Members

Constituency Committee A Committee B Committee C

Town 4 1 1
County 3 1 1
Recreation 2 1 2
Trappers 1 1 1
Education 1 1 2
Environment 1 1 2
Oil and gas 1 1 0
Agriculture 0 1 0
Aboriginal 2 0 1
Chamber of commerce 0 0 1
Union 0 1 3
Timber contractors 1 3 0
Seniors 0 1 1
Youth 0 1 1
Member-at-large 1 2 0
Medical 0 0 1
Religion 0 0 1
Parks and protected areas 0 0 1
Federal government 0 0 1

Table 2
Initiation of Committee Discussions

 Number of Substantial Discussions initiated
 meetings discussions by committee member

Committee A 6 15 5
Committee B 9 18 12
Committee C 10 26 6