Governing citizen engagement

This chapter sets out to explore tensions between bottom-up and top-down processesfrom a governmentality perspective. Using a discourse studies approach,we investigate how forms of public participation in a local climate mitigationproject can be viewed as an instance of governmentality in the sense of howthe conduct of groups and individuals is influenced by other forces and howgroups and individuals influence the conduct of others through participationand involvement. This implies that governmentality is analysed as emerging inconcrete, situated practices. Simultaneously, we investigate how a governmentalityapproach may enrich our understanding of public participation, dialogueand involvement, especially on the complex issue of sustainability and climatechange mitigation.