Vill du vara med?: En studie av Piteåpanelen och dess inverkan på Piteå kommuns miljöpolitik

Sammanfattning: The representative democracy has become weakened during the last decades. At the same time the United Nations declared at the Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992 that environmental problems can best be solved by involvement of all concerned citizens in decision-making. The main purpose of this study has been to examine if citizens panels is a possible way to involve citizens in environmental decision-making and what the outcomes can be. Furthermore the study has investigated what the participation has contributed to environmental politics and how representative the results have been. This has been carried out by investigating the Piteåpanel in the municipality of Piteå by conducting interviews. The result of the study shows that the involvement of the citizens in the decision-making influenced the environmental politics of the municipality. The most striking result is that involving the citizens in the process of forming a climate and energy plan made the final plan more explicit and ambitious. However regarding the representativity the decisions can’t be considered fully representative from a political equality point of view. Despite this the decisions that have been made can be regarded as more legitimate because the citizens have been a part of the decision-making. The study argues in a careful way that increased participation in environmental decision-making in the form of citizens panels can be one of several approaches to both overcome the problems with the representative democracy and solve the environmental problems.