- Firm
- Provisional
- Coming soon
- Revised
- Firm
- Provisional
- Coming soon
- Revised
How well are we doing?
Editor's note: We have recently refreshed and updated our data for all countries on the platform, as we revised the 21 policies we cover.
Profound changes to our economies – how people work, what they buy, how we live – need to recognise the needs of different kinds of people, and include them in designing policies that can help us all be greener. Participatory policymaking is essential to a green economy because an inclusive green economy avoids imposing green interventions from above and instead engages in dialogue with people about what they need and want from the transition. At its most ambitious level, participatory policymaking mandates transparent and comprehensive consultation and assessment of government policies and proposed legislation, focusing on their impact on socially marginalised groups.
Most of the countries reviewed in the Tracker are showing relatively strong or average performance on participatory policymaking. Across the 41 countries covered, Canada stands out as the most progressive, with mandatory broad-based consultation and impact assessment for federal policy and regulation and dedicated provisions for Indigenous engagement and gender-based analysis in environmental and social assessment for major projects. Trailing behind Canada but notable in its progress is Rwanda, which actively promotes citizen participation, particularly in the planning and budgeting processes at the local level, and has shown key developments in impact assessments by requiring the assessment of social impacts, including gender, in projects.
Scoring low with room for improvement includes countries like China, where processes are not fully transparent or inclusive, and participation by marginalised groups is limited.
Until polices are developed through dialogue with those impacted by them, the green transition will struggle to become a truly global, grassroots transition, meaningful to all.
About this policy
Participatory policymaking will come in many forms depending on context – but the principles of transparency, consultation and impact assessment are paramount. Before policies are implemented governments should assess the impact they will have on different groups, especially socially and economically marginalised groups who tend to have less influence on policy priorities. Consultation or dialogue processes that allow local communities to learn about policies are extremely important for designing the wide-ranging economic reforms needed to achieve a transition to a greener economy.
The weakest policies will eschew a bottom-up approach entirely and have little consultation with local communities and marginalised groups at all. More common are approaches that have a consultation phase, but without transparency on how inputs will be responded to or inform better policy. The strongest approaches make local consultation and impact assessment mandatory in order to provide a transparent structure for policymaking, and help improve the effectiveness of - and confidence people have in - new policies.
Innovative approaches to participation via citizens assemblies and other deliberative democratic approaches have also come to the fore, and further innovations are often needed to give meaningful participation in green policymaking to people with disabilities - with the risk of eco-ablism via inflexible policies a genunine threat.
Case Study: Peru
For structural, social and historical reasons, indigenous communities in Peru face more difficult circumstances and higher rates of poverty. This has led to innovation of ways to include them in decision making to protect their rights while also improving policy outcomes. Adoption of a Law of Prior Consultation for indigenous communities has allowed the intercultural ministry to run multiple rounds of policy consultation and develop norms of ongoing dialogue and conversation in development policy. Inclusion has also been mainstreamed in Peru through creation of the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Population, which runs multiple complimentary inclusion programmes.
Peru Country Profile