Situated legitimacy: Deliberative arenas and the new rural governance

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Journal of Rural Studies 22 (2006) 267–277 www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Situated legitimacy: Deliberative arenas and the new rural governance Steve Connellya,, Tim Richardsona, Tim Milesb,1 a

Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S3 7ND, UK b RPS Planning Transport and Environment, London

Abstract Rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone far-reaching changes, as partnerships and other collaborative approaches have emerged to address the challenges of rural sustainable development. The legitimacy of this ‘new rural governance’ is purportedly grounded in deliberation between stakeholders, but this is problematic—it is not clear how ‘legitimacy’ is to be understood now that the criteria of legitimacy appropriate to representative democratic government are not obviously applicable. Here we propose an analysis of legitimacy as situated—that is, given meanings by actors in specific contexts—and continuously constructed through discursive processes, where it also plays a reciprocal, highly political role in shaping those processes. We use this framework to analyse decision making in three distinctive deliberative arenas for sustainable transport policy making in the Peak District National Park in England. Legitimacy claims were found to be significant elements in each arena, but no single, overriding legitimacy discourse was successfully established. Instead, each arena’s legitimacy was a hybrid, justified through a complex mix of competing rationales. While no single conclusion can be drawn about the legitimacy of ‘the new rural governance’, the strongest legitimising principles remained those grounded in representative democracy. In contrast, the ‘new’ approaches rely on deliberative norms accepted only by (some of) the relatively limited circle of stakeholders directly involved. More generally, if such norms are to become accepted principles for legitimate rural governance, then more work is needed to discursively establish their acceptability both in networks of governance and with the wider population. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The landscape of rural governance in the UK and elsewhere has undergone significant and far-reaching changes in the past few years, as the now-familiar partnerships and networks have emerged to address rural development challenges (Edwards et al., 2001). These relational structures, promoted by both policy and research communities (Sørensen and Torfing, 2005) are seen as a necessary response to the intrinsic nature of challenges such as sustainability and regeneration, and the incapacity and eroded legitimacy of existing modes of government to rise to them (Goodwin, 1998; Murdoch and Abram, 1998). However, doubts have been cast on the legitimacy of these Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Connelly). Note: Tim Miles was working at the University of Sheffield at the time the research on which this paper is based was carried out. 1

0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2005.11.008

new governance configurations (Goodwin, 1998; Shortall, 2004), a quality upon which their success rests if they are to increase capacity for effective policy making. In this new context, where the ‘simple’ legitimacy of representative democratic government (Goodwin, 1998) no longer captures the complexity of rural governance, how can legitimacy be understood? This paper contributes to a growing debate over appropriate analytic and normative frameworks for legitimacy by proposing that, as a prerequisite for making normative judgements, we can and should understand how legitimacy is situated—in other words how it is constructed in and through specific policy deliberations, how it is defined and used in their own contexts by actors in the rural governance and those affected by their deliberations. The existence and nature of the new structures and processes are well established and reviewed elsewhere (e.g. Edwards et al., 2000). As a shorthand we refer to a shift from government to governance, following Stoker (1997)

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and many others in recognising the change from governmental domination of policy development and delivery to situations in which a range of stakeholders collaborate in flexible and often less-formalised structures. In rural areas, this blurring of the traditional roles of government and non-governmental sectors has involved the development of new structures, both informally (Curry and Owen, 1996) and in response to national and supranational policies and programmes (see, for example, CEC, 1996, 2000; MAFF & DETR, 2000). This shift has by no means ended. For example across the European Union initiatives such as the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (European Union, 2000; White and Howe, 2003) and the mainstreaming of LEADER-type community development approaches into programmes under the European Agriculture Rural Development Fund (CEC, 2004) will necessitate the establishing of many new partnerships in the coming years at different scales within and across rural areas. Despite this proliferation, the question of what can replace the ballot box as the foundation for these new structures’ claim to legitimacy has not been resolved. Following Goodwin’s identification of the need for such investigation and analysis (Goodwin, 1998), Welch developed a useful analytical framework to examine how elected local authorities understood their legitimacy in the complex field of the new rural governance (Welch, 2002), while other studies have explored how particular forms of deliberative process contribute to legitimacy at the subnational level (Petts, 2001; Cheyne and Comrie, 2002) and critically assessed partnerships’ roles in promoting exclusion rather than inclusive policy making (Yarwood, 2002). However, this literature does not address head-on the more fundamental issue of how to understand and assess the legitimacy of new governance structures, prompting Shortall to ask, ‘what is the political theory underpinning a move to circumvent local government and give a great deal of power to partnerships?’ (Shortall, 2004, p. 113). Perhaps curiously, there is no accepted answer in the mainstream theorising of political science to which students of rural governance can appeal (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004). Of course, the development of a new rural governance is part of a widely recognised trend across political and policy structures more generally within many democracies, as the status of traditional representative democratic processes and institutions declines and ‘new structures of governance’ (Goodwin, 1998, p. 5) emerge and are promoted in their place. These, characterisable very generally as ‘governance networks’ of interdependent actors collectively producing ‘public purpose’ (Sørensen and Torfing, 2005, p. 197), have developed in response to the need for co-ordination of policy making to address intractable and cross-cutting problems—across both traditional institutional divides and the fragmented organisational landscape which resulted from the ‘hollowing-out’ of the state in the 1980s and 1990s (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2004; Skelcher et al., 2004). The legitimacy of these

structures is usually not specified but merely asserted— partnerships are presented as intrinsically good and their legitimacy as self-evident, without the necessity of new legitimising mechanisms to replace those inherent in representative democratic structures (Atkinson, 1999; Mathur et al., 2003). What could constitute the basis for such legitimising mechanisms remains unclear. While the attention of political scientists has been turned towards the issue of legitimacy in the past few years in response to the perceived crisis of European democracy (Gualini, 2004), the issue has so far been neglected in other fields, including rural governance. Recently, it could still be claimed that ‘the concept of legitimacy is, despite its prominence in current discourses and political science in general, often left vague and used ambiguously’ (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004, p. 2). However, an increasing number of scholars are now turning a critical gaze in this direction (Sørensen and Torfing, 2005). The conceptual underpinning of these new governance approaches is that they enable policies and strategies to be shaped through collaborative deliberation between stakeholders (Healey, 1997; Hajer and Kesselring, 1999; Shortall, 2004). This principle, often used normatively, is frequently extended to embrace consensus as the desirable outcome of deliberation (Gualini, 2001, p. 55; Innes, 2004). Collaborative approaches are argued to secure legitimacy for these policies, by giving citizens and civil society organisations direct access to previously remote decision making processes, as equal ‘stakeholders’ (Hajer and Kesselring, 1999, pp. 5–6; Saurugger, 2004, p. 4). In practice, actors’ claims about legitimacy have been identified in alternative underpinning ‘policy belief systems’, for example by Skelcher, Mathur and Smith in their empirical study of rural and urban ‘multi-organisational partnerships’ in the UK (Mathur et al., 2003; Skelcher et al., 2004). Two of these, the ‘managerial’ and ‘consociational’ belief systems, justified relatively closed governance practices on the grounds of increased effectiveness, in contrast with the third, the ‘participative’ belief system, which explicitly rested on norms of openness and inclusiveness drawn from theories of deliberative democracy. Although this research showed that seeking increased effectiveness was found to be the dominant justification used by actors for partnership working, it is the arguments from deliberative democracy which fuel the current upsurge in interest in deliberative and collaborative policy making processes (Sørensen and Torfing, 2005). Across planning and policy theory, a growing number of analysts are seeking to interpret and fill the apparent normative void opened up by the shift to governance, drawing on an analytic tradition rooted in the ‘communicative’ or ‘argumentative’ turn in policy studies (Fischer and Forester, 1993; Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003b). Much of this work has a strong normative content, drawing inspiration from deliberative democratic theory and explicitly intended to promote deliberative policy analysis

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and practice (see, for example, Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003a; Center for Collaborative Policy, 2005). Our intent here is rather different. Given that a range of pragmatic and democratic norms and rationales relating to the legitimacy of deliberative processes is available to actors, and as a consequence potentially empirically researchable, we share with Skelcher and his colleagues the interest in uncovering how these norms and rationales are mobilised in practice. However, rather than examining the mobilisation of alternative and possibly competing conceptions of ‘partnership’, we seek to analyse how the legitimacy of deliberative processes is derived, sustained and challenged. We seek to understand what meanings are given to ‘legitimacy’ and how the concept is used by those involved in the new governance. This is important, not just in enhancing our understanding of the mechanisms of the new policy processes, but because understanding the norms which are actually drawn on may provide the foundation for a different and less partial critique than one based a priori on one particular strand of democratic theory. This paper thus attempts to develop an analysis of legitimacy appropriate to the structures and processes of the new rural governance. We develop and then test a framework using a post-structuralist perspective in which ‘legitimacy’ is seen not as a concept whose meaning can be settled in some final, objective way, but as one which is both continuously constructed through discursive processes and plays a reciprocal and highly political role in shaping those processes. This perspective is derived from Foucauldian discourse analytics and Hajer’s operationalisation of this through the notions of discourse coalitions and story lines (Hajer, 1995). Although such approaches are increasingly used in policy analysis (see, for example, the contributors to Urban Studies 36(1) and the recent work of Skelcher and his colleagues), there has been little explicit analysis of legitimacy (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004), still less in a rural context. The framework advanced here is avowedly tentative and experimental. Viewing structures of rural governance as ‘deliberative arenas’ in which stakeholders come together, and where discursive processes take place, we analyse material drawn from empirical research on policy making for sustainable transport in the English Peak District National Park. In this case it was possible to analyse how deliberation turned out in three different types of deliberative arenas, by examining events in three arenas where the Park Authority sought to integrate conflicting interests and build capacity to act. The arenas were characterised by closed partnership working, participatory consensus-building, and representative democratic structures. (Further information on all three arenas can be found on the websites listed at the end of this paper.) The analysis compares how legitimacy was constructed and sustained as stakeholders sought to satisfy the potentially conflicting demands of increasing their overall capacity for action whilst advancing sustainable policies. Although each arena has unique characteristics, they typify

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contemporary rural governance structures. The analysis is followed by an assessment of how generally applicable the analysis might be as a way of understanding and assessing legitimacy, and the paper ends with some tentative conclusions about legitimacy and the new rural governance. 2. How do we understand legitimacy in the new rural governance? Legitimacy is clearly a necessity for any system of democratic government, allowing the exercise of power without coercion, as ‘the actions of those that rule are accepted voluntarily by those who are ruledylegitimacy converts power into authority’ (Schmitter, 2001, p. 2). However, legitimacy is not a ‘given’ in any system, but a construct which has to be maintained and reproduced by the power structures it in turn legitimates (Beetham, 1991, p. 105). The question we are addressing here is ‘how is this done?’ in the new rural governance. In order to unpack the processes we adopt a discourse analytical approach drawing on Hajer, who defines a discourse as a ‘specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorisations that are produced, reproduced and transformed in a particular set of practices through which meaning is given to physical and social realities’ (Hajer, 1995, p. 44). Discourses thus encompass both text and practice, rather than merely text (Foucault, 1979, 1990). In this interpretation power relations are central: as a result of a specific language use and material practice, a discourse contains a domain of ‘meaningful’ actions governed by a regulatory power mechanism which selects appropriate and meaningful utterances and actions. The creation of legitimacy is central to the functioning of discourses, which ‘guide and legitimise social and political action by shaping acceptable and collectively binding interpretations and evaluations of social and political events and relationships, and y are themselves shaped in communication and argumentation processes whose character is political’ (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004, p. 15). In particular, the legitimacy of ‘political orders’ of various kinds is both the topic and the emergent result of discourses which are explicitly concerned with policy making and politics (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004). However, through such processes differing constructions of ‘legitimacy’ by different actors are possible and likely, with two important consequences. Firstly, legitimacy judgements will be context specific, as different processes generate their own locally accepted ‘normative basis of authority’ (Schmitter, 2001, p. 2). Secondly, there is no reason to expect that in practice all actors will agree locally on what constitutes a legitimate structure, since democratic traditions provide many different rules and norms which can be called on in a debate on legitimacy and legitimate forms of governance. ‘Legitimacy’ is therefore not only a normative criterion by which to assess a process or

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structure, but legitimacy claims and counter-claims are intrinsic elements of the political process itself. The outcome of this process may be a generally accepted ‘collectively binding normative yardstick’ (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004, p. 15), against which actual practice and rhetoric can be judged. However, such a single construction of legitimacy may not emerge, and the process may rather be characterised by competing norms and challenges to ascendant constructions. Nor can any outcome be viewed as permanent— legitimacy is always conditional, in need of maintenance and susceptible to challenge (Beetham, 1991). This is particularly so when social norms and institutional structures are both changing, creating a ‘legitimacy gap’ which requires deliberate effort to close and so establish a stable, generally accepted system of policy and decision making (Krell-Laluhova´ and Schneider, 2004). Arguably the present change in rural governance marks just such a period, characterised by the institutional shift towards partnerships and other ways to engage stakeholders in policy-making processes, and the shift in societal values away from reliance on trusted representatives towards demands for more direct engagement in decision making. So: how can these new structures secure their legitimacy? Processes of decision making shared between state and non-state institutions, elected and non-elected actors, clearly cannot appeal for legitimation to the ballot box, which traditionally conferred substantial legitimacy on decision makers more-or-less regardless of the policymaking processes which lay behind their decisions. In looking for new ways to ground legitimacy, a distinction has been made between the legitimacy of the governance system as a whole and the need for individual parts of it to be legitimate (Welch, 2002). Theorists of deliberative democracy have recently tended to see the former as more important, and moreover suggest that it may emerge from a mass of overlapping, individually imperfect deliberative processes (Dryzek, 2000; Thompson and Bell, 2004). However, the effectiveness of any part of the system must surely rest on its having sufficient legitimacy in itself, and Welch showed that in his case, at least, this was the primary concern of the local government officials trying to sustain legitimacy within new governance processes (Welch, 2002). We therefore argue that the diffusion of authority requires a refocusing of scrutiny onto policy-making processes, not simply onto the formal, explicit exercise of power at decision-making time in, for example, a council chamber. At stake is the legitimacy of the often opaque processes through which discourses are brought into contest and become institutionalised and engrained in practices and material outcomes. Such a refocusing requires a modification of the classic formulations of legitimacy in terms of rulers and ruled. The interest has to shift to those engaged in a process and those affected by it, the ‘stakeholders’, both inside and outside the process in question. The fundamental question which determines legitimacy in the view of the stakeholders is no

longer the classic ‘do we accept this body as appropriate to make decisions that affect us?’ Rather, it becomes ‘do we accept this process as an appropriate way to make policy— here, now?’—with the corollary ‘how seriously should we therefore treat its outcomes as a guide to our actions and decisions?’ The stakeholders making such judgements include both ‘rulers’, those holding overt decision-making powers, as well as others in the policy-making process who are affected and ‘the ruled’—stakeholders who are not active in the process but are nevertheless affected. Crucially this means that legitimacy judgements will be made by decision makers about the policy formulation processes that lead up to their decisions. The task for those promoting or supporting particular ways of developing policy is to establish adequate and convincing positive answers to these new legitimacy questions. But on what grounds can positive judgements be made? As noted above, there are many contesting norms, but there is also a more general theory of legitimacy, of how such norms function, and it is to this that we now turn. Despite its very wide acceptance, Beetham convincingly shows that the widely accepted Weberian formulation—that power is legitimate if those subject to it believe it to be so—is only partially adequate (Beetham, 1991). While consent is important, he argues that [f]or power to be fully legitimate, then, three conditions are required: its conformity to established rules; the justifiability of the rules by reference to shared beliefs [of the dominant and subordinate]; the express consent of the subordinate, or the most significant among them, to the particular relations of power (Beetham, 1991, p. 19). Legitimacy thus rests on the three dimensions of legality, justifiability2 and consent (Parkinson, 2003), all of which have to be maintained to sustain legitimacy, and any of which are open to challenge. Of critical importance is the recognition that legitimacy is not just about (democratic) process, and that justifiability in particular is also dependent on substantive issues. Beetham’s ‘shared beliefs’ are both about acceptable process and about whether a process delivers adequate, and adequately distributed, benefits. Scharpf (1999) usefully defines these as ‘input’ and ‘output’ criteria of legitimacy, which in a purportedly democratic process essentially rest on stakeholders’ evaluation of whether a process allows them to influence the process and if it delivers acceptable results. While the two elements are to some extent separable and substitutable (Scharpf, 1999), there is a continuous, dialectical relationship between them, and in practice they cannot be ‘uncoupled’ in democratic systems (Papadopoulos, 2003, p. 484). In consequence, legitimacy judgements, claims and challenges 2

Note that this is ‘justifiability’, not ‘justification’. What matters is that the exercise of power can be justified if such a demand is made, not that explicit justification must always be put forward.

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are thus not only context specific in the sense of resting on different norms for different processes in different places, but are also issue dependent. The basic legitimacy question set out above thus needs to be further refined, becoming ‘do we accept this process an appropriate way to make policy—here, now, about this issue?’ Judgements can thus only be made in a specific context, concerned with a real process dealing with a particular issue. It is on the ‘input’ side that perhaps the most significant changes in legitimacy norms have taken place in recent years. O’Neill (2001) identifies three ways in which stakeholders’ interests can be brought into a process, each of which carries its own legitimacy: (a) through representatives whose actions are legitimised by authorisation and democratic accountability; (b) through actual presence, or representation by those with a shared identity; and (c) through representation by those whose knowledge, expertise, or judgment is accepted to give them the right to speak or act on others’ behalf (i.e. holders of shared ‘epistemic values’) (O’Neill, 2001, pp. 489–490). Of this trinity of legitimacy through election, common experience and expertise (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2004, p. 65), the traditional representative democratic system has been grounded on the first for its decision makers but granted their advisers legitimacy in policy formulation on the grounds of their expertise. In response to the perceived problems of this system, practice and policy have shifted towards the second, supported by an account of how legitimacy can be sustained drawn from theories of deliberative democracy. The core claim is that ‘outcomes are legitimate to the extent they receive reflective assent through participation in authentic deliberation by all those subject to the decision in question’ (Dryzek, 2000, p. 1). The key element in guaranteeing legitimacy is inclusivity, both in terms of who is present and in how they are involved. Deliberative democratic theory draws here on the Habermasian notion of communicative rationality, with an ideal of unforced, undistorted debate amongst equals, and relies heavily on the notion of stakeholders—the groups and individuals affected by the process. In a pure form this is clearly problematic both in principle, as it fails to address all the dimensions of legitimacy (Parkinson, 2003), and in practice, since it relies on the involvement of all those affected. The impossibility of this in all but the smallest and most isolated processes forces a reliance in deliberative practices on representation, justified through arguments from shared identity (Dryzek, 2001; O’Neill, 2001), which are in potential competition with justifications for representation on the other grounds noted above. In any real situation, then, particularly one in which patterns of governance are changing, we may expect a range of legitimacy discourses—based on the principles of representation, deliberation and knowledge/expertise—to

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be present and used to sustain, establish and challenge ways of making policy and decisions across the dimensions of conformity to rules, justification and consent. Further, given our conception of discourse as more than language, we would expect a rhetoric concerning legitimacy and to be able to identify different discourses being enacted in practices and embodied in institutional forms, in ways which may correspond to the dominant rhetoric or, alternatively, be in tension with it. Analysis of the legitimacy of a deliberative process thus involves a linked series of questions:







What rules and practices govern deliberation? Are they established (or challenged) through explicit appeal to existing rules, by establishing new rules, or are they simply enacted? By whom? By what wider principles are the rules and practices justified/challenged? By whom? Or are they accepted without justification or challenge? Is consent limited to those involved? (Who consents and who does not, both internally and externally?)

Together these questions provide a schema for analysing how legitimacy is constructed within and beyond a process. 3. A study of legitimacy in practice 3.1. Introduction to the case study We turn now to our empirical research on a case in which new governance structures were established to provide effective and sustainable solutions to some knotty transport problems which lay beyond the capacity of existing state bodies. The case studied is located in the Peak District National Park in the southern Pennine hills of central England. The twin statutory purposes of English National Parks, laid down in the Environment Act, 1995, are ‘to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of their areas’ and ‘to promote opportunities for the public understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of their areas’. If there is conflict between the two, conservation takes precedence. National Park Authorities—the principal local planning bodies— also have a duty to seek to foster the social and economic well-being of local communities (DEFRA, 2004). The issue of traffic restraint has been particularly problematic for the Peak District National Park Authority. The Park is located between major urban centres and its hills present a barrier to travel between these conurbations, and so affect regional and national economic development. It is also the most accessible National Park in the country, resulting in car-borne traffic having a correspondingly great impact on the Park’s internal economy and environment. Managing traffic flows has thus brought up the tensions within sustainable development planning particularly forcefully at a number of levels, including strategic issues in relation to the economic regeneration needs of

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neighbouring authorities, balancing environmental concerns with the economic need for accessibility within the Park, and details of local traffic management to protect the natural environment and residents’ quality of life. However, although the Park Authority makes policy on transport, statutory powers are held by the local authorities which surround and overlap the Park’s boundaries. In response to two particular longstanding conflicts between interests over transport policy, the Park Authority established very different deliberative arenas in order to break through the policy impasses and create consensus around policy outcomes. In order to be effective, these arenas not only had to produce policies acceptable to the range of governmental and civil society groups involved, but also establish their legitimacy both with those participants and with other stakeholders not directly involved, in particular the decision makers in the participants’ parent organisations whose approval was required in order for implementation to occur. The first arena was an inclusive consensus-building process, the Stanage Forum, developed as a holistic approach to the management of a small, intensively used area—the cliffs of Stanage Edge and the surrounding countryside. This was a response to opposition by some stakeholder groups to the Park Authority’s introduction of parking charges to manage car access, and aimed to bring together the Authority and all groups with an interest in the area to draw up a management plan with the assistance of an external facilitator (Croney and Smith, 2003). The second was the Peak Park Transport Forum (PPTF), a partnership between the Park Authority and other local authorities established to develop a strategic approach to transport planning (Richardson and Haywood, 1996; Banister et al., 2000). This emerged as the South Pennines Integrated Transport Strategy (SPITS)—a package consisting of limited road improvements on one trans-Pennine corridor, traffic restraint on other key roads in the South Pennines sub-region, and strategic public transport improvements. Finally, we looked at deliberation over transport issues within the Park Authority, where stakeholder views are represented through the authority’s representative democratic structures. Analysis of this process allowed comparison between new deliberative processes and the qualities of deliberation within the ‘old’ structures. Following the schema outlined above, we analysed how the legitimacy of deliberation in each arena was established and challenged. To dissect the deliberations we adopted Hajer’s concept of ‘story lines’ (1995, p. 61)—simplifications of the substantive issues, often to one-line ‘slogans’, which provide actors with symbolic references that suggest common understandings and form the basis for coalitions which actors join to gain argumentative advantage. As story lines are produced and reproduced in speech, in documents and in the assumptions embodied in practices such as decision-making processes, they provide the language and ideas through which wider discourse conflicts

are played out. Following the argument above, we suggest that different discourses of legitimacy are mobilised to support and challenge substantive story lines, so legitimating the evolution of policy. The empirical research was carried out during 2003–2004, through 40 in-depth interviews with participants, observation of meetings—both public and ‘behindclosed-doors’ meetings of officers—and examination of minutes and policy documents. A detailed description and analysis of the deliberative processes is presented in Richardson et al. (2004): here summaries must suffice. 3.2. The Stanage Forum The Stanage Forum was open to participation at any stage by any interested stakeholders. It attracted a wide range of local and national recreation and conservation interest groups and local community representatives. At open Forum meetings problems and solutions were debated and agreed, while a smaller Steering Group of representatives spanning the range of stakeholders and interests met more frequently to develop ideas, which were then brought back to the Forum for discussion and approval. The process was facilitated by an external consultant, whose role was to ensure that the Forum followed explicit ground rules embodying consensusbuilding ideals and successfully produced a management plan which enjoyed support from all stakeholders (Croney and Smith, 2003). Debate was dominated by conflict between a story line of ‘environmental limits’ (‘the area can absorb no more private vehicles’) and one of ‘free access’, embodying the right to unrestricted, cost-free public access, principally for recreation. These were principally espoused by, respectively, the Park Authority and the British Mountaineering Council (BMC), representing the rock climbing community. However, the need to reach consensus led to reframing as a shared problem rather than a conflict: how to allow vehicular access without negatively impacting on the environment. This bridged conflicting positions and pushed discussion towards practical solutions, generating a new pragmatic story line centred on an integrated public transport package and limits on car parking. Yet operationalising this reopened the original conflicts, and by late 2004 little practical progress had been made, as Park Authority officials active within the Forum were rejecting the proposals and key implementing organizations—the bus companies and local transport authorities—were unwilling to support the Forum’s plans. This evolution reflects the interplay of the constraints imposed by the deliberative and consensual ethic of the process with the balance of stakeholders—there was a preponderance of recreational, rather than conservation, groups involved, with the BMC in particular playing a dominant role. While the legitimacy of the outcome appears at first sight to be guaranteed by the explicit rules of the deliberative process, and was a response to the

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demands of maintaining that legitimacy, closer examination suggests that the situation was more complex. The dominant rhetoric of the Forum’s legitimacy was grounded in decision making by consensus, supported by ground rules guaranteeing inclusivity and open, unforced debate—rules justifiable by deliberative democratic principles, and ostensibly consented to by all engaged stakeholders and (implicitly) by the Park Authority as the initiating body. However, even a process so circumscribed to a small geographical area faced the perennial problem of organising inclusive deliberation within large groups—a problem purportedly solved by the creation of the Steering Group, legitimised within the discourse of open deliberation by excluding decision making from its remit, and ensuring its accountability to the Forum through a detailed reporting-back process. Although much of the deliberative practice approximately matched the rhetoric, other legitimacy claims and challenges were made, and other legitimising norms relied upon, as story lines were promoted and challenged. A key Park Authority official suggested that many participants were too self-interested, and so that the outcomes reflected their bias towards recreational rather than conservation interests, conflicting with the statutory purposes of the National Park. Conversely, sports utility vehicle user groups believed that despite the Forum’s purported openness their views would be unacceptable, and rejected the consensual principle as challenging their legal access rights. Finally, several participants felt that the structured, consensus-oriented discussions excluded the consideration of important but contentious issues—reflecting the far from neutral role of the facilitator in organising the inclusion and exclusion of issues and voices from the debate (Connelly and Richardson, 2004). The Steering Group’s legitimacy was also challenged by other stakeholders, principally as it developed a decisionmaking role, and relied on different justifications for making its judgements. For example, on one occasion it rejected technical and legal advice in favour of ideas generated within the Forum—so favouring deliberative over epistemic justifications—while on another it resorted to voting as a way of resolving deadlock, justifying this abandonment of the consensus principle by the overriding need to reach a decision. Thus legitimacy within this arena was complex, with tensions existing between the demands of the deliberative process and the acceptability to different actors of the outcomes, and epistemic and representative norms for decision making being drawn on as well as the (rhetorically dominant) deliberative ethic. These tensions did not, however, disrupt the process—the participants ultimately consented to it, granting it legitimacy from their perspectives. But despite the process having been established by the Park Authority, there were non-participating stakeholders who did not view it, or its principles, as legitimate. Agencies outside the Park have rejected the Forum’s proposals as guidance for their own activities, while some

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of the Authority’s senior managers asserted that their land management expertise gave their decisions a legitimacy over and above the Forum’s deliberation-based legitimacy. 3.3. The Peak Park Transport Forum In contrast with the inclusive Stanage Forum, the PPTF is a closed partnership (Connelly and Richardson, 2004), initiated by the Park Authority as a means of resolving longstanding conflicts over transport strategy between it and the surrounding, mainly metropolitan, local authorities. Formally headed by a ‘members’ group’ comprising representatives of the Park Authority and local authorities, policy debate was principally carried out in closed meetings by a working group of officers from the authorities, the passenger transport executives and private rail companies,3 with representatives from one environmental NGO, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), attending on an ad hoc basis. These meetings were supplemented by occasional workshops for invited stakeholders. The partnership is purely deliberative, relying on the parent organisations to ratify and implement its principal output, the SPITS. The Forum’s deliberations were dominated by a mutually supportive pair of story lines. The first encapsulated a fundamental assumption that improved cross-Park roads are vital for the economic health of the surrounding urban areas. The second embodied the understanding that the costs and benefits of a sustainable transport ‘solution’ could be distributed equitably across the sub-region if all stakeholders subscribed to a ‘pragmatic compromise’, manifested in proposals to restrain traffic across the area and divert it onto a single improved cross-Park road— whose environmental quality would thus be sacrificed for gains elsewhere. The emergent consensus was problematic on two counts: the strategy was devised by unelected officers, without broad stakeholder involvement, and the outcomes were biased towards the interests of the urban authorities, with the ‘compromise’ being remarkably onesided and arguably at odds with the Park Authority’s statutory purpose of environmental protection. The public discourse of legitimacy for the Forum was that of representative democracy—institutionalised in the structure of indirectly elected decision makers advised by officers. At a formal level this rhetoric was matched in practice. However, in practice the members were presented with policy options which had been developed through ‘behind-closed-doors’ deliberation between officers. These discussions were informed and framed by technical reports prepared by external consultants. This process—illegitimate by the espoused representative democratic norms— was justified by officers both on the grounds that only they possessed sufficient expertise in a technical and complex 3

Transport governance in the UK is fragmented across public and private sectors. The Passenger Transport Executives are public bodies which co-ordinate some public transport functions in metropolitan areas.

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field, and by a straightforward appeal to output-based legitimacy, pointing to the successful production of the strategy. The key to this success lay exactly in the private nature of their deliberations, which allowed creative exploration of new, potentially uncomfortable, positions free from scrutiny or political ‘interference’. Wider participation—whether by elected members or a wider range of stakeholders—was viewed by most officers as potentially disruptive. Yet recognition of the weakness of this position led the group rather reluctantly to seek legitimacy by engaging directly with stakeholders from outside the original partnership and by involving the CPRE in the working group. Overall, the development of the strategy through the Forum was a deliberative process cloaked by formal conformity to representative democratic norms, but which in practice operated by a very different set of rules, justified on ‘output’ and expertise grounds. Despite the imbalance of interests inherent in the output, the process was deemed legitimate by those involved, reflecting judgements that the compromise achieved was better than no strategy at all. The CPRE were the exception to this consensus, yet they were caught between wishing to influence the process and simultaneously legitimising outcomes with which they disagreed. External recognition of the process’s legitimacy was more conditional. As implementation nears and the strategy’s implications become clearer the parent bodies may become less supportive. Because the process depends on its outputs to secure legitimacy it is vulnerable if these outputs come to be seen as unacceptable—as appeared to be happening by mid 2005, when opposition to the ‘pragmatic compromise’ was mounting within the Park Authority. 3.4. The National Park Authority The principal planning and policy making body for the National Park is the Park Authority, comprising councillors appointed from the Park’s constituent local authorities and members appointed by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as ‘experts’ and representatives of local parish councils.4 The Authority is structured like a local authority, with members working through committees, advised by a professional body of officers. Our empirical research focused on debates around transport issues in the Park Management and Policy Committees and full Authority meetings, in which officerdrafted reports were presented, followed by relatively informal debate and a final decision through voting by a show of hands. 4 The former are nominated, or self-nominate, while the latter are elected councillors from the lowest, very weak, tier of British local government. Parish councillors joined the Park Authorities following the Environment Act, 1995, in a national initiative to engage more local interests in National Park Governance.

Several competing story lines emerged but none became dominant, leaving the Park Authority without a clear transport policy. The ‘pragmatic compromise’ story line was imported directly from SPITS, but provoked two competitors—one prioritising environmental protection and another contesting the focus on cross-park transport and prioritisation of local economic issues. Three ‘operational’ story lines also developed: one encapsulating the Authority’s aspiration to achieve ‘modal shift’ away from car use by promoting public transport, a second rejecting this on the grounds of the Park’s impotence in this area, and the third attempting to reconcile these through proposing road user charging to fund public transport improvements and to divert traffic from the Park. The development of these story lines was tied to the activities of shifting coalitions of members and officers. The pragmatic compromise was promoted by a longestablished grouping of transport policy officers and members. The ‘prioritise environment’ challenge came from a group of more recently appointed members, with strong environmental concerns and expertise in sustainable transport, whose views are accorded considerable weight in debates. As this story line gained ground, it threatened the Park Authority’s approval of the strategy, prompting the latter’s proponents to support the road user charging story line, around which potentially all but the champions of local needs could coalesce. The ‘local needs’ story line was, unsurprisingly, articulated by the parish councillors. This story line was weak, as the parish representatives have been unable to form an effective grouping and, as individuals, are largely excluded from effective impact in the debates. Different discourses of legitimacy were present in these contests. The formalities of representative democratic process were largely adhered to and consented to. However, none of the members had straightforward representative legitimacy, opening up space for challenges. The councillors are only indirectly elected, being appointed by local authorities to the Park Authority. The expert appointees’ position is justified on epistemic grounds—they contribute their expertise and a wider, national interest perspective. Bringing in parish appointees was justified by the need to strengthen the representation of local interests. The parish appointees claimed greater legitimacy than any other group, being directly elected both to their own councils and subsequently by all the Park’s parishes before formally being appointed by the minister. However, their local interest focus was viewed by some officers and expert appointees as reducing their legitimacy to engage in policy making for a National Park—an argument used with some success to prevent the parish appointees’ substantive position from gaining ground. Further, the ideal of open debate between equal, elected representatives was significantly compromised. Transport policy was developed by small groups, to whom the majority of members deferred. Their dominance was justified, and explicitly acquiesced to, on the grounds of their expertise and the other members’ lack of knowledge

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and experience—reinforced by an unofficial hierarchy in which the expert appointees were seen as ‘senior’ and so justifiably more influential in debate. The second problematic aspect was the active involvement of officers, who worked very closely with one group of members to promote the Transport Forum’s Strategy within the Park Authority. This could only be defended on output grounds, since it clearly transgressed representative democratic norms. These aspects gave rise to two main internal legitimacy challenges, prompted by concerns about outputs but articulated as criticisms of the legitimacy of the process. Parish councillors, concerned by the neglect of local interests in SPITS, criticised the process of policy formulation by small expert groups which had resulted in this strategy dominating the Park Authority’s debates. Unease with the implications of the ‘pragmatic compromise’ for the Park’s environment prompted the second expert group, along with the parish representatives, to challenge the role of the transport officers in developing and promoting this policy. In contrast to the parish representatives, this newer expert group successfully reopened debate on continued Park Authority support for the strategy. Despite these internal wrangles the Park Authority has an unassailable overall legitimacy in the eyes of its members as the legally constituted authority for the Peak District National Park. It can also assume tacit societal consent for its authority, albeit weakened by the shifts in social norms referred to at the start of this paper. The extension of the Park Authority to include parish representatives was intended to tackle this, though their observed lack of influence suggests that this has not been particularly successful. 4. Conclusions In this paper we have pursued questions about how the legitimacy of rural governance processes can be assessed in practice. The subsequent analysis reveals the complexity of legitimacy in rural governance in the Peak District, and its importance: participants in all three arenas recognised the need to secure legitimacy as a precondition for effective governance and as a means of promoting their interests. Legitimacy claims were found to be significant elements in all the deliberative processes. Some common themes emerged. In each arena there was an explicit discourse of legitimacy, whose rhetoric provided a dominant rationale governing its explicit rules and accepted procedures. This rationale was different in each case, and was established differently: the representative democratic nature of the Park Authority was embodied in its formal processes, the deliberative democratic principles of the Stanage Forum were explicitly set out and the conformity of the Peak Park Transport Forum to representative norms was taken for granted as a function of its structure and membership. Practice sometimes—but

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not always—adhered to these rhetorics. However, most cases of ‘rule breaking’ conformed to alternative legitimacy discourses, which were either explicitly invoked at the time or could be summoned up as justification on challenge or under scrutiny by a researcher—there were very few cases of unjustified, or unjustifiable, action. Equally, however, none of the arenas successfully established a single, overriding legitimacy discourse. The rationale for each arena’s legitimacy was a hybrid, relying on a complex, shifting and often opportunistic mix of input and output, representative, participatory and epistemic justifications for a set of changing practices of policy making. This was not entirely a ‘free for all’ in which different discourses were equally likely to succeed. Although Hajer (2003) postulated the existence of an ‘institutional void’ which could be filled by new norms and practices, we, like Skelcher and his colleagues (Skelcher et al., 2004) found that traditional norms were still powerful. The strongest legitimising principles remained those grounded in representative democracy, whether used as the public cloak for less justifiable practices, or as the ‘default’ to which participants appealed when other arguments failed. Deliberative norms were relatively weak, and—perhaps most worryingly for proponents of partnerships on ‘effective governance’ grounds—reliance on output criteria was a source of weakness, providing opponents with the opportunity to challenge story lines’ legitimacy as well as opposing their substantive implications. This hybridity had a very significant consequence: that each arena and its processes, taken as a whole, was of dubious legitimacy judged against any single norm, and therefore open to challenge. It should be stressed that this was true of all three, both the new governance structures and the old, with the differences between them in the rhetoric of the processes and in the balance between different justifications drawn on for the actual practices. This paper reports on a single case study involving three examples of rural governance structures in a single policy field. The analysis provides a step towards a conceptualisation of the legitimacy of rural governance processes, supported by a generally applicable evaluative framework. This claim is partly based on the general nature of the arguments put forward, and also on the nature of the processes studied. Although legitimacy will be constructed differently in every individual case, those described here are not atypical in either purpose or function. They can be read as rather ordinary examples of the kinds of rural partnerships and other governance processes discussed by Edwards et al. (2000) and ourselves (Connelly and Richardson, 2004) and described in case studies across the literature of rural governance. Even the difference between these deliberative arenas and local partnerships with the funds to implement local plans— exemplified by the LEADER groups in the EU (Ray, 2000)—is probably not significant for the analysis, though one would anticipate that their debates over legitimacy might be rather different.

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To conclude, we also believe that tentative implications can be drawn out which go beyond a claim of generality for the analytical framework. While it follows from the analysis’s underlying constructivist philosophy that we would not want to evaluate new rural governance processes against some ‘external’, neutral standard of legitimacy, the approach in principle allows us to compare locally established institutional forms and legitimacy claims with wider societal norms. However, we suggest that the ‘hybridity’ of deliberative arenas—their reliance on multiple discourses of legitimacy—is likely to be widespread. No single conclusion can thus be drawn about the legitimacy of ‘the new rural governance’—particularly given that on close examination it appears that the new forms of governance are not necessarily so different from the old, and should not be, on principle, compared either favourably or unfavourably with them (as suggested by Papadopoulos, 2003). The wider judgements that can be made are thus about the process of legitimacy construction. Strengths and weaknesses are likely to be present in the way different arenas construct legitimacy, leading to different vulnerabilities to criticism. This suggests that in practice those establishing new governance structures should pay attention to all dimensions of legitimacy. In particular, if change is instrumental, intended to increase the effectiveness of policy making, then attention should be paid to input legitimacy—increasing capacity to act through processes which are justifiable only on output grounds leaves them vulnerable to challenge. Proponents of deliberative democratic processes should also take care. The theoretical problems identified by Parkinson (2003) and O’Neill (2001) were manifested in practice in the case study, and opened up even the apparently exemplary Stanage Forum to challenge. Given that such processes are probably necessarily hybrids of different legitimacy norms, the non-deliberative aspects should be explicitly attended to. Despite their perceived faults, traditional representative forms of governance are still very widely accepted—by the mass of the population, by many policy makers, and by many political analysts. In contrast, new participatory and partnership approaches rely on norms of deliberation which may only be accepted by (some of) the relatively limited circle of stakeholders directly involved. More generally, if norms of deliberative democracy are to take their place as accepted principles for legitimate rural governance, then a great deal of work is needed to discursively establish their acceptability both in networks of governance and with the wider population.

5. Further information about the three deliberative arenas: Stanage Forum: www.peakdistrict-nationalpark.info/ people/northLees/forum/ Peak Park Transport Forum and South Pennines Integrated Transport Strategy: www.spits.org.uk

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