Copyright © 2002 the Canadian Journal of Sociology

Forest Management and Advisory Groups in Alberta:
An Empirical Critique of an Emergent Public Sphere
John Parkins

Canadian Journal of Sociology 27, 2 (Spring 2002): 163-184.

Abstract: The normative ideal of a public sphere, as defined by Habermas, is the realm of social life where private people come together as a public to engage in debate over the general rules that govern our lives. This debate is grounded in procedural rationality where bracketing of social difference, inclusiveness, and the force of the better argument provide the basis for mutual understanding and decision making. These ideals are used to determine the extent to which 12 forest resource advisory groups in Alberta achieve the standards of a public sphere. Results from interview and survey research show that, minimally, public advisory groups qualify as a public sphere and are engaged in representative thinking. Control of these groups by forest companies, however, tends to de-politicize the deliberative process through information management and bureaucratic constraints. Some recommendations are made that may serve to re-energize civic debate over the future of our national forests.

Résumé: L’idéal normatif d’une sphère publique, tel que défini par Habermas, est domaine de la vie sociale où les membres du public se rassemblent pour discuter des règles générales qui gouvernent nos vies. Ce débat est ancré dans une rationalité procédurale par laquelle la mise entre parenthèse des différences sociale, l’inclusion et la force du meilleur argument forment la base d’une compréhension mutuelle et des prises de décisions. Ces critères idéaux sont utilisés pour déterminer dans quelle mesure les 12 groupes consultatifs sur les ressources forestières en Alberta vérifient les critères qui caractérisent une sphère publique. Des entrevues et des recherches sur le terrain montrent que les groupes consultatifs répondent à ces critères et reflètent une pensée représentative seulement de manière minimale. Le contrôle de ces groupes par les compagnies forestières, cependant, tend à dépolitiser le processus de délibération par la gestion de l’information et les contraintes bureaucratiques. Cet article contient des recommandations qui pourront servir à raviver les débats civiques concernant l’avenir de nos forêts nationales

Introduction

Under what conditions can private people come together and discuss issues of public concern where rational argument, not social status, form the basis of informed consensus? This is the question Jurgen Habermas addresses in his attempt to develop the historical category of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989). Based originally in 17^th and 18^th Century Europe, the public sphere was manifested most ideally in the coffee houses of England. In modern society, however, the public sphere is thought of not as a single realm of publicness and openness but more pragmatically as a variety of institutions and formal procedures for precipitating a public sphere. According to theorists such as McCarthy (1992), the boundaries and structures of the places where debates about issues of public concern take place are influenced by history and culture and are therefore fluid. They are negotiated by specific communities according to a set of common needs and values. Some recent articles describing the role of deliberative democracy in managing a range of Canadian-based development projects, while highlighting their successes and failures, suggest a critical role for these public spheres (Richardson et al, 1993; Ali, 1997; Mehta, 1997; McDaniels et al., 1999). Another example of these modern public spheres can be found in the forest resource advisory groups of Alberta. These groups appear to meet some of the basic criteria of a public sphere in that they purport to provide space for a representative sample of citizens to become informed about and debate the veracity of existing forest management practices. In this paper, I undertake an empirically informed normative critique of these forest resource advisory groups as a public sphere. I begin by describing the category of a public sphere in historical context and then I delineate some of the contemporary revisions to Habermas’s ideal that, arguably, renders it more flexible in confronting some of the complexities of modern society. I then conduct a critique of forest resource advisory groups in Alberta using interview and survey data. Using the normative ideal of public sphere as a standard allows for a focused critique of contemporary public involvement processes. It also provides a basis, borrowing from Dryzek (1995), for uncovering public moments of distorted communication, the causes of such distortion, and the opportunity for social awareness and change. This critique leaves open the possibility of considering forest resource advisory groups to be, on one hand, acting effectively as a public sphere and, on the other hand, acting as a public sphere co-opted by or, to use Habermas’s term, feudalized by the private interests of industrial forestry. I conclude with a set of proposals for re-politicizing forest resource advisory groups and for creating space where authentic public debate and social learning can take place on matters of important public interest — our national forests.

Historical Development of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

Since its original German publication in 1962 (1989 English translation), the ideas presented by Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society have endured substantial criticism and remains a central theme in the theoretical debates around deliberative democracy (Villa, 1992; Dean, 1996; Torgerson, 1999; Dryzek, 2000; Pellizzoni, 2001). The book outlines the historically unique features of bourgeois public life during 17th and 18th Century Europe. This was a period marked by tremendous social change. Not only were traditional feudal modes of production giving way to early stages of global trade and capitalist accumulation, enlightenment ideals found in authors such as Immanuel Kant (1784) were creating the intellectual space for “men of learning” to challenge the status quo through informed argument. This new found freedom allowed citizens (the reading public) to challenge and to revise forms of social organization ranging from state bureaucracies to religious institutions. The Kantian idea of freedom also formed the basis for Habermas’s conception of the public sphere.

In terms of the emergent features of bourgeois society to which Habermas refers, the public sphere takes form with the supporting foundations of a literate public during a unique period of British and, to a lesser extent, European history. One of the most striking features of this historical period was the proliferation of coffee houses serving as conduits for businessmen to discuss matters of common concern or general interest. The first coffee houses were established in London around 1650. By the 18th Century they had grown in popularity to numbers in excess of 3,000 – all with a core of regulars. Discussions in these establishments were not only far reaching, from state politics to matters of trade, they were illuminated by an increasing circulation of ‘news’ journals that served to inform a literate public about matters of common concern. At their peak, coffee house patrons would go so far as to compete with each other by making arrangements with publishers to deliver the widest possible selection of intellectual material. In this sense, the bourgeois public sphere was interpreted by Habermas as a sphere of private people who would come together as a public to “engage public authorities over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor” (Habermas, 1989).

In discussing this phenomenon of informed and public argumentation within this historical period, Habermas used the German word Öffentlichkeit. The standard English translation is public sphere, which tends to connote a specific place or separate sphere from other social spheres. On one hand, the translation seems to fit nicely with the period of English coffee houses as a distinct locale of public discussion. This implied meaning can be somewhat restrictive, however, in that Öffentlichkeit can also be understood as a specific quality or aspect of various social arrangements in the form of “openness” or “public access” (Koivisto and Valiverronen, 1996). For instance, some contemporary social movements or social gatherings may exhibit certain signs or qualities of a public sphere. This subtle distinction will be important later in our discussion of forest resource advisory groups as a public sphere in the contemporary period of organized capitalism.

What are the key elements or features of a public sphere? Calhoun (1992) has summarized these features as follows. First, Habermas refers to a kind of “social intercourse” in the public sphere that disregarded social status altogether or at least treated social status as secondary to a form of trust in the process of argumentation and a shared public concern. In this way, the notion of common interest in truth or right policy supported the “bracketing” of social difference. Second, rational argument was the sole arbiter of any issue. In other words, any form of argument was to be guided by general procedures or what is now commonly called procedural rationality. Procedural rationality emerged in later refinements to the concept of a public sphere as a normative claim regarding the available procedures that facilitate the democratic process. In its extreme form, contemporary theorists refer to Habermas’s version of discourse in the public sphere as radically proceduralist. “It views normative dialogue as a conversation of justification taking place under the constraints of an ideal speech situation. The proceduralist constraints of the ideal speech situation are that each participant must have equal chance [to speak]” (Benhabib 1992). Third, the public sphere allowed for the problematization of areas that hitherto had not been subject to critical debate. Issues related to church and state authority were for the first time brought into public discourse as matters of common concern. Goodnight (1992) discusses this element in the context of a public moment, for instance within self-sequestered Eastern European societies of the mid-1900s, that can be facilitated by the show and display of alternatives. These alternatives would not be available for debate in the absence of a public sphere. Sckollerhorn (1998) refers to this aspect of the public sphere in terms of de-constructing barriers to the spread of new conviction. Fourth, for the first time in western history, inclusiveness or at least the potential for inclusion became an established principle. This principle was realized by a reading public with access to books and journals who where willing to engage in public discourse. These features of the public sphere were produced by a unique set of social arrangements and intellectual foment in the early capitalist stages of Europe. While debates have turned on the extent to which Habermas correctly understood the cultural conditions precipitating the 17th Century public sphere, his work is now generally accepted as an attempt to constitute the historical category of public sphere and then draw it as a normative ideal (Calhoun, 1992).

These historical conditions have been generalized by Habermas (1979) to a set of expectations about how people should behave in public communication. As an expression of procedural rationality described earlier, these norms for pragmatic communication are foundational and grounded in common sense. Forester (1985) organizes these norms into the following terms. Members of a deliberative community should be expected to speak comprehensively, sincerely, legitimately, and to speak the truth. Comprehension refers to the extent to which the listener can understand what is happening around them or to them. Sincerity refers to the general expression of the speaker’s intentions whereas truth refers to “the fit or misfit of statements or representations of reality with the reality supposedly represented” (1985:223). Legitimacy refers to the appropriateness of professionals making certain claims that may or may not be within their realm of professional expertise. Without these norms we have nothing but misunderstanding and mistrust.

As the title suggests (Structural Transformation), the normative ideal of a public sphere is only half the story. But because the normative ideal is of primary interest here, I will only briefly describe what Habermas means by the structural transformation of the public sphere. According to Habermas, structural transformation came about through a “refeudalization” of society. In other words, private organizations gained public power on one hand and the state became increasingly influential in areas of family and economy. This refeudalization had a destabilizing and de-politicizing impact on the public sphere by shifting the locus of public discussion from one of general or common interest to interests based on inequality and class division. As a result, the debate shifted from issues of general public concern to negotiation and compromise between interests not shared by society as a whole. The ensuing public sphere became a forum for advertising ideas related to what is now termed “special interest.” This form of public debate is likely most familiar to the 21st Century observer but according to Habermas, falls desperately short of the proposed normative ideal.

In his non-feudalized version of the public sphere, Habermas lays out a compelling ideal form for public deliberation and decision making with regard to the affairs of life. Although providing certain universal pragmatics for communication within the public sphere (what was later termed ideal speech acts), Habermas has been criticized by contemporary theorists for failing to identify an institutional basis for an effective public sphere in the organized capitalism of the 21st Century. To this end, several authors have taken Habermas’s normative ideals, set in a specific period of early capitalism, and have attempted to revise or advance a set of refinements that are at once more functional in pluralistic contemporary societies and more sensitive to the expanding realm of human concern broadly known as the natural world [1]. It is to these issues that we now turn.

Representation in the Public Sphere

Habermas’s conception of the public sphere, as a category of bourgeois public life, is most heavily criticized for its inability to deal equitably with issues of public representation in modern state bureaucracies – states which are characterized by a plurality of competing public interests. In its historical form, Habermas conceptualizes a singular public sphere which is claimed to be the public arena where those citizens armed with public knowledge can debate issues of public concern. In this sense, a multiplicity of public fora becomes dysfunctional in that the locus of public discussion tends to shift from issues of public concern to negotiation and compromise between private interests. Within the modern context, however, it is difficult for most theorists to imagine one overarching public sphere as adequate to addressing the concerns of a literate and concerned citizenry. As a normative ideal, anyone with a public concern is free to participate in the public sphere. From a practical point of view, however, the inclusiveness foundations of the public sphere developed by Habermas become problematic in modern literate societies where fundamental value differences are cherished in forms of multi-culturalism and where socio-economic stratification is pronounced (Fraser, 1992). Eckersley (1999) argues that the closest Habermas comes to addressing the question of representation within a single public sphere is role-playing. In the context of discursive dialogue, role playing means “anticipating and assuming the position of others in order to test and evaluate the consequences of proposed norms from all conceivable perspectives” (1999:27). Eckersley also points to Goodin (1996) as a defender of this role-playing orientation whereby participants anticipate and address the interests and possible objections of differently situated others as anticipatory internalization, or “a strategy that serves to educate and transform the preferences of participants in the deliberative community” Eckersley (1999:27).

Although this emphasis on role-playing may serve to broaden the range of issues and concerns under consideration within a public sphere, the problem of who can speak for whom and under what conditions remains acute. In order to circumvent this problem, Fraser (1992) takes the concept of a modern public sphere away from role-playing to what she calls subaltern counterpublics. These are “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (1992:123). In this way, she moves away from the concept of a singular public sphere to one of multiple or parallel public spheres. This position is immediately less elitist in its discounting of role playing or representative thinking by the few who are privileged to participate in the singular public sphere. Yet it does, however, initially lay itself open to Habermas’s criticism of multiple public spheres as a sign of refeudalization where public interests are displaced by negotiation and compromise between private interests. Fraser addresses this potential problem in her formulation by re-emphasizing the publicness of these counterpublics. Insofar as these groups are formulated to address issues of public concern and participate in public debate through information dissemination and argumentation, they continue to serve as a public sphere. According to Fraser, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. “On one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics” (1992:124). Fraser sees the emancipatory potential of these groups precisely between these dual characters in that these counterpublics “serve to offset, although not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies” (1992:124). Some classical examples of successful counterpublics might include feminists, gays and lesbians, people of colour, and environmental advocates. Fraser also makes a useful distinction between weak and strong publics; weak being those deliberative communities where activities are intended exclusively for opinion formation, and strong being those publics where opinion formation and decision making are undertaken (i.e. legislative assemblies).

With these refinements to the normative ideal of a public sphere, we can begin to imagine an ideal that might be more suitable to a re-constituting of the public sphere in modern society. A modern public sphere would likely not be constrained by one fora for public information and argumentation but more practically contained within a series of parallel public spheres where members of a stratified public can find their place to participate and therefore be less encumbered by vast differences in social status or value positions. These counterpublics would of course continue to adhere to the foundational elements of a public sphere provided by Habermas; an attempt to reach mutual understanding based on the force of the better argument. In this sense, these counterpublics may be judged by the degree to which they attain the qualities of publicness or openness (Offentlichkeit) required to engage in ideal speech acts. Toward this end, parallel public spheres may engage, to some extent, in role-playing where the perspectives of those not present in the deliberative community are brought to bear in the discourse. They may also seek to engage other deliberative communities or counterpublics in their attempts to become more inclusive in their understanding of public concerns and to achieve consensus through mutual learning. With this modern ideal of a public sphere in mind, we can appreciate Geoff Eley’s re-definition of a public sphere as “the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place” (Eley, 1992). The structure then is what Habermas identifies as the norms of communication within a public sphere.

Greening Discourse Ethics

Critical theorists have traditionally considered nature as subordinate and dominated by technical rationality. The main theme of Horkheimer and Adorno’s work in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) was that science has a tendency to dominate the natural world in ways that are practically unavoidable. These negative views of progress are challenged by Habermas in his theory of communicative action where he attempts to document instances of incremental change in defiance of the categorical imperatives of high-tech or science-based capitalism (Agger, 1985). According to Habermas, these attempts to affect change take place within a public sphere where human agents are equipped with knowledge and are free to discuss alternatives to solutions derived merely from technical rationality. Within this concept of human agency, again, Habermas is positioned for criticism by allowing only those who are capable of communication (agents who possess language) to participate in the deliberative community. His position is also biased toward those with greater rhetorical skills. This anthropocentric position is not necessarily problematic in that human agents could, through their reflexive capacity, act as agents on behalf of the nonhuman community. But of course this outcome is not guaranteed and one could imagine a scenario where human interests would take precedence over nonhuman entities, especially those with no immediate human value.

This problem of humans as representative of the nonhuman world turns on a theory that is grounded in human speech acts and an ontological dualism where a sharp distinction is made between human and nonhuman worlds. One step in breaking down this problematic dualism is to posit that nature is essentially a human construct. It is human in that nature has been influenced and even constructed by human history and culture to the extent that the natural world is conceived in very different ways. This breaking down of nature as a distinctive and autonomous realm is not unique to critical theory. Recent contributions from historians and philosophers (Cronon, 1996) have served to break apart this dualism and critique the idea of nature as a distinctive ontological category.

Vogel brings these arguments into Habermas’s theory of the public sphere in some persuasive ways. He argues that the social construction of nature “emphasizes the way in which the environment that surrounds us and that we take for granted as ‘natural’ turns out, on investigation, to be the product of human labour and hence literally socially constructed” (1996:6). If we agree that in this sense the natural world is indistinguishable from the human world, then a critical theory of the public sphere is capable of considerable import because of the sociality of nature. As a result, this theory rejects what is known as the naturalistic argument.

Such a naturalism thinks it can resolve what are fundamentally social questions — about the sorts of practices we as a society ought to be engaging in, the sort of world we ought to inhabit, the sorts of people we want to be — by appealing to ‘what nature demands’ of us or to the dangers of a dominated but powerful nature that might ‘take its revenge’ on us (Vogel 1996:9).

These arguments, according to Vogel, serve only to short-circuit the democratic process by labeling certain elements of our social world as ‘natural’ and therefore non-negotiable when in fact they simply reflect a limited set of normative claims about how the world should be. From the point of view of the public sphere, to ground normative claims outside the realm of the discursive community is to isolate these claims from discursive scrutiny. In the end, Vogel argues that to say nature is socially constructed is to make human agents morally responsible. “It is this recognition of our inextricable connection to and responsibility for the world we inhabit, it seems to me, that the source of a morally justifiable ‘environmental ethic’ is to be found” (1996:10).

Although the approach taken by Vogel goes some distance in providing discursive space for the concerns of nature in the public sphere, it remains explicitly anthropocentric in orientation. Humans remain the sole agents of moral argumentation and normative claims making, and as a result, ecocentric theorists argue the inadequacy of this position. With the increasingly troubling issues of global warming and biodiversity in mind, ecocentric observers take issue with Vogel’s cavalier claims about nature’s inability to take revenge on the human world. Humans may simply be reaping the consequences of poor management but from an ecocentric point of view, humans act on nature as one of many human and nonhuman agents of change. In this sense, there exists an essential human embeddedness in nature, which dictates an interconnectedness and an interdependence that is absent from the anthropocentric view. Unlike the anthropocentric view, which has been likened to technocentrism whereby nature is predominantly controlled and consumed, ecocentrism places the health and functioning of the ecosystem at centre stage with no fundamental differences between human and non-human things (Smith, 1998). Furthermore, from an anthropocentric view, humans are singled out for their communicative excellence. But Eckersley suggests that such a perspective is tantamount to human chauvinism. “To single out our particular forms of excellence as the basis of our exclusive moral considerability is simply human chauvinism that fails to recognize the particular forms of excellence of other life-forms” (1990:750). Eckersley then extends this argument to the public sphere in defense of nonhumans as communicatively competent – albeit in different ways than humans. If one of the pillars of the public sphere is the notion of representative thinking or role playing, one would expect human agents who are able to communicate through language, to act as representatives of others who are unable to do so. This other-regarding then may also be extended to the nonhuman community. Ecocentric theorists argue that “it is enough that a being is a centre of agency, however rudimentary, with its own life and special mode of flourishing for it to be recognized as a morally considerable being, deserving of recognition and consideration in human deliberation” (Eckersley, 1999:42). Some critics remain uncomfortable, however, with the unidirectional or elementary nature of our communication with nature. Surely in these instances a discourse or an interaction with nature is not possible. We can interpret signals from nature but nature is not able to challenge these interpretations. To this concern, Dryzek (2000) emphasizes the notion of effective listening as central to the public sphere. In many instances, humans are not able to challenge our interpretations of their needs. Nonetheless we attempt to do this by careful listening, by attempting to understand their needs and by communicating those needs to others. Finally, much like Smith’s (1998) call to ecological citizenship, Dryzek argues the most effective means of promoting an ecologically sensitive democracy would be to stop thinking of our ourselves as simply social beings and start thinking of ourselves as ecological beings.

With these extensions of the public sphere — the anthropocentric view which apprehends nature as a social construction, and the ecocentric view which demands a place for nonhuman agents in the public sphere — Habermas’s original conception of the public sphere has been modernized to suit the expanding concerns of contemporary society. To a degree, the demand for the inclusion of the nonhuman other remains problematic when one considers who should speak for these nonhumans and the proliferation of life forms entitled to consideration. Vogel also reminds us that how nature is represented, through naturalistic claims or discursive-based claims, remains an important consideration. Regardless of these difficulties, the normative claim for the inclusion of the natural world is established by these authors and is most closely represented in the field of environmental sociology as the new ecological paradigm (Dunlap and Catton, 1994).

Alberta Forest Resource Advisory Groups as a Public Sphere

We now turn our attention to a specific example where a public sphere is being forged in the contemporary context of organized capitalism. Forest resource advisory groups in Alberta are a relatively new phenomenon, yet they provide an interesting example of the complexity involved in public sphere formation in the modern state. Part of this complexity is the new science of forest management. Highly technical management tools such as models that emulate natural disturbances are being developed by joint ventures between multi-national forest companies and university departments. An example of this type of cooperation is the Sustainable Forest Management Network at the University of Alberta. In the face of this highly science-based decision-making apparatus, however, Canadians continue to be concerned about the sustainability of their forests. They are increasingly critical of management practices that are “seen as out-of-step with their own values that place environment over jobs” (Natural Resources Canada, 1997). In order to understand this lingering public dissatisfaction with modern forest management practices, it is useful to reflect briefly on the 20th century back-to-nature discourse. A social constructionist view of nature emphasizes the historical transformation away from an ideology of nature as a resource for capitalist development, toward an ideology emphasizing the aesthetic and nonfunctional values of nature (Hannigan 1995). Byproducts of this wilderness-as-a-resource perspective are national parks, special places initiatives, biosphere reserves, and a desire on the part of civil society to reorient our forest management infrastructure toward more ecocentric values. Sensing this disconnection between public opinion and existing forest management practices, national and provincial-level governments have emphasized and legislated public involvement as a key component to effective forest management decision making. In Alberta, the primary mechanism for ongoing public involvement in forest management is approximately 14 forest company-sponsored public advisory groups (PAGs) which are composed of 10 to 15 members of the general public and organized by the company to provide regular comment on local forest management plans and to address issues of concern to the general public. Public interests or concerns are transmitted by these groups in several ways. One mechanism would include forwarding local concerns to the PAG through a constituent representative. In one recent example, the local environmental organization forwarded concerns about the company’s stated goals in their sustainable forest management plan through their PAG representative. These concerns were then considered by PAG members. In some instances, a vote is taken to either adopt or reject these concerns as a group or to seek additional information before making a decision. In the end, if a PAG makes a recommendation to the company, the company retains the right to either accept or reject the recommendation. In other words, these groups have no decision making authority. Other ways of providing regular public comment relate to group learning about issues of common concern. For instance, PAG members may not have a specific concern but they may be interested in issues such as road access management or cumulative effects. These group interests then set the stage for guest speakers and other information gathering activities. These learning activities have a collective impact on PAG members as well as company representatives. The first PAG in Alberta was formed in 1989, but the majority of these groups have been in existence for less than five years. In most instances, the company seeks broad-based representation from the local community to initiate the group and then involves the group in developing terms of reference for subsequent additions or terminations of group membership. Members typically include representatives from the local labour union, educational, medical, and religious institutions, recreation clubs, business community, and Aboriginal and environmental organizations. Members are not paid for their time but meals are often provided by the company. Typically those who do participate have the time, the intellectual curiosity or concern for forest management activities in their region, and the support of a constituent group to act as their representative. In the remainder of this paper, I will use personal observation, interview, and survey data to further describe and explore the extent to which PAGs achieve the category of a public sphere with specific attention to issues of representation and the inclusion of nonhuman or ecological concerns in advisory group discourse.

Forest Resource Advisory Groups as a Public Sphere

Can PAGs be described as a public sphere or at least possessing certain qualities that might approximate the historical category of a public sphere? In order to address this question, we can refer back to the fundamentals of the public sphere outlined by Calhoun (1992). In brief, these include (1) a general disregard for social status, (2) truth claims founded solely on the force of the better argument, (3) allowance for the problematization of issues that might otherwise go undebated, and (4) the inclusion of all who are equipped (literacy and knowledge) and are willing to participate in the deliberative community [2]. I will argue that minimally, PAGs do qualify as a public sphere for the following reasons. First, PAGs are formed with the expressed intent of providing informed input into forest management plans [3]. Second, this input is to come from a diversity of local residents who are either directly or indirectly affected by forest management plans. For one advisory group, this diversity includes representatives from local government, other local industries, forest users (i.e. trappers), clergy, physicians, Aboriginals, forestry workers, and a number of representatives from technical schools and universities. These representatives do not have decision making authority, but they are intended to provide a reality check on forest management plans by isolating existing or potential issues of concern to the general public and discussing possible solutions with the use of best-available data. Third, through constituent representation, PAGs are open to all members of the local public who may have an interest or concern about forest management. In principle, these objectives loosely match the criteria defined by Calhoun, although as the following discussion demonstrates, the current functioning of PAGs show areas of significant weakness in their approximation to the category of a public sphere.

Representation in Public Advisory Groups

In the previous discussion, we note that representation has been identified as an area of theoretical weakness in Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. This stems largely from the demands for an expansion of the public sphere in the modern state. In this section, I will show that, by some specific objective measures, representation of the Alberta public within PAG membership is also weak. These measures are taken from survey research conducted in 1999 with 1000 Alberta residents and 158 PAG members. The Alberta sample was obtained by random selection of telephone numbers with follow-up procedures resulting in a 66% response rate. A complete list of 158 PAG members was obtained and distributed via group chairpersons. There was no opportunity for follow-up contact with individual members, resulting in a response rate of 45%. For a complete description of methods and descriptive statistics, refer to Parkins et al. (forthcoming). Survey results indicate that, based on some basic socio-demographic data, PAG members are not representative of the general public (Table 1). Public advisory groups and the general public have similar mean ages but PAG members are significantly more male, more educated and more wealthy than are the general public. Results from a second survey examining differences in forest values and attitudes between the Alberta public and PAGs also show significant variation in value orientations (McFarlane and Boxall 2001). For instance, in response to the statement ‘there is sufficient wood to meet our present and future needs,’ 63% of PAG members agreed while only 23% of the public agreed. Similarly, in response to the statement ‘logging causes few long-term negative effects,’ 52% of PAG members agreed while only 16% of the public agreed. These findings suggest that on average, PAG members tend to misrepresent the general public in Alberta; specifically in socio-demographic characteristics and in forest value and attitude orientation.

Table 1. Socio-demographic characteristics of survey samples

Characteristics	Alberta public	PAG Members
Mean age	45.6	48.0
Women (%)	51.4	16.9
Post-secondary education (%)	65.7	84.0
Household income &Mac179; $70, 000 (%)	30.6	49.3
PAG = Public advisory group.

In defense of this apparent failure to achieve a representative sample of Alberta residents in the membership of these advisory groups, it is possible that PAG members are engaged in role-playing and, in doing so, may anticipate and assume the position of others in an attempt to imagine a broader possible range of perspectives on a given issue. A set of survey questions provide some support for this position. First PAG members were asked ‘whose views were you selected to represent’. In response, 23% of members indicated ‘the public at large’ whereas 71% indicated ‘a specific stakeholder group’. Second, members were asked, now that you are a PAG member ‘which group(s) do you seek to represent’. This time, 43% indicated ‘the public at large’ and 50% indicated ‘a specific stakeholder group’. These findings show more than 20% of respondents switching from representing a specific stakeholder group to representing the public
at large — a finding that seems to support the idea of role-playing by PAG members. In other words, PAG members may anticipate or assume the position of others within their community even when their personal values may dictate a different position. The possibility of role-playing is also supported by data showing the range of information sources being accessed about forest management in Alberta.

It becomes immediately clear from Figure 1 that a large proportion of PAG members are accessing information from a wide range of sources.

---

Figure 1 Forest Issue Information Sources

---

Forest industries are the most frequent source but forest visits (first-hand experience), research scientists, government agencies, and environmental organizations are sources of information for at least 50% of PAG respondents. Access to, and the inclusion of, these sources and the ideas contained within them appear to be crucial to the maintenance of PAGs as a public sphere.

Support for the “representative thinking” argument is also supported by survey data showing the percentage of respondents who took action to express views or to gain information about forest management. Public advisory group members were found to be much more active than urban or rural residents in a range of activities such as donating money to environmental and conservation groups, joining environmental organizations, and writing letters to government agencies. These findings lend support to the notion that PAG members, although not necessarily representative of the broader public in socio-economic characteristics, may in fact be engaged in a process of other-regarding. Consistent with the 17th Century public sphere, described by Habermas, access to intellectual material was essential to an informed, rational argument, and to identifying problems that might otherwise go undebated. Furthermore, these intellectual materials may serve to stimulate the type of role-playing that theorists such as Eckersley (1999) suggest are crucial to the functioning of a public sphere in modern society.

---

Figure 2 Percentage of Respondents Who Take Action to Express Views or Gain Information about Forest Management

---

Advisory Groups as Counter Publics or Feudalized Public

A counter argument to the consideration of forest resource advisory groups as a role-playing public sphere may be to imagine them (to use Fraser’s term), as subaltern counterpublics. Using much of the same data presented in the previous section regarding the mismatch between public values and PAG values regarding forest management, one could argue that in fact, PAGs can be more accurately understood as a closely controlled groups of citizens who are educated selectively about the operations of the forest company in such a way as to render them effective in communicating company achievements. The most convincing data for this claim comes from the survey conducted by McFarlane and Boxall (2001) where the general views of PAG members were regularly aligned with those of Registered Professional Foresters (RPFs).

---

Figure 3 Distribution of Forest Value Segments among Stakeholder Groups

---

Registered Professional Foresters are employed by government and forest companies to manage the forest land base. They are commonly in a position to organize PAG meetings and act as brokers of information provided to PAGs. In this sense then, PAGs may, over time, begin to operate as a sophisticated communication mechanism for forest companies — a mechanism that can be viewed as a counterpublic in the sense that PAGs become parallel deliberative communities to environmental organizations, Aboriginal groups, or academic communities that are often critical of the existing forest management regime. Public advisory groups may also be thought of as rural or local counterpublics parallel to the urban or non-local public.

Public advisory groups as a counterpublic tends to break down, however, when considered in the context of the PAG mandate to be a representative group of local residents. According to Fraser’s definition of a counterpublic that is engaging in public life via communication with parallel publics, the notion of constituent representation and a diversity of public perspectives within one counterpublic becomes counterintuitive. Fraser also defines counterpublics as a training ground for agitational activities. This dimension seems to be missing from PAGs who are largely a collection of local organizational and institutional representatives. In the end, one might argue that PAGs represent a feudalized version of a public sphere. They are not referred to as refeudalized here because they were likely never completely untethered from private (corporate) interest, and although perhaps initially constituted by a diversity of public members, they may quickly become agents of private interest; a private interest that restricts debate and packages information in support of a private agenda. For example, PAG members may push companies to think about road access or cumulative effects management but they often remain dependent on the company to identify experts and information relevant to the issue. The values orientation depicted in Figure 3 is suggestive of this restricted range of access to information. As a result, PAGs may not represent a place where people initiate incremental change in defiance of the categorical imperatives of high-tech capitalism. Rather, they may be a place that confirms or endorses these imperatives and disseminates them to the broader public.

An example of PAGs as a feudalized public sphere comes from the attempts by some environmental organizations to use PAGs as a deliberative community where ecocentric arguments can be tabled for discussion and debate. In the ideal form, a public sphere would provide the opportunity for this debate to occur and, by force of the better argument, take positions that might be in conflict with existing ways of knowing or understanding the world. In contrast to this ideal, a number of environmental advocates refuse to participate in PAG deliberations citing unwillingness to listen and restricted agendas as barriers to Öffentlichkeit (openness and publicness). Some of this apparent unwillingness to include and carefully listen to arguments can be understood in terms of forest worker perceptions of the environmentalist community. Dunk (1994) suggests these relationships are governed by metaphoric and metonymic dimensions where being an environmentalist often means being a city-dweller, middle-class, abstract, and perhaps ignorant. These stereo-types then may form the basis for exclusion from the local public sphere. As a result, barriers within PAGs and other so-called multi-stakeholder processes have provoked environmentalists to take their arguments to a public arena where procedural rationality is more firmly entrenched – namely the courts. Countless examples of court cases where environmental advocates have forced corporations and municipalities to rethink the ways industrial activity is conducted or to halt development altogether speaks to the lack of public fora within the modern state to hold these debates and to achieve consensus based on the force of the better argument. Public advisory groups have the potential to provide this role but the extent to which ecocentric views, or dissenting views in general, are restricted from the discourse speaks to the feudalization of this public sphere.

Conclusion

Habermas provides a rich theoretical context in which to differentiate between positive and negative moments of public development (Goodnight 1992). These public moments can be contrasted with private moments where the dictates of scientific rationality permeate the decision-making process. These private moments foster a modernity that is on one hand highly progressive and creative and on the other hand concerned with private interest, personal gain, and the narrowing of public options to those in support of private interest. Habermas identifies a period in history, a critical period between feudal societies and capitalists states, where a vibrant public sphere provided the opportunity for private citizens to debate and influence issues of public concern. The foundational elements of this public sphere provide the material for a normative ideal to critique modern public spheres. One of the challenges for theorists in conducting this critique is to propose credible alternative strategies for organizing a modern public sphere that might coincide more closely to the ideals defined by Habermas and other contemporary theorists. This study argues that public advisory groups within the forest industry of Alberta go some distance in achieving the category of a public sphere. Advisory groups seek local representation, they appear to access a wide range of intellectual material, and they appear to engage in role playing. In other aspects, however, these advisory groups fail to achieve the ideals of a public sphere. Most critically, PAGs are sponsored by private interests in the form of a forest company. Company representatives are often the gatekeepers of information provided within formal group meetings and they appear to maintain a degree of control over who can supply knowledge to group deliberations and what range of forest management alternatives are given access and legitimacy within the discursive arena. These procedural limits are manifest in some members of society and some dominate perspectives on forest management being, if not eliminated from the deliberation, at least frustrated in their ability to argue their position. First Nations and environmental advocates are prime examples.

Advisory groups can move closer to the norms of a public sphere in a number of ways. Forester (1985:219) provides an extensive list of recommendations for enhancing deliberative process in public planning. These include: supplying technical and political information to citizens that will enable more effective participation, encouraging community-based groups to press for full disclosure of project plans, and encouraging independent project reviews and investigations. Public advisory groups can benefit from many of these recommendations as well. First, by creating some distance between the group and the company, PAGs can achieve some autonomy in setting the procedures for deliberation over forest management issues. This would include autonomy over what kinds of issues are discussed and how and where technical information is accessed. Second, citizens or counterpublics who are unwilling to participate in regular deliberations may be willing to provide information or technical presentations to the group. This may enhance the group’s ability to engage in representative thinking on behalf of those counterpublics. Third, the membership of these groups may be expanded to include a wider range of interests. If this is impractical, then a rotation of public representatives instead of static membership may be more appropriate for achieving the inclusiveness that is so crucial to a public sphere.

Forest resource advisory groups have become a primary mode of public participation in forest management decision making. These groups have provided the space for private citizens to debate issues of public concern in forest management, but for many within society, they have not played that role. At best, these groups may be described as a public sphere engaged in role-playing activities to compensate for inadequate representation within their deliberative communities. At worst, they may be described as feudalized public spheres, acting out the consultative requirements of corporate interest and ill-equipped to debate the substantial social and scientific concerns about how Canada’s forests are being managed and for whom they benefit.

References

Agger, Benjamin
1985 “The dialectic of deindustrialization: An essay on advanced capitalism.” In Forester, J. (ed.) Critical Theory and Public Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ali, S. Harris
1997 “Trust, risk and the public: the case of the Guelph landfill site.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 22(4): 481–504.

Benhabib, Seyla
1992 “Models of public space: Hannah Arendt, the liberal tradition, and Jurgen Habermas.” In Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Calhoun, Craig
1992 “Introduction: Habermas and the public sphere.” In Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cronon, William (ed.)
1996 Uncommon Ground. Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Dean, Jodi
1996 “Civil society: beyond the public sphere.” In David Rasumssen (ed.). Handbook of Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Dunk, Thomas
1994 “Talking about trees: Environment and society in forest workers’ culture.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31(1): 14–34.

Dunlap, R.E. and W.R.Catton
1994 “Toward an ecological sociology: The development, current status and probable future of environmental sociology.” In W.V. D’Antonio, M. Sasaki and Y. Yonebayashi (eds.). Ecology, Society & The Quality of Social Life. New Brunswick/London: Transaction Publishers.

Dryzek, John S.
2000 Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. Liberals, Critics, Contestations. New York: Oxford University Press.
1995 “Critical theory as a research program.” In Stephen K. White (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Habermas. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Eckersley, Robin
1990 “Habermas and green political thought.” Theory and Society 19: 739–776.
1999 “The discourse ethic and the problem of representing nature.” Environmental Politics 8 (2): 24–49.

Eley, Geoff
1992 “Nations, publics, and political cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” In Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fischer, Frank
1990 Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Forester, John
1985 “Critical theory and planning practice.” In Forester, John (ed.) Critical Theory and Public Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fraser, Nancy
1992 “Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” In Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goodin, Robert
1996 “Enfranchising the Earth, and its alternatives.” Political Studies, 44: 835–849.

Goodnight, G. Thomas
1992 “Habermas, the public sphere, and controversy.” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 4 (3): 243–255.

Habermas, Jurgen
1964 “The public sphere: An encyclopedia article.” In Bonner, S.E. and Kellner, D. (eds.). 1989. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
1979 Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence). Cambridge: MIT Press

Hannigan, John A.
1995 Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective. New York: Routledge.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno
1972 Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. by John Cumming). New York: Herder and Herder.

Kant, Immanuel
1991 “An answer to the question: ‘What is enlightenment?’”(1784) In Reiss, H. (ed.) Kant: Political Writings (trans. H.B. Nisbet) 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Koivisto, Juha and Esa Valiverronen
1996 “The resurgence of the critical theories of the public sphere.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 20(2): 18–36.

McCarthy, Thomas
1992 “Practical Discourse: On the relationship of morality to politics.” In Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press.

McDaniels, Timothy, Robin S. Gregory and Daryl Fields
1999 “Democratizing risk management: successful public involvement in local water management decisions.” Risk Analysis 19(3): 497–510.

McFarlane, Bonita L. and Peter C. Boxall
2001 “Forest values and attitudes of the public, environmentalists, professional foresters, and members of public advisory groups in Alberta.” Northern Forest Centre Information Report NOR–X–374. Edmonton, AB.

Mehta, Michael
1997 “Re-licensing of nuclear facilities in Canada: the ‘risk society’ in action.” Electronic Journal of Sociology 3(1) [http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.001/mehta.html]

Natural Resource Canada
1997 Tracking survey of Canadian attitudes towards natural resources issues. Halifax, NB: Corporate Research Associates.

Parkins, John R., Richard. C. Stedman and Bonita L. McFarlane
Forthcoming Public Involvement and Forest Management in Alberta: Do Public Advisory Groups Represent the Public? Northern Forestry Centre Information Report NOR–X–382. Edmonton, AB.


Pellizzoni, Luigi
2001 “The myth of the best argument: power, deliberation and reason.” British Journal of Sociology 52(1): 59–86.

Richardson, Mary, Joan Sherman and Michael Gismondi
1993 Winning Back the Words: Confronting Experts in an Environmental Public Hearing. Toronto, ON: Garamond Press.

Skollerhorn, Erland
1998 “Habermas and nature: the theory of communicative action for studying environmental policy.” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 41(5), 555–573.

Smith, Mark J.
1998 Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Torgerson, Douglas
1999 The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Villa, Dana R.
1992 “Postmodernism and the public sphere.” The American Political Science Review 86(3): 712–721.

Vogel, Steven
1996 Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press.

December 2002
© CJS Online