Exclusion: the necessary difference between ideal and practical consensus

Abstract

Consensus building has become an everyday activity in environmental planning and management, and its use is often held to be a symbol of a fair, transparent and fully participative process. However, this paper argues that in any real situation practical constraints and tensions between different goals lead almost inevitably to compromises in the ideals of inclusivity and non-coercion. This gap between ideal and practical consensus is opened by a range of practices which exclude potential participants, interests, issues, actions and/or substantive outcomes. The paper contends that insufficient attention is paid by practitioners and researchers to these shifts, which are often confused or masked by a rhetoric of ideal consensus. It is concluded that practitioners need to reflect critically on these questions of exclusion, so that the necessary but difficult judgements involved in designing practical consensus building processes can be made transparently, and in ways which do not undermine the processes' legitimacy.