Page - 186 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Decision-making in Repository Siting Procedures – Democratic and Societal Challenges for Nuclear Waste Governance MBAH, Melanie Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS), Karlsruhe, Germany Abstract A prerequisite for siting procedures of contested infrastructures is that they meet the requirements of democracies of the 21st century. Meanwhile, societies that are plural and fragmented hamper interest aggregation and challenge decision-making in increasingly complex problem structures. Therefore, classical top-down approaches of decision-making are criticized and often fail in that either no site can be identified or site identification leads to major conflicts. Democracies in general seem to be less able to take robust decisions that reach acceptability and legitimacy. Participation then becomes a “bestseller”. The utilization of participatory elements in decision-making procedures is continuously expanding, in order to represent various views and interests to recreate legitimacy. As a result, new challenges evolve with regard to participation and democratic standards and principles. This article systematizes the literature on participation and decision-making focusing on nuclear waste governance in Germany as an example for a siting procedure of a contested infrastructure. It shows that participation is demanded from different actors with opposing views on what participation means and why and how it should be implemented. On the other hand, democratic principles of equality and legitimacy are put into question when informal participation is intensified. A solution for this is to institutionalize participatory elements, which also means new working modes of institutions and authorities and a change of democratic structures. Nuclear waste governance in Germany is a good example for current efforts undertaken towards this direction. 1. Introduction Recent developments in decision-making on contested infrastructure projects indicate a participatory turn for example in nuclear waste governance (Bergmans et al. 2015; Seidl et al. 2013), but also in other fields such as renewable energy or transport infrastructure (Renn & Schweizer 2009; Römmele & Schober 2013). The reason for that is that traditional government approaches lost their steering capacity in solving complex and wicked problems1 (Brunnengräber et al. 2014). Some authors therefore diagnose a current crisis of representative democracy (e.g. Kriesi 2013). This crisis is also known as post democracy (Crouch 2004). The background of this diagnosis is the growing number of protests, citizens’ groups and social movements that demand for more transparency, participation and democratization (Dalton 2014; Geißel 2012) and also the restructuring of nationalism, for instance in Germany in the form of Pegida2 or the AfD3. That is 1 Wicked problems are somehow unsolvable or unstructured. This indicates the need to organize learning processes which include a pluralism of perspectives (Brunnengräber et al. 2014; Hoppe 2010, 228-229). 2 PEGIDA means Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamification of the Western World and is right nationalistic movement. 3 AfD is the name of a new political party in Germany, called Alternative for Germany which represents right 186