Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses processes of translation when participation instruments travel from one institutional setting and application context to another. It critically discusses the institutional prerequisites for participatory governance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses processes of translation when participation instruments travel from one institutional setting and application context to another. It is argued that participatory governance is never known in advance, but needs to be made known again and again. The paper draws on cases that ranges from the fields of nuclear waste siting, urban planning, and scientific governance in which efforts are made to put in use relatively standardised participation instruments. In these processes, the involved actors' representations of governance as well as the institutional prerequisites for participatory governance play a role in the active work of refining and stabilizing certain participation instruments but also in radically changing them.