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Paper short abstract

Analysing participatory practices in air pollution governance in India, the paper traces how institutional practices shape the promise of inclusion. It makes the case for designing participatory practices that can exceed manageable consensus while remaining responsive to the heterogeneous publics.

Paper long abstract

Public participation is widely framed as a democratic corrective to technocratic decision-making, yet it can also function as a mechanism through which authority is stabilised and legitimised. The paper analyses the implications of this duality through an examination of air pollution governance in India. It traces how institutional practices shape the promise of inclusion, from technical management of air quality knowledge and policy strategies that foreground behavioural compliance and individual responsibility to participatory platforms that structure how publics encounter pollution data and policy discussions. These practices reveal how citizens are mobilised within a broader governance arrangement that stabilises authoritative forms of expertise.

The analysis unfolds across three planes: the tension between singularity of the expert authority and the diverse claims of affected publics; the temporal politics of crisis; and the infrastructures of participation that act as sites of boundary work. Our central analytical wager in this paper concerns designing participatory practices that can exceed manageable consensus even as they remain responsive to the heterogeneous publics who must live with the futures. The true measure of “inclusion,” we argue, lies in moments of friction where claims arrive from the publics as smell, irritation, symptoms, unequal vulnerabilities, and contested responsibilities which must be rendered actionable within policy.