| dc.description.abstract | Technoscientific controversies have exposed the uncertainty of scientific facts, and that science cannot always provide the ‘solution’ to public issues. Public participation is meant to increase legitimacy of the outcomes, and to restore trust in political and scientific institutions. Scholars within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have cautioned that ‘technologies of elicitation’ may affect public participation by for example imposing a framing of the issue at hand on the public. Thus, debates may be reduced to technical questions rather than discussions of the public meaning of the issue. This thesis explores public participation in one technoscientific controversy in a policy context. The European Union (EU) is developing a classification system of sustainable activities (EU taxonomy), where each activity becomes classified through a set of technical criteria. Through practice-oriented document analysis, the thesis studies the process of defining the sustainability of hydropower. The thesis follows the drafts of the sustainability definition, the public consultations and the feedbacks from the first rough outline of ‘sustainable hydropower’ to the adoption of the definition. The aim of the thesis is to explore whether the public consultations affected the definition of ‘sustainable hydropower’. This entails a twofold research interest, both in how the technologies of elicitation affected feedback, and how in turn feedback on sustainable hydropower attempted to modify or reframe the issue. The three public consultations on the sustainability definition employed two different formats. Two were structured as questionnaires and one was an open public consultation. The thesis finds that there were highly diverging views on the issue and that the format of the technologies of elicitation affected the feedback. For the questionnaires, the feedbacks mostly attempted to introduce small modifications of the issue, but maintained the same framing of sustainable hydropower as proposed by the EU. The open consultation significantly increased participation, especially since it facilitated for large-scale campaigns. Although most submissions still addressed the technical details, there was a larger variety of feedback. Many respondents attempted to reframe sustainable hydropower by introducing a broader definition of ‘sustainability’. Thus, the format of the public consultations had an impact on the public’s opportunity to affect the definition of sustainable hydropower. | eng |