The European Research Council (ERC) awards Prof. Jens Newig a prestigious Advanced Grant

Citizens' assemblies advise on climate policy, municipalities let the public help decide on budgets, and even in autocratically governed countries there are participatory planning processes. Public participation is meant to promote better and fairer decisions for the environment and climate, as well as a more vibrant democracy. Yet although participation is booming worldwide, research has so far been unable to explain precisely when such formats work — and when they don't. Existing research relies predominantly on individual case studies or regionally limited investigations, and therefore allows only limited generalisations.
This is where the project "GAPS – Global Assessment of Participation in Sustainability Governance," funded with 2.5 million euros, comes in. For the first time, it aims to systematically analyse which forms of participation contribute to effective, just, and democratically legitimate decisions. "There are thousands of individual case studies on participatory processes worldwide. We want to bring this knowledge together and make it comparable," explains Professor Dr. Jens Newig, Professor of Governance and Sustainability at the School of Sustainability. Together with his team, he intends to evaluate nearly all documented participatory processes worldwide from recent decades.
A large proportion of these studies have not been published internationally in English, but rather in edited volumes, reports, or local publications, and are thus barely visible internationally. "A purely human team could not accomplish this evaluation," says Newig. Methodologically, the project combines statistical analyses and qualitative case studies with innovative AI-supported approaches: large language models such as Claude or Gemini help the research team evaluate thousands of texts in different languages. In doing so, the team is venturing into uncharted scientific territory. All analyses are validated through several independent evaluations.
Both classic democratic states and countries of the Global South, as well as authoritarian-governed states, are taken into account. "We know from earlier studies that genuine power sharing is often a decisive factor for successful sustainability decisions. Now we want to understand the reasons and clarify whether these relationships hold worldwide," says Jens Newig.
A central challenge of the project is Western-shaped biases. "We have to be careful not to unconsciously apply Western standards to participatory processes in entirely different contexts," Newig emphasises. The team addresses this with a theoretically grounded evaluation framework and deliberately includes studies from as many languages, countries, and publication formats as possible. Artificial intelligence itself also carries risks: language models can interpret texts differently or "drift" over the course of an evaluation. For this reason, each case is processed by several models and checked on a sample basis against the assessments of human coders. "For us, artificial intelligence is a tool, not an oracle," Newig stresses. "In the end, what matters is that the results are scientifically robust."
In the long term, the results are intended to form a freely accessible knowledge base. Public administrations, ministries, and organisations could use it to research comparable case studies and gain reference points for designing their own participatory processes.
To carry out the work, Newig is building an international team; one postdoctoral position and four doctoral positions are planned.
ERC Advanced Grants offer experienced researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious projects that can lead to significant scientific breakthroughs. They are among the most prestigious and most highly endowed research funding awards in Europe, granted by the European Research Council under the Horizon Europe programme.

Die ERC Advanced Grants bieten erfahrenen Forschenden die Möglichkeit, ehrgeizige Projekte zu verfolgen, die zu bedeutenden wissenschaftlichen Durchbrüchen führen können und gehören zu den renommiertesten und höchstdotierten Forschungsförderungen in Europa, die vom European Research Council im Rahmen des Programms Horizon Europe vergeben werden.