Stakeholder participation and the role of local government in local environmental sustainability programs: legitimacy, social capital, and political trust

Abstract

An extensive literature on local environmental sustainability has addressed the importance of governments more broadly, and local governments particularly, in terms of playing a leading role in managing and safeguarding local environmental resources. Nonetheless, there has been very little theoretically-inspired or empirical research that has investigated how local governments should perform the role. Therefore, the major objective of the present study is to explore the role of local government, with respect to stakeholder participation, in local environmental sustainability programs. An integration of stakeholder salience and institutional theories in a way not previously seen in the prior literature provides a logical explanation not only of the cases being studied—Saensuk municipality and Pattaya city, but also of the development of conceptual framework for systematic understanding the relationship between the participation of key stakeholders and the role of local government in local environmental sustainability programs.

Given the context of local government, the qualitative approach based on the principles of constructivism was employed for this present study. In achieving the objectives of the study, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with local government representatives and a sample of key stakeholders from the two local governments were used along with other sources of evidence. The results significantly revealed that social capital, political trust, and legitimacy were the key sources explaining the causal relationship of the participation of key stakeholders and the role of local government in local environmental sustainability programs. Based on this key finding, some considerations should be primarily addressed. First, it was found that there is the relationship between social capital and political trust in the presence of government trustworthiness. Secondly, there is a direct effect of social capital on information accessibility. Lastly, organizational legitimacy entails the relationship between the key stakeholders’ participation and the role of local government in local environmental sustainability programs. Not only to support the central thesis of stakeholder theory that underline the importance of managerial decisions, the findings also refine the theory of stakeholder salience in terms of specifying the condition that explains the way local governments exhibit their roles in order to maintain and enhance their legitimacy. As a result, this study can grapple with the issue of organizational dominance over self-serving compliance, which has been a slighted topic in institutional analysis, including encouraging local governments to redefine their role in building a trustworthy local government that, in turn, has a high likelihood of enhancing political trust, cultivating social capital, and strengthening civil society for moving towards local environmental sustainability goals.