E-Participation and Climate Change: Are Local Governments Actively Promoting Responsible Behaviors and Offering Opportunities for Citizen Involvement?

Citizens are demanding greater transparency and accountability from their governments, and seek to participate in shaping the policies that affect their lives. The diffusion of the Internet has raised expectations that electronic tools may increase citizen participation in government decision-making and stop the decline of trust in political institutions. This paper brings together two relevant topics, e-participation and climate change, analyzing the websites of the environment departments of European local governments that have signed the Aalborg+10 commitments, to establish to what extent European local governments are making use of the Internet to promote e-participation and environmental-friendly behaviors among their citizens. Our results show that the developments on e-participation are higher in those areas just giving information than in the areas related to interactivity. The Internet as a tool to revitalize the public sphere is still limited to those countries with higher levels of transparency and a culture of citizen engagement.