Stakeholders’ Framing of Societal Conflicts in Citizen Participation is Associated with Policy Makers’ Selection of Proposals

Citizen participation aims at resolving societal conflicts about sustainability policies. How citizens subjectively interpret and frame conflicts in citizen participation and how their frames impact policy design, is poorly understood. We address this gap by coding and analyzing citizens’ conflict frames (N = 701 policy proposals) in the case of a large-scale urban mobility transition project. We predicted that (H1) citizens tend to frame proposals in a distributive win-lose rather than in an integrative win-win fashion, that (H2) citizens evaluate integrative win-win frames more positively, and that (H3) policy makers tend to select integrative win-win frames for designing policies. The findings show that citizens primarily used distributive win-lose frames, whereas policy makers tended to select integrative win-win frames for designing policies. By identifying this gap between individual-level framing and societal-level selection, our findings offer novel insights into effective framing of policy proposals. Implications for improving participation processes are discussed