Self-Authorship and Participant Engagement in Policy Dialogue: Evidence from a Policy Dialogue in Fukushima

Abstract

This paper investigates how self-authorship—an internal sense of legitimacy, capacity, and responsibility to contribute—influences engagement in community-based policy dialogue. Using data from 1F Community School, a policy dialogue in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, the study analyzes questionnaire responses from 51 participants. Engagement is assessed through four indicators: speaking, empathy, learning, and reflection. The analysis finds that self-authorship is significantly associated with emotional and reflective forms of engagement, while unrelated to gain of knowledge. Willingness to participate in next policy dialogue is not linked to self-authorship, but instead to perceived power asymmetry. These results suggest that structural design alone is not enough to foster meaningful engagement. The study highlights the importance of designing dialogue spaces that support participants in seeing themselves as valid contributors, especially in technically complex and emotionally sensitive contexts like environmental recovery.