Abstract
This paper focuses on a circumstance that enables to initiate consensus building process in an infrastructure project for environmental conservation, in a situation of serious social distrust among various stakeholders caused by past experiences. Firstly, this paper introduces the actual process of the circumstance building as the social basis of consensus building in the erosion control projects at Miyazaki coast, in which initiation of consensus building process was seemed to be difficult because of the serious distrust among local/central governments, residents and citizens with various interests. Especially, various actual distrust and its calming process are described in detail. Secondly, based on the analysis of the circumstance building process, this paper finds three key elements to introduce the social basis among various stakeholders to initiate consensus building, (a) recognition of others and their values, (b) understanding of administrative institutions, and (c) objective scientific attitude. Then, this paper shows the importance of understanding of that various stakeholders’ interests were generated in the identical background with certain space and history, and the range of space and history is determined by the nature of relevant infrastructure. This paper also shows the importance of stakeholders’ expectation and trust to project authority to shift to consensus building process. Thirdly, based of the above discussion, two conceptual structure models are presented, that is, for circumstance building process and for shifting to consensus building process, regarding infrastructure project for environmental conservation. The former model shows the process of sharing recognition of the three key elements. The latter shows the structure of consensus building process to be shown in advance, after circumstance building, which involves fair dialogue circle among stakeholders and chronological adaptive/amendment circle.
