How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public’s perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants “confer” and “retract” in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public’s expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

公众参与规划和环境治理如何使民主合法性？我将乐观与批判性参与文献区分开来，我认为这两方面的研究都倾向于忽视公众对此问题的看法。实际上，这种监督对民主合法性产生了强烈的规范性和本质主义理解，将合法性视为参与式治理的过程或实质的内在因素。从对民主合法性的反本质主义理解开始，我主要基于当代社会对民主制度的看法和期望，我概述了一个规范不可知论的框架，以探讨如何通过参与来实现合法性。使用这个框架来调查瑞典公民参与瑞典参与过程的经验，我强调了民主合法性如何可以有效地理解为个人公民参与者以多种方式“授予”和“撤回”的多维，临时和或有的素质。在此基础上，我最后提出建议，持续进行的研究与公众对参与式治理的期望和经验的参与可以揭示对实现民主计划成果的潜力和挑战的批判性见解。