Offer Help

This is a personal story about fifty years of experience with participation, the last eighteen of which have been with aviation. As webmaster of UECNA, I have not listed the forms of action in random order, but with one goal: to provide insight into how you can increase your influence. 
Wouter Looman

If you are bothered by aircraft, you want to complain about it. You look for an entrance to let people know that the noise should be reduced. Airports often have a counter where you can file your complaints. With a bit of luck, you will be told what the cause of the nuisance is, that they have heard you and that they are collecting complaints so that policymakers can deal with them. Of course, this is mainly a sweetener that only a small part of the complainants will accept. Because nothing will probably change and the growth of aviation will only increase the nuisance. Stories about quieter airplanes are bullshit if the frequency increases.

A second step is to find people with the same situation, to organize yourself. You are never the only one who experiences nuisances and often like-minded people have already started a group, association or foundation to join forces. Because on your own you have no chance against the aviation sector.

Can you achieve anything as a group? A joint protest is at least more visible and you can gain supporters and media attention. But I don’t know if a plane has ever been grouded because of a demonstration. Yes, perhaps that one time when activists chained themselves to private jets. But that was of course short-lived. And the question is whether those in power were really impressed. In most cases you come to oppose each other more strongly.

You can try to make your own organization stronger by lobbying to gain allies, for example for political support. Money can play an important role if you want to take on the powerful aviation lobby. You can use it to improve your PR, set up a good website, carry out spectacular actions and last but not least create a buffer to try to achieve something through legal means.

Perhaps you want to try to get influence with arguments, with fact finding. You want to refute myths about the importance of aviation for the economy and employment. These are the arguments that, according to governments, make it fully worth terrorizing citizens with noise, emissions, damage to health, quality of life and learning ability, damage to nature and global warming, yes of course, the usual spiel. So far, it has not succeeded in keeping a plane on the ground, despite the fact that good arguments hold water. And of course we have to continue with that and hope that sentiment will start to change.

Going to court seems to offer the best chance of achieving something. Whether it concerns challenging permits, laws, exceptions, licenses, violations of human rights or health: governments and companies must take this into account. If they are not well-intentioned, they will deploy an army of lawyers, use delaying techniques, play the (right-wing) media and invoke force majeure. Almost all countries have agreed with ICAO to the growth model and freedom of aviation.

The last form of action is the one you are reading about now and which is actually the odd one out. Offer help. How do you mean help? I will explain, with a few disclaimers, because this will not work very often. First, I will tell you something about participation.

Participation

Whether citizens have an influence on policy depends largely on the space that authorities are willing to give. Often, the personal goodwill of a CEO, minister, alderman or other key figure determines the benefit that citizens see in investing energy in participating.

Because participation can be a fig leaf to keep up the appearance of exerting influence. In addition to outright manipulation, citizens can be used by letting them give their opinion, then doing nothing with it and making a good impression with the fact that they have involved citizens. Information evenings, consultation and participation are well-known examples. Letting citizens participate in sounding boards is also a notorious form of fake participation.

Cooperation with citizens as a recognized stakeholder is probably the highest achievable when it comes to aviation. But that cooperation does not come about automatically. For that to happen, both authorities and citizens have to trust each other. And that distance is quite large. In my opinion, the only chance for citizens to gain influence on the authority is to build personal contacts with employees/civil servants.

That is also the entrance: building a relationship of trust with employees who have access to the authority. That requires a specific attitude. If you get the opportunity to talk to them, you should not:

• come and complain – they already know that you are experiencing nuisance and they will defend themselves;
• start telling stories – they know the stories and can sit back and relax;
• fight to be right – you are not going to win, you are testing the budding relationship and nothing will change.

What you can do is ask open questions and listen. Suitable questions are: What do you think about the fact that citizens experience so much nuisance? How do you deal with complaints? How can we accommodate citizens? Can we help you with this?

This is the way we have managed to tackle it in the Netherlands at various levels. At the risk of feeling caught out, this is a method that has worked. Excellent contacts have been established both at a local level (for example, the Amsterdam municipal government, in this case the successive aldermen and their permanent civil servants) and at a national level at the ministry responsible for aviation. I dare say that this has an influence on policy. Of course, that influence stands or falls with the willingness to do something with the knowledge of citizens. But it cannot be denied that the Netherlands is the only country with a (small) decrease in the number of flights and that shareholder Amsterdam sees a reduction of no less than twenty percent.