An external Ph.D. research entitled "The cost and value of participation in water governance: A case study of Indonesia and The Netherlands."
The literature continues to emphasize the importance of stakeholder participation, although it also emphasizes that it can be misused and misapplied. Very few research has covered participation costs, because there is an assumption of the limitless voluntary contribution of the public in participation and the difficulty of predicting participatory processes. Further, possibly there is a political unwillingness to support a more genuine analysis of the empirical evidence about the costs and benefits of participation as actual participatory processes may lead to a challenge of the existing distribution of power. This study aims to understand, considering costs and results, how meaningful participation can be established in a flood protection program in different problem structures in an industrialized country and developing country.