Environmental policy making demands many skills: dealing with complex causal relationships, coping with uncertainty in data and models and handling plural values and preferences of those who are involved or affected by these policies. Inviting stakeholders, experts and the public to take part in drafting environmental policies to deal with environmental and health challenges and facilitate a transition into a sustainable future has been a major objective in many countries of the world. However, many of these attempts have not lead to satisfactory results or were abandoned due to difficulties about the appropriate concepts of involvement and decision making structures. The paper will develop a systematic overview of these implicit and explicit concepts of stakeholder involvement, analyse their relative strength and weaknesses and demonstrate how these concepts have been played out in the climate change debate.