This academic article explores how participatory governance in urban environmental planning was implemented and experience in Durban, a coastal city in South Africa. The author, Aylett, contextualises participatory governance with the literatures on social justice and climate change. He highlights how participation has been promoted as a method to achieve social justice concerns, yet its impacts have often either just resulted in top-down agendas, or led to exclusion of the typically marginalised, thus perpetuating inequalities.  The author acknowledges that the conceptualisation of participation has had impacts upon how it has produced and reproduced power imbalances at local scales, and draws on the philosophical work of Habermas and Foucault to outline the point. Next, he illustrates how participation concerns have pervaded the climate change discourse through the language of climate justice, where it is advocated that inclusive deliberation and decision-making will engage communities to actively participate in planning a future related to climate change which has equitable benefits and impacts. Aylett goes on to explore how participation, with the goal of climate justice, played out in Durban. He finds that deliberative structures and participatory planning and budgeting were successfully institutionalised in the municipality, which led to the participation of previously excluded groups. However, participations did not break down existing unequal patterns of energy consumption, nor did they have substantive impact on implementation of climate change related policies; their low budget prioritisation by the government being an example. Furthermore, conflicts between civil society and government prevented deliberative participatory governance in certain instances and led to greater participation and representation of needs from specific wards. The author calls for greater civil society contribution to formal participatory processes in future. By making the conflict productive, in the right forums, it could even out representation and action on climate change related policies.