Public participation is an area of great interest within the Environmental Impact Assessment process, and it is possible to find an extensive scientific literature on the subject. Despite this, there are great divergences regarding this concept and its objectives and, therefore, some authors have dedicated themselves to carrying out literature reviews in the search for a better conceptual approach. In this sense, this work seeks to contribute to these efforts and proposes to analyze how public participation is being addressed in dissertations and theses that discuss the environmental licensing process. The study used the Catalog of Theses and Dissertations of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), from which 23 works were selected that address public participation, directly or indirectly, in the environmental licensing of Small Hydropower Plants (SHPs). Then, the analysis of the works sought to answer four questions: ‘How is public participation commonly defined?’, ‘What are the objectives of public participation?’, ‘Who are the interested parties?’ and ‘How does public participation occur? participation?’ The analysis showed that there is still a lack of theoretical depth on the concept of public participation, as well as on its objectives and participants. On the other hand, the most common forms of participation, such as public hearings, appear more frequently in the analyzed works.