The Question of Participation: Toward Authentic Public Participation in Public Administration (original) (raw)
Deliberative civic engagement in public administration and policy
This article explores deliberative civic engagement in the context of public administration and policy. The field of public administration and policy is seeing a resurgence of interest in deliberative civic engagement among scholars, practitioners, politicians, civic reformers, and others. Deliberative processes have been used to address a range of issues: school redistricting and closings, land use, and the construction of highways, shopping malls, and other projects. Additional topics include race and diversity issues, crime and policing, and involvement of parents in their children's education. Finally, participatory budgeting, which has been used with success in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989 and has been employed in over 1,500 cities around the world, has been one of the most promising forms of deliberative civic engagement. Finally, the article suggests what we must do to build a civic infrastructure to support deliberative civic engagement, including government, but also practitioners and scholars.
Designing Public Participation Processes
Formerly a public and nonprofi t manager, she now focuses her research and teaching on civic engagement, integrative leadership, and public and nonprofi t management. Through ethnographic research, she studies a diversity of approaches to public engagement across a wide range of policy and planning issues and their consequences for decision outcomes, implementation, and community capacity building.
Handbook on Theories of Governance, 2nd edition, 2022
Public participation in governance involves the direct or indirect involvement of stakeholders in decision-making about policies, plans or programs in which they have an interest. This chapter explores the theories illuminating key concerns, namely what constitutes legitimate and useful public participation; the relationships among diversity, representation, and inclusion; the appropriate influence of different kinds of knowledge; and how to align participation methods and contexts. We describe two areas needing additional theoretical development: what levels of participation are desirable and workable, and the threats and opportunities for participation posed by increasingly diffuse systems of governance.
Participation in the U.S. administrative process
Comparative Law and Regulation
The participatory process that lies at the heart of U.S. administrative law is hailed by some to be among the most comprehensive in the world. Agencies promulgate rules under elaborate procedures designed to place public participants as important collaborators and watchdogs at virtually every step in the agency's decision. Indeed, in this process, citizens are guaranteedby legislationimportant rights of participation, which include commenting, accessing information, and ultimately challenging agency rules in court. 1 In practice, however, the work of the U.S. agencies has become increasingly inaccessible to many of the individuals and groups that their rules affect. 2 Rulemaking records are often very large and can run into the hundreds of pages. 3 Comments submitted on agency proposals, standing alone, can include thousands of submissions, many of which are dozens of pages each. 4 The agency's own explanations, proposals, and rule text can be opaque and gratuitously complicated in ways that even experts cannot follow. 5 As Professors Farina, Newhart, and Blake observe, from the perspective of affected citizens, the agency's rule and accompanying analysis "is about as accessible as if the documents were written hieroglyphics." 6 The net result is an administrative 1
Despite the growing body of literature on participatory and collaborative governance, little is known about citizens' motives for participation in such new governance arrangements. The present article argues that knowledge about these motives is essential for understanding the quality and nature of participatory governance and its potential contribution to the overall political and administrative system. Survey data were used to explore participants' motives for participating in a large-scale urban renewal program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was neighborhood-based, characterized by self-selected and repeated participation, and designed to influence local decisions on the use of public resources. Three types of motives were identified among the participants: (a) Common good motives concerned improving the neighborhood in general and contributing knowledge and competence. (b) Self-interest motives reflected a desire to improve one's own political efficacy and to promote the interest of one's own group or family. (c) Professional competence motives represented a largely apolitical type of motive, often based on a professional role. Different motives were expressed by different categories of participants and were also associated with different perceptions concerning program outcomes. Further analysis suggested that participatory governance may represent both an opportunity for marginalized groups to empower themselves and an opportunity for more privileged groups to act as local "citizen representatives" and articulate the interests of their neighborhoods. These findings call for a more complex understanding of the role and potential benefits of participatory governance.
2018
The case study in the dissertation was extended from the series of the citizen participation projects sponsored by Southern Region of Water Resources Office under the Water Resources Agency in Taiwan from 2012-2015. The author considered the projects were the first and the authentic participatory actions initiated by the public agencies in a meaningful, communicative, and collaborative manner that could be a participatory efforts model for the other public agencies.
Challenges in the Public Participation and the Decision Making Process A z i z a n M a r z u k i
Public Participation, 2019
The implementation of the public participation process is important for the democratisation of social values and better planning and fulfilment of public needs. The public participation process, however, is sometimes threatened by bureaucratic constraints caused by the lack of a systematic approach and an inadequate public administration system, which contribute to the public exclusion from the process. The exclusion is also caused by the lack of knowledge about public participation and low levels of education amongst the public. With this in view, this paper reviewed four approaches to public participation in four countries: Denmark, the Philippines, Canada and the United Kingdom. The dimensions of public participation developed by Uphoff and Cohen were then used for data analysis, interpretation and conclusions drawn by discussing the grounds for public inclusion and exclusion from the decision-making process.