Public Administration Review· 2015Q1· Review
Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future
- 1,189citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2015year
Short summary
Experiments in participatory governance over the last two decades show mixed results in advancing democratic values, with effectiveness showing promise but legitimacy and social justice facing significant obstacles.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Participatory governance experiments have proliferated over the last 20 years.
- Effectiveness is a potential benefit of citizen participation, driven by public sector constraints and digital affordances.
- The effect of participation on democratic legitimacy is currently unclear.
- Increasing social justice through citizen participation faces the greatest obstacles.
- Key challenges include a lack of systematic leadership, consensus on participation's role, and limited scope/powers of participatory initiatives.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large‐ and small‐scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy‐enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of participation on legitimacy is unclear. Efforts to increase social justice through citizen participation face the greatest obstacles. The article concludes by highlighting three challenges to creating successful participatory governance: the absence of systematic leadership, the lack of popular or elite consensus on the place of direct citizen participation, and the limited scope and powers of participatory innovations .
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Public Administration Review, 2015 · DOI ↗
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Field: Public Administration
Public AdministrationSocial Sciences