Deliberative Democracy and the Paradox of Participation

Abstract

Citizen involvement and participatory governance have been adopted as essential components of urban development policies in many countries. For instance, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre was successful in mobilizing and empowering poor people. However, in many cases, participation is merely a buzzword which often leads to co‐optation. In this article, we propose an explanatory model of participatory governance for making comparative analyses and compare participatory budgeting in the 1990s in Brazil with the Japanese community policy of the 1970s. Based on this, our analysis identifies the paradox of participation and the importance of gatekeeping functions. As a consequence of enhanced citizen participation, the power of the bureaucratic administration becomes dominant unless politicians and the legislature retain their autonomy in decision‐making. If the gatekeeping functions of involvement and decision‐making are monopolized by the administrative body urban development is de‐politicized, which, in turn, leads to co‐optation by government and exclusion. It is important to retain the function of politics to deepen democracy through citizen participation in urban development.