Abstract
New public governance studies have increasingly sought to highlight the importance of citizen engagement in local decision-making processes as a way to identify suitable approaches to matters of public concern. There is a particular absence of good theoretical development building upon empirical work exploring citizen participatory processes as potential sites for social learning. In this paper, we asked the overall research question of the extent to which a new citizen participation process can be designed as a social learning system to facilitate the integration of citizen types of interests and knowledge in local decision-making. To answer this question, the study’s results provided deeper insights into the internal social learning dynamics within one particular deliberately designed collective local decision-making process, the G1000 firework dialogue in Enschede, The Netherlands. Using Wenger’s concept of “communities of practice” (CoP) as a baseline for analysis, the results of this study indicated that the G1000 firework dialogue process encouraged the creation of activities that may be considered to correspond to the different structural dimensions of CoP and that new design-based models of citizen participation would benefit from adopting a more explicit incorporation of and orientation towards social learning practices and theories. Consequently, we argue that local governance should invest more in citizen participation processes that encourage and enable learning among different societal stakeholders with different interests through constructive dialogues over political matters.
Highlights
Since the early 20th century, a so-called “deliberative turn” has taken place in democratic theory (Manin 1987; Bohman 1997; Dryzek 2000) with communication and reflection increasingly becoming the focus of the democratic discourse (Habermas 1996)
Having presented an overview of the dynamics of the G1000 firework dialogue in Enschede, we turn to exploring the extent to which these activities can be considered as constituting “a social learning system”
We firstly do that by exploring the extent to which it is possible to perceive the three characteristics of communities of practice” (CoP) in these activities within the G1000 firework dialogue, namely, developing a sense of joint enterprise, the emergence of mutual engagement, and the development of shared repertoires (Section 4.1)
Summary
Since the early 20th century, a so-called “deliberative turn” has taken place in democratic theory (Manin 1987; Bohman 1997; Dryzek 2000) with communication and reflection increasingly becoming the focus of the democratic discourse (Habermas 1996). It is supposed that information exchange between various informed social actors might improve the quality of decision-making in increasingly complex matters of public concern (Neyer 2006) This turn was marked by a notion that individuals may be regarded as competent and rational actors/agents, and should more closely be involved in day-to-day politics, as they can reflect on their preferences during these open dialogues (Chambers 2003; Ganuza and Francés 2012). Previous studies indicated that citizen participation processes designed using deliberation-centric approaches could lead to more informed, involved, and educated citizens (Luskin et al 2002; Gutmann and Thompson 2009; Arendt 2010; Grönlund et al 2010). This belief is reflected in an increasing number of participatory governance models The G1000can initiative can be considered as oneofexample of a new type of mini-public most frequent initiative be considered as one example a new type of mini-public
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