Meaningful Citizen Participation Research Articles

Dynamics of Citizen Participation in Forming Identity in Forming Citizen Identity

This research aims to investigate the dynamics of citizen participation in shaping citizenship identity through a literature review. The research method employed is a literature review, where data are obtained from previous studies encompassing various sources such as journals, books, and scholarly reports. Thematic data analysis was conducted to identify patterns, trends, and relationships between citizen participation and citizenship identity. The research findings highlight the crucial role of citizen participation in building a strong citizenship identity, while challenges such as opinion polarization and the spread of false information through social media are also identified. In conclusion, through collaborative efforts among the government, civil society, and the private sector, communities can strengthen meaningful citizen participation and reinforce the foundation of an inclusivecitizenship identity.

Energy platforms and the future of energy citizenship

Energy platforms involve citizens in the energy system by creating and orchestrating virtual energy collectives that can support energy system governance. In such an energy collective, households pool their resources to engage in energy trading, collective self-consumption, or grid balancing. In this paper we draw on the theory of material participation to examine how everyday interactions with energy platform technologies enable people to enact energy citizenship. Our findings from interviews and workshops in a demonstration project of an energy platform show that energy platforms complicate the notion of being an energy citizen. For the householders in our research, engaging in new collective energy practices disturbed the existing link between domestic energy practices and energy citizenship. Where people's energy citizenship used to be centred around their own domestic domain, engagement with platform technologies required them to reflect on their position in relation to new issues such as the ‘greenness’ of various energy markets. Moreover, people were confused about the relation between their own agency and goals as an energy citizen, vis-a-vis the collective agency that results from the bundling of energy practices, and the power and motivations of platform providers and energy system actors. Uncertainties around agency and responsibility need to be reduced if platform-based energy collectives are to play a role in fostering meaningful citizen participation in the energy transition. For platform providers, this implies acknowledging people's existing practices and trajectories of energy citizenship, and providing feedback about the contributions people are making.

Developing normative criteria for meaningful citizen participation and deliberation in environmental policy

The European Green Deal (EGD) represents the most ambitious environmental policy framework in European history, aimed at improving the health and well-being of citizens and future generations through climate action and becoming the first climate-neutral region in the world by 2050. The EC has initiated the European Democracy Action Plan and the European Climate Pact to include the participation of citizens in a meaningful way to help achieve these goals (i.e. not simply a tokenistic gesture or box-ticking exercise). While these efforts to ensure greater citizen participation and deliberation in environmental policy are good first steps, there is still a lack of clarity about what meaningful citizen engagement should look like. This paper will propose that for such efforts to be successful, we need to assess different perspectives in the debate and provide recommendations based on this. This paper provides a systematic review of various approaches within the academic literature on citizen participation and deliberation in environmental policy (ecocentrism, biocentrism, ecomodernism, ecofeminism, environmental pragmatism, environmental citizenship, environmental rights, and environmental justice). Following this, we provide a list of 16 criteria (in five thematic sections) for policymakers, civil society organisations (CSOs), and society, to ensure meaningful citizen participation and deliberation.

Are we moving towards a managerial model of e-governance? building a case for citizen centric e-participation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Exploring the various information and communication technology measures adopted by the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to ensure ‘good and effective governance’ of the province, this paper aims to understand how far such e-governance initiatives endorse citizen’s participation in governance and what limitations are problematizing the quest for citizen engagement through such measures. The paper primarily explores and examines the service provider’s perspective through in-depth interviews with officials from KP Government’s IT focused departments. Applying the theoretical framework developed by Chadwick and May (2003), the paper argues that the KP government’s more than 140 plus IT based applications are mostly electronic versions of paper-based information posted on the websites, which makes it an information dissemination system rather than a fully interactive technology. There is little comprehension about ‘citizen engagement’ through e-government initiatives among bureaucrats and e-governance is largely seen as a one-sided provision of official information; citizen access to government services; or their access to the online complaint mechanisms. Officials also recognize that shortfall of essential infrastructure; public awareness deficits; accessibility issues; a lack of public trust in online service delivery mechanisms, and doubts over timely official response; all confound meaningful citizen participation in governance through the ICTs.

Co-creation Processes Contributing to the Societal Impact of Science: Contributions from the Net4Impact Network

Meaningful citizen participation throughout the development of research projects has increased the societal impact of science. Co-creation processes promote a more significant societal impact by aligning research with societal needs. In recent years, essential advances in citizen participation in science have been identified. However, there are still critical challenges that limit citizen interaction with scientific creations. This article provides some of the contributions made by the Net4Impact network in the face of these challenges. Specifically, we analyse co-creation processes developed by those projects that have demonstrated societal impact. This qualitative study is based on the analysis of Webinars, meetings with researchers from different scientific areas and Communicative Content Analysis. As a result, this work provides six examples of societal impact in three scientific areas: social sciences, humanities, and engineering. In addition, we analyse the characteristics and implications of the different co-creation processes developed by these successful projects.

A proposed citizen participation–public trust model in the context of service delivery protests in South African local government

The South African local government context has been marred by persistent citizen protests that continue to jeopardise public administrators’ quest for effective service rendering. Such protests have been attributed to the disregard of citizen participation in local government and unresponsive service rendering, amongst other factors. Meaningful citizen participation is seen as a precondition for the establishment of trust between communities and public administrators. This article, delving into the empirical literature, presents a citizen participation and public trust model aimed at minimising service delivery protests in South Africa. It argues that whilst lack of community trust has been lauded as one of the factors that have brewed citizen protests over the years, there is evidence to show that between the core values of procedural justice and public trust, citizen perception of power to influence may be vital to minimise proclivity to protest. The article finds that in addition to the interactional and informational justice components of procedural justice, meaningful citizen participation can be measured as a combination of these justice areas with mechanisms that highlight citizens’ positive perceptions of their power to influence decisions. As recommendations, the article argues that indeed lack of community involvement in municipal processes has the potential to break down trust and explode into service delivery protests. However, the article concludes that ensuring meaningful participation in local government decision-making processes, as defined in this article, is a precondition for building community trust and limiting the outbreak of service delivery protests in the local government context.

Charting the design and implementation of the smart city: the case of citizen-centric bikeshare in Hamilton, Ontario

ABSTRACT Previous scholarship on the smart city has expressed concern at the top-down, technocratic nature of smart technologies and the lack of meaningful citizen participation in their development. In this paper, we utilize instrumentalization theory to trace the initiation, design and deployment of a specific smart city initiative: bikeshare in Hamilton, Ontario. Smart bikeshare is increasingly seen as complicit in processes of social stratification, serving a predominately white, middle-class demographic and particular locales. Our case study reveals the potential of reflexive design praxes to reconfigure bikeshare as a platform for both instrumental and social value. In particular, we highlight how collaborative, open and inclusive forms of urban governance can enroll a broad range of civic actors to create a scheme that embodies diverse but complimentary goals and ideologies. We conclude that instrumentalization theory provides a conceptual means to open up the “black box” of urban design to critical interrogation, and to identify how to enact participatory design and citizen-centric smart urbanism.

Doing it together: How co-production underpins the use of social innovation during service delivery

Background: This article focused on the use of social innovation (SI) during local government (LG) service delivery, and how it could enable citizens to participate meaningfully through co-production. The two variables underpinning the conceptualisation of SI in the context of its dual purpose, and that are relevant in this article, are co-production and citizen participation.Aim: The aim of this article was to investigate how the use of SI could enable citizens to participate meaningfully during the local governance of service delivery through co-production.Setting: Through a comparative approach, the research presented in this article investigates the use of SI in LG service delivery in the cases of the City of Ghent (Belgium) and Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality (South Africa).Methods: The methodology of this study entailed using a qualitative research design that was combined with a case study approach.Results: It was evident that citizen participation during the co-production of services was influenced by the divergent circumstances and needs of citizens, infrastructure and the availability of resources.Conclusion: Significantly, this research found that meaningful citizen participation starts with the individual duty of every citizen to protect, preserve and sustainably use the collective goods and services provided by the state.

Mapping preferences for the number of built elements

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the number of design elements in the context of building facades in urban streetscapes and visual preferences of users to enable a more meaningful citizen participation in the design of local streetscapes.Design/methodology/approachThis paper developed a web application, which manages experiments through programmatically creating scenes and displaying them online to participants using questionnaires. It collects preferences towards the number of design elements in the scenes and determines the statistical relationship between them.FindingsThe results offer an empirical description of a semi-convex relationship between the number of elements and preferences. They confirm that participants from a particular area inter-subjectively agree in their visual judgements towards the number of design elements, and justify the employment of a regression model fitted on the preferences of residents to assess design proposal in their area.Originality/valueThe paper offers an empirical description of the relationships between preferences and a wide range of values of the number of design elements and empirically supports that people from one area inter-subjectively agree in their judgements towards a visual aspect of the building facades. The study introduces a new analytical component, known as the vertex, which could alter future methods on the visual evaluation of the built environment.

What the United States Can Learn from the European Commission's Better Regulation Initiative

In May of 2015, the European Commission released a package outlining the vision for its Better Regulation initiative, a program aimed at improving outcomes of European Union (EU) regulation. The move represents a step forward for regulatory reform in the EU, and signals a potential shift in world leadership roles among countries promoting evidence-based policy. The United States (US), once at the forefront of regulatory science and analysis, may now be lagging behind. If Better Regulation is implemented as its ambitious designers envision, this could signal a new role for the EU in advancing 21st century policymaking.Better Regulation seeks to improve the EU regulatory process in several ways. The initiative allows for more meaningful citizen and stakeholder participation at all stages of the policymaking process; it seeks to institutionalize the use of economic analysis throughout the lifecycle of a policy; and it sets up a process for reviewing the existing stock of regulations to ensure old rules do not become excessively burdensome or obsolete. All this is done in a manner intended to inform legislators as they periodically review funding levels for new and existing programs.

Contentious politics, grassroots mobilization and the Icesave dispute

In 2008 Iceland experienced the deepest and fastest economic crisis ever recorded in peacetime, which included the total collapse of its financial sector, as well as significant erosion of its currency. This paper concerns a localized protest movement that occurred in the wake of the 2008 crash in Iceland: the mobilization of protest to a settlement deal, known as the Icesave settlement. We interviewed just over 30 actors involved in the mobilization, including politicians, activists, and academics. Our data show that both sides of the Icesave dispute drew on a set of three interwoven narratives, or framings of the debate, that respectively drew on ideas around natural justice, citizenship, and nationalism. Several key discursive intersections between these narratives and the political and economic landscape in the post-economic crisis not only rendered the Icesave dispute salient and commensurate with the experiences of Icelanders living through the crash, but also gave greater credibility to the no-Icesave campaign. We conclude by arguing that the Icesave dispute provides a unique lens onto central questions concerning democracy and the possibilities of meaningful citizen engagement and participation in an era of increasing globalization and of neo-liberal forms of economic governance. Our findings contribute to this literature by revealing some of the particularities of the Icelandic context that were important in creating the socio-historical moment that led to the success of the anti-Icesave movement.

1-3. 875a Sewpaul V EMANCIPATORY CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN ACTION: DISCOURSE ETHICS AND DECONSTRUCTION (PART 1)

This paper elucidates the importance of emancipatory education to social work education and training, identifies the objectives and underlying epistemologies of a course on Human Behaviour and the Social Environment, and emphasises the importance of negotiating relationships for the creation of a participatory and emancipatory approach to education. It reflects the application of Habermas’s (1996) theory of communicative action and discourse ethics to complex issues including HIV/AIDS and the relationship between race, class and gender and the relationship of these to issues of power, privilege, status and access to resources in the South African context. The incorporation of creative, experiential and empowerment-based teaching/learning strategies are central to the development of critical consciousness in students, and for facilitating effective and meaningful citizen participation among students. The paper also highlights the potentially damaging, albeit unintended, consequences of such teaching strategies

Involving citizens in public decision making: the case of participatory budgeting in Lithuania

In times of increasing public distrust in government and its institutions, engaging the public in decision making may strengthen democracy as well as result in a more effective allocation of scarce public resources. Participatory budgeting has started in Brazil and spread around the world but is a new concept in some countries. The objective of this paper is to reveal the current situation of attempts to involve the public in making decisions on budget allocations in Lithuanian municipalities, disclose barriers to a more active participation, and propose possible strategies for greater public empowerment. For that purpose a survey was designed that was filled out by members of municipal councils. The results indicate that members of municipal councils are aware of the advantages of participatory budgeting. However, there are numerous barriers for meaningful citizen participation, including lack of financial resources, occasional incompetence of municipal administration, citizens’ indifference, and bureaucratic inertia.

What is Driving the Increasing Presence of Citizen Participation Initiatives?

Nowadays there is an imperative for governments to be more responsive to community needs, and public sector modernisation programmes are introducing opportunities for citizen participation. We look at citizen participation initiatives through the lenses of institutional and stakeholder theories. Using survey data and exogenous variables we analyse experiences in thirty OECD and MERCOSUR local governments. We find that the possible gains in legitimacy and trust explain the efforts made towards citizen participation. In addition, the different levels of commitment towards meaningful citizen participation suggest that factors such as power and urgency can be complementary to legitimacy when analysing citizen participation.

Improving Democratic Governance in East Asia

This article addresses institutionalized instabilities and declining democratic legitimacy in East Asia. It argues that a wide range of reforms could improve democratic governance in the region. Specifically, the article analyses the importance of constitutional design and the need to promote ‘good’ democracy. It suggests that East Asian democracies should strive for constitutional systems that avoid gridlocks and promote effective governance. Although adopting the parliamentary system represents the optimal strategy, reforming second-tier political institutions can also improve performances of presidential regimes in these countries. Moreover, these democracies need to develop the institutions and processes that encourage greater rule of law, system responsiveness, meaningful citizen participation, and socioeconomic equality. If taken, these reforms could provide East Asian democracies with enhanced stability, efficacy and legitimacy.

Citizens' Governability and Policy Analysts' Roles in the Policy Process: A Theoretical Examination

Today much emphasis has been placed on “governance” and the active participation of citizens in the policy process. Such arguments are based primarily on the recognition that legislative and executive branches have not been responsive enough to meet the needs of citizens. Citizens are expected, then, to play an active role in the policy process and collaborate with other actors such as governments and corporations so that public policy could reflect the citizens’ needs.If citizens are to participate in the policy process more actively, however, they must have proper knowledge on public policy and political process; to put it another way, they are required to possess the governability so that the collaboration with other actors could succeed.This paper is intended to theoretically review the governability of citizens. Closer attention is given to what policy analysts could do for the improvement of citizens’ governability. It is contended that policy analysts play an active role in the policy process so that policies which they think desirable could be adopted. This paper proceeds as follows. First, modeling the policymaking process, how citizens could influence the process is demonstrated. Next, this paper reveals that, despite the potential influence of citizens over the policymaking process, policymakers are unlikely to make a policy the citizens want. There exist some limitations of citizens’ governability, which make it difficult for citizens to exert the influence; most policy problems are too technical and too complicated for citizens to deal with. Given the limitations of citizens’ governability, then, attention is paid to the roles of policy analysts in the policy process; how policy analysts could contribute to encouraging meaningful citizen participation and improving the policy process is examined. This paper is concluded by discussing the collaboration among policymakers, citizens and policy analysts in terms of knowledge utilization. The reform of the governance structure requires us to establish a policymaking system which enables policy analysts as well as citizens to actively participate in the policy process.

Participatory farce: Youth and the making of urban places in Zimbabwe

Discussions with Harare's youth and planners revealed that the direction, form and content of urban planning are cast in stone. In most cases, the outcome of planning is a foregone conclusion. This makes it impossible to factor in some grand schemes that are outside the confines of what has already been sanctioned in plans, regulations and policies that guide development in the urban built environment. Consequently, spatial planning practices inevitably confine public participation to the periphery. The most that citizens can do is provide information and raise objections. This paper argues that it is impossible to integrate meaningful citizen participation in urban planning within the present structural and operational environment. The observed tokenism and placation are the best that can happen under these constraints. For effective participation to be possible, structural transformations, an overhaul of planning practice, and a reorientation of the very spirit and purpose of planning are necessary.

Prerequisite conditions for meaningful participation in brownfields redevelopment

Current research in environmental planning supports decision making based on collaborative planning mechanisms. While current research clearly details the limitations to and prerequisites for meaningful public participation in general and for select environmental issues, there is little focus on them in brownfields redevelopment. In practice, the general assumptions are that brownfields redevelopment is an ideally situated policy issue for participatory planning. However, as this paper will illustrate through case study research, there are several situational prerequisites that must be met before there can be meaningful citizen participation in brownfields redevelopment. By highlighting these prerequisites, the author's goal is to mobilize research and policy efforts to overcome those limitations and to foster widespread meaningful participation in the redevelopment of brownfields in residential neighborhoods.

China's Legislation Law and the Making of a More Orderly and Representative Legislative System

This article examines the significance of the Legislation Law (lifa fa), passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) in March 2000. The Legislation Law represents an attempt by the NPC to rationalize China's legal system, establish a uniform legislative hierarchy and consolidate its authority over other important lawmaking institutions. The politics behind the Law's development therefore offer insight into the balance of power in China's lawmaking arena, revealing how key institutions – the NPC, the State Council and local people's congresses – engaged in bureaucratic bargaining over fundamental questions of their existence and authority within an evolving system. While the promulgated Law reveals the mixed results of this complex process, it also makes possible a more open and consultative legislative process by sanctioning the emergence of public legislative hearings. Now gaining currency around China, hearings are a new development and could be an important step in institutionalizing more meaningful citizen participation in the legislative process.

Turning GOLD into EPG: Lessons from Low-Tech Democratic Experimentalism for Electronic Rulemaking and Other Ventures in Cyberdemocracy

Empowered Participatory Governance, or EPG, is a model of governance developed by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright that seeks to connect a set of normative commitments for strengthening democracy with a set of institutional design prescriptions intended to meet that objective. It is derived partly from democratic theory and partly from the study of real-world attempts to institutionalize transformative strategies for democratizing social and political decision making. This paper reviews Fung and Wright's recent volume, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, and considers the relevance of the authors' and other contributors' insights for the future of a phenomenon called electronic rulemaking. Electronic rulemaking is a species of government on-line deliberation, which I call GOLD, that seeks to facilitate greater citizen involvement in the formal processes of elaborating administrative rules to implement federal law. Although the volume hardly mentions information and communications technologies at all, there readily appears an extraordinary fit between the capacities of new ICTs and the needs of EPG, in terms of both accomplishing a supportive context and actually implementing the recommended institutional designs. Whether electronic rulemaking will prove a significant way station towards EPG is uncertain, but, given the promise of the EPG experimental agenda and the need to enlarge opportunities for meaningful citizen participation in decisions that affect their lives, EPG proponents should give more active consideration to the potential role of GOLD initiatives in achieving EPG aims.