Public Participation In Policy-making Research Articles

Advancing Democratic Engagement in Indonesia's Treaty Ratification Process

This study explores the application of the 'meaningful participation' principle in the formation of laws ratifying international agreements in Indonesia, with a focus on social, economic, and environmental sectors. The research adopts a normative legal methodology, utilizing statutory and conceptual approaches to analyze relevant legislation, court decisions, and academic literature. The findings reveal a significant imbalance in public participation in the ratification process, primarily characterized by a top-down approach with minimal substantive dialogue with affected community groups. Despite constitutional provisions allowing the President to establish agreements without ratification, meaningful public participation in legislative and ratification processes remains limited. The study emphasizes the need for open public consultations, active involvement of non-governmental organizations, and private sector engagement to achieve policies that reflect the comprehensive interests and aspirations of the populace. It highlights the importance of community involvement, transparency, economic-environmental balance, and inclusive approaches in influencing meaningful participation levels. The research calls for recommendations to the Government and Parliament to foster more qualitative and significant public participation in the ratification process, aligning Indonesia with international principles of meaningful participation in social, economic, and environmental law. This approach is crucial for Indonesia, as the world's third-largest democracy, to promote meaningful public participation in policy-making, especially in ratifying international agreements impacting the broader society.
 Highlights:
 
 Imbalanced Participation: Dominance of a top-down approach with minimal public dialogue in treaty ratification.
 NGOs and Private Sector: Essential roles in representing diverse societal interests in legislative processes.
 Legal and Democratic Alignment: Need for transparent and inclusive law-making, balancing economic and environmental aspects.
 
 Keywords: Meaningful Participation, International Treaty Ratification, Public Involvement, Legislative Process, Indonesian Democracy

JURIDICAL ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC INFORMATION DISCLOSURE IN GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

This article conducts a juridical analysis of public information disclosure in government systems in the digital era. The purpose of compiling this article is to identify legal issues related to public information disclosure in the digital era and provide appropriate legal solutions to overcome these problems. The research method used is a literature study by analyzing laws and regulations related to public information disclosure, as well as collecting the latest data and information about the use of information technology in government in a descriptive-analytical manner. The study results show that public information disclosure is a basic principle in a democratic government system that is fundamental for strengthening government accountability and encouraging public participation in policy-making. In the digital era, public information disclosure is becoming increasingly important, but it also requires the protection of information security and privacy because public information disclosure in the digital era has complex legal implications, such as issues of information security, personal data protection, and copyright issues. This article suggests that the government strengthen regulations regarding public information disclosure in the digital era, including developing strict information security standards and protecting intellectual property rights. In addition, the government also needs to increase public awareness about their right to obtain public information and develop an effective and efficient information system to facilitate access to public information.

E-Government as A Tool to Increase Public Participation in Public Decision Making

The purpose of this research is to examine e-government as a tool to enhance public participation in decision-making. The researcher used qualitative research methods with a field research approach. Field research involves direct observation, interviews, or other data collection methods in the field, allowing the researcher to gain a deep understanding of the phenomenon under study. The research location for this study is the Jakarta Provincial Government. To gather information or collect data, two staff members of the Jakarta Provincial Government were interviewed. The findings of this study indicate that the use of e-government in the Jakarta Provincial Government has proven to enhance public participation in policy-making. E-government enables broader, more inclusive, targeted, and transparent participation. Public participation is facilitated through online platforms where people can easily access information and participate in discussions about proposed policies. In the context of the Jakarta Provincial Government, e-government has also helped improve the efficiency of governance and provide easier access to public services.

The Impact of Public Participation on Energy Policy: A Comparative Study

Large-scale participation from the public is essential for the development of energy policies that are effective, efficient, and sustainable. Public involvement in the policymaking process improves the openness, legitimacy, and social acceptance of energy policies. Nonetheless, the level of public participation in the development of energy policy varies considerably among countries and regions. This research looks at the impact of public engagement on energy policy using case studies in Germany, the United States, and China. This paper employs a case study comparison approach to analyze the benefits and drawbacks of public participation in energy decisions. Both theoretical and empirical approaches to the literature on public engagement with energy policy are discussed. The majority of the data was gathered via in-depth interviews with experts on energy policy, government officials, and representatives of civil society in the countries of concern. The information was examined via a thematic lens. According to the research, public participation in the development of energy policies may increase their social acceptability, legitimacy, and transparency. The shift to a more sustainable energy system may be aided by the discovery of novel and more effective policy choices, which can be uncovered via this process. The research did, however, point out a number of obstacles and restrictions to public participation, including a lack of resources, the difficulty of juggling multiple interests, and the possibility of conflicts. The amount and character of public participation in energy policy-making varies greatly among nations, as shown by the comparative study of case studies, reflecting disparities in political, social, and economic conditions. For instance, Germany's energy transition has been successful in part because of the country's long-standing system of public participation in energy policy. However, public participation is restricted in China's energy policy-making process, which has contributed to widespread mistrust and hostility to energy policies. The report finishes with a discussion of the results' implications for energy policy-making and ideas for increasing public participation in this area. Sustainable, democratic, and socially equitable energy policies are promoted in the research by emphasizing the necessity of public participation in the policymaking process.

Adequacy of Public Information for Meaningful E-Participation in Policy-Making

Within the first two years of COVID-19’s exposure, countries around the world mitigated, among other things, social mobility control, resulting in other limitations on fundamental rights, such as freedom of movement and peaceful assembly. Within the rights restrictions, the desire of citizens to satisfy their desire for information and exercise their right to free expression was insatiable. The authors argue that citizens deserve access to sufficient information in order for them to have a meaningful right to participate. At the same time, electronic means can be an additional feature to channel public participation in policy-making. Regrettably, the primary platform adopted in Human Rights laws in operationalizing the right to participate in public affairs remains minimal to coexist meaningful e-participation embarked on the adequacy of the right to information based on Human Rights (HR) standards. This study aims to answer how a justification for meaningful e-participation in law-making can be defined. It also queries which framework can provide sufficient public information based on a rights-based approach. The study leverages the convention of civil and political rights (ICCPR) as the primary legal instrument for a qualitative doctrinal approach. The study suggests that adequate information should be in one package with e-participation to optimize the enjoyment of the right to participate in policy-making. 
 Keywords: Law-Making, meaningful e-Participation, Right-Based, Right to Information

Dilemmas of public participation in policymaking in South Africa

The effectiveness of representative democracy in South Africa is questionable, given the lack of confidence in the Parliament and the recurring service delivery protests, which indicate that citizens' opinions are unheard. Due to this, the Members of Parliament (MPs) devise strategies such as democratic innovation to involve citizens in policymaking as the platform for deliberation. Given this context, the paper discusses public participation in policymaking and how declining confidence in the Parliament necessitates democratic innovations as a panacea for increasing citizens' participation in Parliament activities. The paper also identifies dilemmas that occur in public involvement. Data was generated by interviews (with 16 MPs), observation of plenary debates, minutes of the Parliament, Hansard, minutes of Select and Standing Committees, and Parliamentary speeches. Findings suggest that despite the complexity of implementing public participation in South Africa, the Parliament has made significant progress since 1994 in widening democratic innovation to facilitate public participation. However, disadvantaged people continue to be marginalized from policymaking. The paper suggests that there is a need for political education and public participation in policymaking to strengthen democratic institutions in South Africa.

Reconciling participatory and evidence-based policymaking in the EU Better Regulation policy: mission (im)possible?

ABSTRACT Modern systems of governance are increasingly adopting measures aimed at fostering public participation in policymaking, while embedding decisions in scientific evidence under the label of Better Regulation policy. Existing research identifies tensions between participatory and evidence-based approaches. This prompts questions about one of the most ambitious reforms to combine and enhance participatory and evidence-based tools of policymaking, initiated by the European Commission in 2016. We assess the extent to which this reform successfully combined and expanded the participatory layer of supranational policymaking while also strengthening its evidence-based credentials by analysing stakeholders’ evaluations. We find that stakeholders assess both sets of measures as part of a single, integrated dimension. Participatory measures received slightly better appraisals and were better known, but both sets of measures were evaluated positively and there are no significant differences in evaluations across stakeholder categories. This points to the complementarity of measures from a stakeholder perspective.

Foregone and predicted futures: challenges of opportunity cost neglect and impact bias for public participation in policymaking

ABSTRACT Deliberative democracy fosters greater involvement of the public in policymaking. However, psychological challenges involved in eliciting policy preferences receive little attention in this context. This study addresses the implications of opportunity cost neglect (OCN) and impact bias for policy preferences. Utilizing a survey experiment among residents of peripheral towns in Israel, we examine preferences regarding investment in rail infrastructure in peripheral areas. In line with psychological studies on OCN, we find evidence that priming awareness to alternatives can de-bias OCN in policy preferences. However, this method is less effective for people who exhibit impact bias (respondents for whom the policy is new), presenting a serious challenge to the validity of policy preferences of those who are expected to be most affected by the considered policy. This paper offers a theoretical contribution to the relationship between OCN and impact bias, and discusses the practical implications for public participation in policymaking.

Participation and litigation: parallel routes to policy in the South African postcolony

ABSTRACT Policy processes in contemporary South Africa draw attention to a phenomenon that is both common in policymaking and under-theorised in the anthropology of policy: the tendency for policy to be made both through legislative and administrative fora, and through litigation and the threat of litigation, often concurrently. Given South Africa’s robust legal frameworks mandating public participation in policymaking, there is an unexpectedly productive dialectical relationship between administrative and legal processes, where failures of participation create openings for court challenges that may limit the scope for top-down policymaking. These legal actions likewise reflect responses to the country’s apartheid history: they rely upon legal oppositional strategies developed to challenge the apartheid state, often by the same actors and organisations, and they rely upon legal institutions that have been deliberately structured to prevent past injustices from being repeated. This paper illustrates these points with two cases from South Africa: first, a local policy implementation process concerned with the issuing of permits for subsistence fishing in the Dwesa-Cwebe Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Eastern Cape and, second, a national process concerned with the re-opening of claims under South Africa's land restitution programme.

Making consultation meaningful: Insights from a case study of the South African mental health policy consultation process.

It is widely recognised that mental health policies should be developed in consultation with those tasked with their implementation and the users affected by them. In the South African legislative context public participation in policymaking is assumed, with little guidance on how to conduct consultation processes, nor how to use consultation inputs in policy decisions. The South African Mental Health Policy Framework and Strategic Plan was adopted in 2013 after an extensive consultation process. Focussing on the 2012 provincial and national consultation summit, this case-study conducted key informant interviews and undertook documentary analysis to explore the process through which consultation inputs were-or were not-transferred to inform this policy. Between 2013 and 2016 seven interviews were conducted, and 11 documents (policy drafts and summit outputs) and transcripts of 23 audio-recorded sessions from the national summit were analysed. Findings revealed that no substantive changes were made to the mental health policy following the consultation summits. There do not seem to have been systematic processes for facilitating and capturing knowledge inputs, or for transferring these inputs between provincial and national levels. There was also no further consultation regarding priorities identified for implementation prior to finalisation of the policy, with participants highlighting concerns about policy implementation at local levels as a result. This represents a lost opportunity for greater involvement of service users in policy development. Together with poor service-user representation, the format of the consultation process limited participant interaction and the possibility for engagement with, or uptake of, more experiential forms of knowledge. Several procedural elements were found to limit the elicitation and transference of consultation contributions for uptake into policy. Recommendations for future policy consultations include adapting the format of participatory processes to enable optimal use of participant knowledge, as well as greater service-user participation.

Participatory Deliberative Democracy for Peace in El Salvador

Postconflict societies such as El Salvador, surpassing 25 years of relative peace since signing the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords, have employed many mechanisms to rebuild and establish lasting peace. This study explores the impacts of four types of deliberative democracy mechanisms employed in this postconflict context to build grassroots participation in public policy-making: cabildos abiertos (open town hall meetings), asociaciones de desarrollo comunitario (community development associations), presupuestos participativos (participatory budgeting), and planes estratégicos participativos (participatory strategic plans). Findings suggest that individual participation in these forms of deliberative democracy implemented in postconflict El Salvador is associated with increased trust in local government. However, participation is also associated with higher levels of direct experience with personal violence and decreased satisfaction with one’s community. Findings suggest that implementing participatory deliberative democracy mechanisms in postconflict contexts is not alone enough to address the critiques of top-down liberal peacebuilding. Participatory forums for policy-making in postwar contexts should be designed and employed with conflict dynamics in mind to foster possible positive effects of deliberative democracy while mitigating potential negative effects on peacebuilding.

The Politics of Education Policymaking in Nepal

I begin this editorial with an assertion that the contemporary public policymaking landscape in Nepal shows little citizens’ participation and thus education policymaking also bears a similar approach. Here, public policies refer to “the decisions and actions of government and the intentions that determine those decisions and actions” (Geurts, 2011, p. 6). Theoretically, governments across the globe in recent decades have committed for larger citizen participation in public policymaking. Therefore, I understand public policymaking as a phenomenon in which wider stakeholders engage in governmental decision-making processes aimed at addressing a public issue.

Engaging with policy practitioners to promote institutionalisation of public participation in science, technology and innovation policy

This paper is a reflective account of a public participation project the authors conducted in Japan in 2012–2015, as part of the central government's initiative for evidence-based policy-making. The reflection focusses on three key aspects of the project: setting a precedent of involving public participation in policy-making; embedding an official mechanism for public participation in policy-making process; and raising policy practitioners' awareness of public participation. We also discuss why we think engaging with policy practitioners, while problematic in various ways, is and will continue to be important in promoting institutionalised practice of public participation.

A more collaborative Buenos Aires: Civil society participation in public policy-making

A more collaborative Buenos Aires: Civil society participation in public policy-making

Civic Participation in a Hybrid Regime: Limited Pluralism in Policymaking and Delivery in Contemporary Russia

This article asks why the Russian government has developed new avenues for public participation in policymaking and delivery and assesses the extent to which these avenues introduce pluralism into these processes. Drawing on 50 interviews with individuals and citizens’ groups involved in either public consultative bodies or socially oriented NGOs, the article demonstrates the government’s desire to harness the knowledge and abilities of citizens and civic groups in place of state departments perceived to be bureaucratic and inefficient, while controlling and curtailing their participation. Arguing that these countervailing tendencies can be conceptualized as limited pluralism, a category elaborated by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, we show that citizens and civic groups are able to influence policy outcomes to varying extents using these mechanisms.

E-petition popularity: Do linguistic and semantic factors matter?

E-petitioning technology platforms elicit the participation of citizens in the policy-making process but at the same time create large volumes of unstructured textual data that are difficult to analyze. Fortunately, computational tools can assist policy analysts in uncovering latent patterns from these large textual datasets. This study uses such computational tools to explore e-petitions, viewing them as persuasive texts with linguistic and semantic features that may be related to the popularity of petitions, as indexed by the number of signatures they attract. Using We the People website data, we analyzed linguistic features, such as extremity and repetition, and semantic features, such as named entities and topics, to determine whether and to what extent they are related to petition popularity. The results show that each block of variables independently explains statistically significant variation in signature accumulation, and that 1) language extremity is persistently and negatively associated with petition popularity, 2) petitions with many names tend not to become popular, and 3) petition popularity is associated with petitions that include topics familiar to the public or about important social events. We believe explorations along these lines will yield useful strategies to address the wicked problem of too much text data and to facilitate the enhancement of public participation in policy-making.

Children's participation in national policymaking: “You're so adorable, adorable, adorable! I'm speechless; so much fun!”

Policymaking is one of the most challenging arenas in which children's participation rights are implemented. The goal of this study is to portray patterns of children's participation in public policymaking and characterize various adults' reactions to children's participation. The study draws on protocols of committees operating in the Israeli parliament and interviews with an advisory group of children and young people who had participated on the committees. The findings show the potential of children's participation in national policymaking to mobilize policy change and to contextualize policy discussions. They also demonstrate that children's comments in policy discussions may evoke extreme responses, expressed as either fawning or dismissing. The conclusions offer practices that may assist in preparing both the participating children and the policymakers and in diversifying the children's voices.

Public Participation in South Africa’s Policy Decision-Making Process: The Mass and the Elite Choices

Public participation in policy-making dominates most Development, Political Science and Public Administration academic discourses. The issue of concern is the extent to which governments are able to create structures that allow for public participation of citizens in matters affecting their political and developmental concerns. The success of any government administration is, therefore, measured on the basis of how the citizens participate and contribute to the process of deciding their own political and developmental direction. It is argued that the public participation approach that considers the interests, contributions and needs of citizens in policy decision-making processes is difficult in practice. This article investigates the processes of public participation in public policy-making in South Africa with respect to the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act 92 of 1996, the Abolition of Capital Punishment policy and the Civil Union Act 17 of 2006. This is done with a view to determine if public participation in policy decision-making is a reflection of the choices of the elite or the masses.

Governance of Citizen Participation and its Related Concepts: A Review of Literature

This article reviews the concept of citizen participatory governance or citizen participation in public policy-making, a new mode of institutional arrangement increasingly becoming popular in many industrialized democracies. The governance of citizen participation may take different forms, and past studies used different terms in describing the concept. This article take a brief look at various forms of citizen participation (citizen participation in budgeting, collaborative governance, public-private partnership, and citizen coproduction of public service) and explain their concepts as demonstrated in prior research. In a nutshell, this article conclude that these various forms of citizen participation are not well conceptualized in the past literature and calls for future research in this research area with growing importance.

PERAN PARTAI POLITIK DALAM PENDIDIKAN POLITIK GENERASI MUDA DAN IMPLIKASINYA TERHADAP KETAHANAN POLITIK WILAYAH (Studi Di DPD II Partai Golongan Karya Kota Malang Jawa Timur Tahun 2009 - 2014)

A political party was an important element in democratic countries. One of the functions of the establishment of political parties as political institutions that were responsible for providing political education to the cadres of political parties as well as to the wider community. In a democratic political system political party of choice as a means to realized the ideals of the nation and the state. Political education was an effort to realized the Indonesian democracy healthy and quality. This study aimed to discussed the role of political parties in the political education of the younger generation and its implications for political resilience in the study area with the second DPD Golkar Party Malang East Java. The method in this research was descriptive qualitative, which described the complex social phenomena occured in society. The research process was done by selecting informants who were deemed eligible research with purposive sampling method. In this case the Golkar Party offi cials Malang. The technique of research by conducting in-depth interviews, observation, literature study and documentation. Then analyzed with three grooves activities that occurred simultaneously, namely data reduction, data presentation, drawing conclusions or verifi cation The results showed that the role of political parties in providing the cadres and political education to the public remains low. Methods and materials for political education conducted by the political parties were still very conceptual and less applicable. Evaluation methods in the provision of political education was not operating effectively, so that the role of political parties in providing awareness to the community about the rights and obligations as citizens to be low. oreover, the resulting low level of quality cadres of political parties in encouraging the improvement of people’s lives. Implications of the role of political parties in the political education of the younger generation of political resilience of region adversely affected the political participation of society and the low level of public participation in public policy-making and oversight.Keywords: Political Parties, Political Education, Youth Generation, Political Resilience of Region.