Civil society

Public participation

Citizens’ participation has many functions in developing a strong system of local self-governance, as it is a central way to build awareness of importance of the local structures and means of understanding the concerns and desires of the community. Development initiatives can be more successful when there is feeling of ownership in projects through direct involvement. Though it can be difficult, complicated, time-consuming and sometimes impossible to promote citizens’ participation in decision making, when consensus-based decisions are made, the results are often more legitimate and more widely accepted than decisions made by elected officials acting independently.

There are strong reasons for making an effort to encourage citizens’ participation and collaboration. Fundamentally, participation is essential to the core meaning of democracy and good governance as it improves information flow, accountability and due process, and gives voice to those who are most directly affected by public policy. Furthermore, citizens’ feedback allows to identify the community needs and priorities and the efficient allocation of resources to address them. When resources are scarce, the contributions and involvement of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private businesses and ordinary citizens to particular areas or activities can relieve the pressures on local authorities. Moreover, procedures that encourage ongoing participation between elections and consensus-oriented decision making produce more legitimate decisions because people have been involved in the process.

Example of the public participation at the local level

To explain the importance of involvement of citizens, we can imagine a very simple example of building a playground for children in the city neighbourhood. Often, these places are destroyed, either by vandals that are used to come there in the evenings, or even by children themselves by their play. These playgrounds, the destroyed ones, are then left behind or even destroyed completely and parents usually find another place where to bring their children. It is considered as a duty of a local government to take care of these places and to repair them. This can be a very long process and often after they get repaired they are destroyed again.

However, there are some cases when the citizens of nearby apartments got involved. Either they have drawn attention to the case and pushed the local government to speed up the process of reparation, or even got engaged by offering their own volunteer work and their own sources, or with the material from the city, they organised a work-team of parents that together with their children or other neighbours repaired the playground. Afterwards, the attitude towards it is very different. The self-interest to protect this place and prevent it from any damages is much stronger.

This is also a case of other public spaces - if people are involved (in decision making, planning, or even as a volunteers in building of it), their relation to that space is much more intense and they not only use it but protect it against devastation.

The eight-rung ladder of citizen participation developed by Sherry Arnstein is a simplification, and can have different forms nowadays from country to country, but it helps to illustrate the point that so many have missed - that there are significant gradations of citizen participation.

The bottom rungs of the ladder are Manipulation and Therapy. These two rungs describe levels of "non-participation" that have been contrived by some to substitute for genuine participation. Their real objective is not to enable people to participate in planning or conducting programs, but to enable power-holders to "educate" or "cure" the participants.

Next rungs progress to levels of "tokenism" that allow the have-nots to hear and to have a voice: Informing and Consultation. When they are proffered by power-holders as the total extent of participation, citizens may indeed hear and be heard. But under these conditions they lack the power to insure that their views will be heeded by the powerful.

When participation is restricted to these levels, there is no follow-through, no "muscle," hence no assurance of changing the status quo. Placation allows have-nots to advise, but retains right to decide for the power holders. Further up the ladder, there are the levels of citizen power with increasing degrees of decision-making clout. Citizens can enter into Partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power holders.

At the topmost rungs, Delegated Power and Citizen Control, have-not citizens obtain the majority of decision-making seats, or full managerial power.