This article presents a systematic review of the English-language empirical literature about citizen participation to identify the obstacles to its implementation and the most successful ways to address them. Three sets of variables seem to impact effectiveness: contextual factors, including information asymmetries and public officials' attitude; organisational arrangements, including community representation criteria and process design; and process management issues, including group dynamics and collaboration quality. Two recommendations stem from our analysis: internalise decisions in organisational procedures, and establish ongoing interactions between government bodies and their stakeholders. We conclude that half-hearted engagement is unlikely to lead to successful citizen participation.
Purpose
– Interactive decision making has become a recurrent practice across countries, policy sectors and tiers of government. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how organizational arrangements, i.e. the way the interactive process is designed, influence its outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
– The research is carried out through a multiple case study. Four cases of interactive decision making are analyzed using a qualitative framework.
Findings
– Findings can contribute to shed light on the organizational underpinnings of the outcomes of interactive decision making. Accessibility, in particular meant as process openness, i.e. the intensity of the decision-making powers that are devolved to the public, seems to represent the key factor in producing positive outcomes, especially if associated to less-formalized arrangements.
Practical implications
– On the practice oriented side, findings provide decision makers with insights about how to design interactive mechanisms to improve the chances they would “work.” Specifically, finding suggest to launch interactive initiatives only when the public’s expectations in terms of process openness can be satisfied.
Originality/value
– The way organizational arrangements influence outcomes is likely to be affected by context-specific factors interacting with the formers in generating the latters. Therefore, in order to reach meaningful research results it might be necessary to systematically factor context-specific features in the analysis. Here lies the relative novelty of the paper: although the relation between arrangements and outcomes of interactive decision making has been already investigated by other contributions, the present analysis purposefully focusses on cases occurred in the same policy sector, in one homogeneous geographical location and characterized by the same administrative tradition in order to discount the influence of these factors.
Local public services, Accountability, External control, Conflict of interest, Resistance to control, M42 - Auditing, M48 - Government Policy and Regulation,
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