Civil society and participatory policy making in South Africa:

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

“…the presence of a pre-drafted summit declaration). Previous local and international research has shown that consultation can leave participants feeling disempowered due to being co-opted into processes with predetermined outcomes [12][13][14]39]. The finding that the 125 group recommendations were reduced to the eleven recommendations on the summit declaration behind closed doors-with no audio or documented records of this meeting-also suggests a top-down process, whereby government retains control over both decisions and decision-making.…”

“…Adequate consultation processes are essential for policy implementation [56], especially in terms of how inputs move between provincial and national consultation events and back again [57]. One consequence of a decentralised health system is that the development of policies at national level removes them from the provincial and local administrative structures which implement them, as well as from participating communities [8,12,58]. Lack of consultation around implementation priorities may negatively affect policy implementation at provincial and district levels [8,12].…”

“…However, the extent of public involvement and incorporation of their views varies considerably. In South Africa, public participation in policymaking is legislated [11,12] and therefore expected, without necessarily problematising how such processes should be conducted, nor whether or how the inputs are used. This is especially so at national and provincial levels [13].…”

“…It may also be because most policy processes are formulated at national level; this removes them from provincial and local administrative structures tasked with implementing them, as well as from communities who might participate in them [12]. This implementation gap between top-down consultation on national policies and provincial-level implementation has been well documented, both in South Africa [12,16,17] and internationally [18][19][20][21]. There is thus clear divergence between the goals of public participation and its effects in practice in the South African context, indicating a need to identify ways in which public inputs might have a meaningful impact on policy decisions.…”

Popular Participation in Legislative Law-Making under the New Democratic Dispensation in Kenya

“…21 In the 'talk-centric' model, the people debate about governance affairs which reinforce participatory democracy and civic engagement. 22 It is on this premise, and given the challenges of electoral democracy in Africa and Kenya in particular, that direct participation of the people is examined in this article. The hope is that this approach would add colour and legitimacy to representative democracy thus providing a formidable coalition in support of democracy.…”