Managing the state-civil society relations in public policy: Deliberative democracy vis-a-vis civil society movements in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper is trying to examine the state-civil society relation and also argue from the theory of deliberative democracy in explaining the roles of civil society in Malaysia. Carolyn Hendriks sees deliberative, from two fundamental approaches; there are micro deliberative which concentrates on defining the procedural conditions of a structured deliberative forum and macro deliberative which are more concerned with the messy, unstructured deliberation which takes place in the public sphere. With the combination of civil society and deliberative democracy, this paper will open up the discussion on the state-civil society relations in Malaysia. It manages to trace that Malaysian civil society movements, in engaging and managing the relation with the state, have employed both deliberative methods of deliberative democracy. In fact, Malaysian civil society has gone a step further by joining the opposition party and contesting in the election for power due to hostile relation between the state and civil society. However, the reality is that there are too many considerations that need to be contemplated by the state and civil society in their relations, especially when it involves national security and race issues.