Participatory mechanisms as symbolic policy instruments?

Boussaguet, Laurie

doi:10.1057/cep.2015.12

Cited by 29 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…For example, at national level such as in Portugal where e-participation initiatives are sparse, with the function of most initiatives at the local level being to inform, as the government primarily supports e-informing rather than e-consulting and e-collaborative efforts (Fedotova et al 2012). This lack of effective e-participation is not restricted to Portugal, however, with Boussaguet (2016) making similar claims about participatory mechanisms at the EU level, criticising the lack of use of participatory experiments or tools and the failure to include "ordinary" citizens.…”

Section: E-informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience with Digital Tools in Different Types of e-Participation

Aichholzer

Rose

2019

Studies in Digital Politics and Governance

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The chapter offers a systematic overview of the use of digital tools for various forms of political participation and the experiences made so far, based on an extensive literature review. Discerning three key functions of e-participationmonitoring, agenda-setting and input to decision-making-the authors review a variety of formally institutionalised mechanisms as well as informal expressions of civic engagement, including social media. The examination of digital tool use for monitoring purposes extends from electronic information access and exchange to e-deliberation, while the role for agenda-setting mainly includes uses for e-petitions and e-campaigning, showing a mixed picture of democratic impacts. The review of e-participation providing input for decision-making focusses on e-consultations, e-participative budgeting and e-voting, identifying several persisting problems with the latter instrument. A special section examines e-participation at EU-level, from deliberative citizens' involvement projects and e-consultation to the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) and e-petitions to the European Parliament. Findings show that digital tools enhance direct and participative democracy in many respects; however, exaggerated expectations of new democratic potentials remain unfulfilled: deliberative participative designs lack any impact on decision-making, and the ECI still is rather an instrument for civil society mobilisation than citizen empowerment. 4.1 Three Basic Functions of e-Participation Understanding "e-participation" as the use of digital tools for political participation in the wider sense includes a wide variety of formally institutionalised mechanisms, as well as informal expressions of civic engagement. According to their predominant function in the policy cycle, we can discern three basic functions of participation (we prefer this typology because of the focus on level of impacts):

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Section: E-informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience with Digital Tools in Different Types of e-Participation

Aichholzer

Rose

2019

Studies in Digital Politics and Governance

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“…Several reasons for public participation are established in literature; producing better decisions and raising legitimacy among the most relevant ones [52][53][54][55]. On EU-level, shaping citizenry and strengthening trust in EU institutions may be added [56,57]. In correspondence to the established functions of participation practices, Wiek and Iwaniec [58] describe several process-level functions of collective visioning activities: building capacity, empowering stakeholders, creating ownership, and developing accountability.…”

Section: From Participatory To Transdisciplinary Foresightmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite widespread PE enthusiasm, scholarly and political debate developed various critical and hypercritical arguments. The most commonly identified shortcomings include that PE fails to deliver the aimed for results, such as gains in rationality, stimulating debate or actual impact on strategy and policy-making [41,54,57,59,60,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. Here, discrepancies particularly emerge, when bridging the gap between theory and practice [81,82].…”

Section: Limits To Public Engagementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human centred science and technology—transdisciplinary foresight and co-creation as tools for active needs-based innovation governance

Gudowsky

Peissl

2016

Eur J Futures Res

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Current governance structures are increasingly showing inability to address complex issues such as the Grand Challenges. Dealing with these highly interrelated, cross cutting, extensive and potentially open ended issues requires research, development and innovation to be oriented towards societal needs and demands. Here, developing and applying sustainable long term strategies for socio-technical change on the basis of socially robust knowledge seems inevitable and using the tools of anticipatory governance-forward looking and participation-is essential in order to govern innovation actively and responsibly. Yet, expert-based forward looking has its limits, especially when considering long term perspectives, and may fail to include all necessary opinions. Thus, stakeholder engagement has become a norm over the last decades, but including laypeople into forward looking science, technology and innovation (STI) governance is underexplored. Here, strategy and policy programme development may be well suited to function as early entry point for public needs and values into the innovation process. This paper will briefly review the theoretical basis for transdisciplinary forward looking and provide first insights into an ongoing highly deliberative and reflexive foresight and co-creation process engaging science, society and policy makers, CIMULACTCitizen and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon2020. We will especially focus on the role of technology within a collective visioning exercise that allowed for shared explorations of desirable futures, thereby collecting tacit knowledge as well as social needs and values. Integrating these with stakeholders' and experts' knowledge serves for co-creating socially robust knowledge for orienting policy and strategy programming towards needs based science, technology and innovation.

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“…Public engagement literature states producing better decisions and raising legitimacy are among the most prominent reasons for commissioning and conducting participatory processes [21][22][23][24]. Additionally, on EU-level, public participation is pursued to strengthen EU-citizenship and build trust in EU institutions [25,26], and can be traced back to projects like 2006's "Meeting of the Minds," a transnational citizens' deliberation on Brain Sciences [27].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

But do they deliver? Participatory agenda setting on the test bed

2018

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In this contribution, we investigate how results produced in a large-scale participatory agenda setting process differ from results of expert-based foresight studies with a similar aim of informing EU research and innovation (R&I) policy. After providing a theoretical positioning and an overview of the EU-wide participatory agenda setting process CIMULACT-Citizen and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon 2020, we describe our developed analytical approach that includes five analytical steps and calculation of three metrics. By comparative reading, analysis and scoring of 16 expert-based foresight reports, we produced data for the metrics that allow for discerning between (a) how many of the analyzed foresight reports cover a respective topic from CIMULACT, (b) how well this basic coverage aligns qualitatively, and (c) comprehensive comparison of each CIMULACT topic with respect to all surveyed reports. To discern differences, we chose those results (research topics) from CIMULACT that were also sufficiently covered by expert-based reports. Our findings suggest that such citizen-based, multi-actor co-created policy advice qualitatively differs considerably from that elicited by expert-based reports, in terms of direction and focus of the proposed R&I agenda.

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Participatory mechanisms as symbolic policy instruments?

Cited by 29 publications

References 22 publications

Experience with Digital Tools in Different Types of e-Participation

Experience with Digital Tools in Different Types of e-Participation

Human centred science and technology—transdisciplinary foresight and co-creation as tools for active needs-based innovation governance

But do they deliver? Participatory agenda setting on the test bed

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