The dark side of public participation: Participative processes that legitimize elected officials’ values

Abstract

The literature on public participation suggests that engaging the public in policy‐making empowers citizens and enhances democracy. Drawing on conditions of “authentic” participation derived from this literature, this critical analysis shows that the public consultation said to have informed Canada's new prostitution laws served to legitimize the governing party's policy orientation. The contribution of this article is twofold: providing an in‐depth, critical account of how a public participation process can endorse elected officials’ values; and identifying factors that may be associated to this outcome. Ultimately, this article shines the spotlight on a force often neglected in the public participation literature: power.

The Grandview‐Woodland Citizens’ Assembly: An experiment in municipal planning

“…The finding that participation on the assembly did not impact assembly members’ confidence that City Council would implement their proposals was likely due to the timing of the surveys. One assembly member noted in the open‐ended section of the survey that, at the time the survey was completed (May 2015), “the report is not complete and we don’t know how the city will react to it.” Part of this may also be because the assembly was not empowered to make binding decisions, and existing research on using democratic innovations to engage citizens in public policy‐making shows that the results of these engagement efforts are sometimes filtered through the organizing agencies, and can even be used to gain cover for pre‐determined policy (Pateman ; Johnson ; Bouchard ). However, in the end Vancouver’s City Council reacted positively to the recommendations.…”

From Stakeholders to Joint Knowledge Production Partners

“…Technologies that can facilitate participation can also be used in non-participatory ways and for non-participatory purposes: They can be used to propagate intolerance and hate, undermine democratic values and practices, and create spaces and politics of exclusion and discrimination (Statzel, 2008). Furthermore, they can be used as a pretext to legitimise hidden agendas of co-optation and suppression, maintaining or enhancing practices and structures of power imbalance and exploitation (Bouchard, 2016).…”

Critical trends of citizen participation in policymaking. Insights from Portugal

“…If evaluation is scarce, the dissemination of participatory processes continues to grow, together with the "market" of professionals and experts, often supported (or hired) by international institutions (Lee 2015). The multiplication of one-off local practices that barely provide comparable evidence of effectiveness deserve suspicion (Mosse 2001;Lee 2015;Bouchard 2016). The "pivotal" age of participation has been accompanied by a general lack of evaluation and, more in general, institutional frameworks in favour of temporary agreements and covenants.…”