The evolution of citizen and stakeholder engagement in Canada, from Spicer to #Hashtags

Abstract

Government‐led citizen and stakeholder engagement is undertaken with the broad aims of improving government effectiveness and strengthening perceived legitimacy for government action. However, some aspects of the digital era that are challenging and stretching these traditions include changing economics of attention, heightened expectations of citizens and stakeholders, and a reconfiguration of the nature of policymaking discourse. Seven Government of Canada citizen and stakeholder engagement cases, spread over the past 27 years, are reviewed against the emergence of digital technologies within the context of traditional engagement exercises to understand how governments are experimenting with new approaches, and how new models may still be needed to respond to this shifting technology landscape. A future research agenda is sketched that anticipates how expanding technological capabilities, changing expectations on the part of citizens and stakeholders, and new approaches to policy discourse might require a reappraisal of our concepts of citizen and stakeholder engagement.

Puzzling Publics: The role of reflexive learning in universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) policy formulation in Canada and the US

“…Beyond discussions of policy learning, our study demonstrates that there is value in opening up theories of the policy process, and in particular, theories of policy formulation, beyond policy elites. Public administration studies of new and disruptive technologies have noted increasing trends in government to engage citizens in policy design (Longo, 2017). Our discussion of reflexive learning provides initial indications as to why some public engagement exercises succeed while others do not.…”

To what extend do governments effectively use social media? Understanding government and user interactions on immigration agencies' social media

“…As outlined in Chapter 2, both public administration and migration studies scholars have focused on understanding government and migrants' perspectives of social media use primarily using qualitative methods (Clarke 2012;Hrdinova et al 2010;Francoli 2014Francoli , 2017Komito 2011;Dekker and Engbersen 2014;Longo 2017;Small 2012). For example, Clarke ( 2012) used a research design that included content analysis of government Twitter accounts and 30 semistructured interviews with public servants from different federal departments of the Government of Canada to find out if government is using social media to engage with citizens and identify barriers for the social media use in government.…”

“…The first discussion focuses mostly on citizens' participation in public policy, e-consultations and eengagement (e.g. Clarke 2012;Clarke and Craft 2017;Kavanaugh et al 2012;McNutt 2010McNutt , 2014Longo 2017) and the second discussion focuses primarily on public service delivery (e.g. Dutil et al 2010;Mergel 2012Linders 2012;Roy 2017;Small 2012).…”

E-government as an anti-corruption tool: panel data analysis across countries

“…In the literature, the concept of participation is mainly understood as e-consultation. Thus, it means obtaining non-state stakeholders' ideas, expertise, and opinions about policy problems and alternatives (Lee and Kwak, 2012;Longo, 2017). Collaboration indicates that governments and nonstate stakeholders work together to solve complex social problems (Noveck, 2009).…”