Participation
The extent and quality of public participation in government decision making profoundly shapes both policy outcomes and societal trust.
Why redesign participation?
Seeing the big picture: enable collaborative actions
Citizen participation offers diverse expertise and perspectives, including local and Indigenous knowledge. Inclusive processes can foster collaborative actions across households, commons, markets, and governments to tackle complex challenges such as climate change.
Nurturing human nature: foster societal trust
Globally, public trust in governments is low. Well-designed citizen participation can help rebuild trust and foster wider support for government actions on complex challenges such as the just transition.
Being distributive by design: overcome elite influence
Weak citizen participation increases the risks of regulatory capture, where powerful interests disproportionately influence governments’ priorities and policies, blocking efforts to redistribute power and challenge the status quo.
Emerging alternatives: redesigning participation
Useful resources to help explore how to redesign particiaption include:
- The Deliberative Democracy Digest creates a space for emerging debates and reflections on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.
- The OECD provides guidelines, case studies, and insights on citizen participation.
- Participedia crowdsources case studies from around the world on the topic of citizen participation.
- The Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies shares best practice on the design and implementation of climate assemblies in Europe.
- DemocracyNext collates research and provides guidance on institutionalising and scaling citizens’ assemblies.
- The Global Citizens’ Assembly Network generates actionable insights to inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of global citizens’ assemblies.
- Module 5 of the Wellbeing Economy Policy Design course offers guidance on how citizen participation can help co-create a wellbeing economy vision.
Credit: European Commission
Share your ideas and tools
Do you have any other ideas on how governments can redesign participation? We would welcome your feedback and suggestions.
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