Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy

Tina Nabatchi, Matt Leighninger

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118688595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive text on the theory and practice of public participation

Written by two leaders in the field, Public Participation for 21 st Century Democracy explores the theory and practice of public participation in decision-making and problem-solving. It examines how public participation developed over time to include myriad thick, thin, and conventional opportunities, occurring in both face-to-face meetings and online settings. The book explores the use of participation in various arenas, including education, health, land use, and state and federal government. It offers a practical framework for thinking about how to engage citizens effectively, and clear explanations of participation scenarios, tactics, and designs. Finally, the book provides a sensible approach for reshaping our participation infrastructure to meet the needs of public officials and citizens.

The book is filled with illustrative examples of innovative participatory activities, and numerous sources for more information. This important text puts the spotlight on the need for long-term, cross-sector, participation planning, and provides guidance for leaders, citizens, activists, and others who are determined to improve the ways that participation and democracy function. Public Participation for 21 st Century Democracy:

• Helps students and practitioners understand the history, theory, and practice of public participation
• Contains a wealth of case studies that explore the application of public participation in different settings
• Covers vital issues such as education, health, land use, and state and federal government
• Has accompanying instructor resources, such as PowerPoint slides, discussion questions, sample assignments, case studies and research from www.participedia.net, and classroom activities.

PART ONE

Participation in a Rapidly Changing Democracy

chapter ONE
Citizenship, Outside the Public Square

The problems we face are daunting, and our capacity to address them is remarkable. Climate change, terrorism, financial instability, and other challenges are indeed formidable, but our power to address them is more advanced than ever before.

The greatest element of our improved problem-solving capacity lies in citizens themselves. We enjoy higher levels of education and communication, and we are more committed than ever to the notion that all people deserve certain inalienable rights. Our ability to understand, use, and improve technology is growing by leaps and bounds: everyone, it seems, is a potential scientist, analyst, or inventor. The power of ordinary people, and the ability of government, civil society, and other institutions to unleash that capacity, is the key to our progress as a civilization.

The reality of rising citizen capacity is not, however, a comfortable fact for public leaders. Trapped in systems designed to protect their expertise from citizen interference, besieged by people who no longer believe their data or respect their authority, and faced with hostile constituents at public events, public officials, managers, and other leaders are understandably skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their fellow men and women.

In turn, citizens are skeptical about the virtues, capabilities, and good sense of their public officials. Highly polarized policy debates, the inability of elected leaders to agree on seemingly common-sense measures, and the massive influence of moneyed interests have helped produce the highest levels of citizen distrust in government that we have ever seen.

The official, conventional processes and structures for public participation are almost completely useless for overcoming this divide between citizens and government; in fact, they seem to be making matters worse. In large part, that is because the infrastructure for participation is inefficient and outdated; it does not recognize citizen capacity and it limits our collective problem-solving potential.

To supplement or circumvent this official participation infrastructure, local leaders have devised a host of new processes, formats, and structures for engaging the public. These include intensive face-to-face deliberations, convenient digital tools, and online networks that add dexterity to the power of face-to-face relationships. Many of these innovations not only satisfy the fundamental needs and goals of citizens, but also demonstrate the potential of public participation for making difficult decisions and solving formidable problems. So far, however, they have been pursued primarily on a temporary, ad hoc basis and have not been incorporated into the way that governments and communities operate.

Public participation can help protect our liberties, ensure justice and equality, and improve our quality of life. It is sometimes characterized as the interaction that makes democracy work—but it might be more accurate to say that public participation is the democracy in our primarily republican political systems. The greatest challenge we now face is how to transform those systems in ways that allow us to tap citizens’ full, democratic, problem-solving potential.

Illuminating that challenge is the purpose of this book. Before we explore the potential of participation (in Chapter 2), we will first examine the new attitudes and capacities people bring to public life. We also describe the existing infrastructure for participation and begin to explore why it typically fails to provide the things that citizens want.

Confident, Frustrated, Connected, and Lonely: The Curious Case of the 21st Century Citizen

“What is public participation?” would seem to be the first question to answer in this book. But there is a more fundamental question: “What do citizens want?” The most common mistake made by people who are trying to engage the public is that they try to facilitate citizen participation without first trying to understand citizens. Understanding citizens is, of course, no easy task. Citizens’ attitudes toward community and public life seem full of contradictions.

Public Problem-Solvers, Who Distrust the Official Public Problem-Solvers

People who are not policy experts or public servants are making increasingly sophisticated contributions to the governance and improvement of their communities. Some of these efforts involve the use of new online tools. Armed with new technologies and previously inaccessible government data, people have mapped crime patterns, assessed zoning policies, developed bus schedule apps, and monitored water quality. Other examples are impressive not for their technological sophistication, but for the audacity and commitment of volunteers. In Kansas, a team of forty-two volunteers worked with state government to complete a twelve-mile water pipeline in a fraction of the time (and cost) it would normally have taken (McGuigan, 2013). More common examples are the numerous street cleanups, neighborhood patrols, and after-school programs conducted by citizen problem-solvers.

Despite the obvious public-spiritedness of these and many other examples, the attitude of citizens toward government and other public institutions is strikingly negative. Trust in government is at an all-time low (Pew, 2013). Voting rates have declined steadily for decades, along with other measures of civic attitudes. One finding of the Knight Foundation’s (2010) Soul of the Community research was that people who had participated in a conventional public meeting had lower levels of attachment to community than people who had not. Citizens seem more eager to contribute to public problem solving, yet more frustrated with the conventional processes for governance.

Civil in Private, but Not in Public

Another curious contradiction has to do with the state of civil discourse. In public life, incivility has become increasingly common. Rudeness and intolerance are apparent in official public meetings, on newspaper comment threads, and in other public venues. A study of California public managers concluded that “everyone involved . . . had personal experience with—or could relate to descriptions of—instances of the public-acting-badly and civic-engagement-gone-wrong” (Pearce & Pearce, 2010).

And yet, in our private lives, incivility is less obvious. For one thing, it is no longer widely considered acceptable for people to use slurs and stereotypes relating to race, gender, or sexual orientation. While public hearings may be full of angry people and angry words, at least anecdotally it would seem that workplaces, campuses, and other public spaces are not.

Connected—and Lonely

The omnipresence of social media and other online connections contrasts oddly with citizens’ sense of social isolation. As of 2013, 73 percent of all adults who went online were users of social networking sites—a percentage that has doubled in the last five years (Duggan & Smith, 2013). Twenty-two percent of American adults use “digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues” (Smith, 2010).

But at the same time, the number of people expressing loneliness and a lack of social connections has continued to increase. The rate of people who consider themselves “lonely” has doubled since the 1980s, up to 40 percent of all adults. Furthermore, this social isolation seems to have other negative impacts on people’s lives, including their health. One study suggests that loneliness is as deadly as cancer and twice as deadly as obesity (Olien, 2013).

These trends may seem contradictory, but they are not. People are mistrustful of, angry at, and unfulfilled by public life, in part because of the public participation opportunities they are (and are not) being offered. The most widely available of these opportunities—voting, attending public hearings, and filing complaints—are, at best, insufficient and, at worst, detrimental.

The Failing Infrastructure of the Public Square

To realize the full potential of participation, we need to focus on what citizens actually want: problem solving, civility, and community. If we start with these goals in mind, it becomes easier to understand why official avenues for engagement do not appeal to the public.

In Chapter 2, we define participation and its various forms in greater detail and describe how some of those forms are capable of delivering the things that citizens want. For now, we follow the line of our citizen-centered analysis to a definition that does not mention government at all: Public participation is an umbrella term that describes the activities by which people’s concerns, needs, interests, and values are incorporated into decisions and actions on public matters and issues (see Nabatchi, 2012; Nabatchi & Amsler, 2014; Roberts, 2008). The word “public”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• PART ONE: Participation in a Rapidly Changing Democracy
• PART TWO: Participation in Action
• PART THREE: Participation for Democracy, Present and Future
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• EULA