Locating Citizen Participation

Abstract

In recent years, citizens in many countries have been on the receiving end of a wave of interest from governments, NGOs, donors and lenders in ways of involving them more actively in shaping decisions that affect their lives.Innovative experiments in governance have opened up spaces for public involvement in deliberation over policies and a greater degree of control over certain kinds of resources (Fung and Wright 2000, Goetz and Gaventa 2001).Levering open arenas once closed off to citizen voice or public scrutiny, these moves have helped to widen political space for citizens to play more of a part in shaping some of the decisions that affect their lives.Forms of political participation associated with liberal democracy have come to be complemented with a new architecture of democratic practice, built on familiar foundations and offering ambiguous new political opportunities.Whether in budgeting, policy dialogue, planning, project appraisal, poverty assessment, monitoring or evaluation, 'participatory' alternatives to expert-driven processes have gained ground. 1 These moves have given rise to new interactions and institutions, blurring old boundaries and creating new configurations of power and resistance. Notes1 The extent to which much of what is claimed as 'participatory' is any different from the 'top-down' approaches it claims to replace is, of course, rather less clear (see Cornwall 2000). 2 The World Bank has been a particularly prolific source of literature on these benefits of participation, from the mid-1970s to the present, see www.worldbank.org/participation. 3I am grateful to Kaushik Mukerjee for this point. 4This section draws on Cornwall (2000), which explores these historical trajectories in more detail.