This paper examines citizen participation in complex governance through two key scholarly frameworks. Drawing on Archon Fung's (2006) analysis, it explores how participatory mechanisms address three core problems in public administration: legitimacy deficits, political injustice, and governmental ineffectiveness. Case studies include Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting and the Chicago Police Department's beat meetings. The paper also synthesizes Walters et al.'s (2000) framework for designing public participation around the stages of policy development, identifying five core purposes for citizen involvement — Discover, Educate, Measure, Persuade, and Legitimize — and six issue characteristics that shape the appropriate design of participatory strategies.
Legitimacy is defined by Fung (2006) as a characteristic inherent in a public policy that gives citizens good reasons to support or obey it. One part of legitimacy is captured by the question: "Is government run for the benefit of all or for a few big interests?" (p. 70). If the answer points to government being run for the benefit of just a few big interests, then citizens may not — or should not — support it.
Other legitimacy problems are rooted in "unintentional rifts" existing between officials and their constituents, creating a situation where officials and public administrators "may be unable to gauge public opinion and will." This rift can widen if the sphere in which decision makers function becomes further removed from ordinary citizens (p. 70).
There are a number of methods for addressing these two legitimacy issues — government being run for the benefit of a few big interests, and a rift between policymakers and their constituencies. These methods focus on creating participatory forums that are more participant-inclusive and participant-representative, as well as more communication-intensive. For example, James Fishkin's Deliberative Polls aim for descriptive representation via random selection of participants and seek to modify the nature of communication "from preference expression to preference development by providing background materials and facilitating conversations among participants" (p. 70).
Likewise, the Study Circles Resource Center has helped a small town in Idaho address legitimacy issues by creating a model for participation. In this model, a purposefully diverse set of participants are grouped together — in a number of groups — to discuss a controversial issue. Conversations are facilitated and participants are given appropriate background information. These "Study Circles" have aided the development of public consensus (p. 70).
Fung explains that there have been many attempts at improving legitimacy in the standard public hearing process, nearly all of which attempt to improve the "representativeness of participants either through random selection or targeted recruitment" and aim "to make discussions more informed and reflective" (p. 70).
Injustice, Fung argues, "often results from political inequality" (p. 70). Groups that bear no political influence cannot affect decision making, or cannot acquire the information they need to assess policy alternatives, because they are purposefully left out, poorly organized, or too weak. These groups are, more often than not, ill-served by their communities' laws. Inequality can also result from the financial and resource connections of politicians in political campaigns, politicians' relationships with special interest groups, the superior ability of interest groups to mobilize and influence policy, and "persistent legacies of racialized and gendered exclusion from political offices and organizations" (p. 70).
There are two ways to address injustice via participatory methods: replacing decision makers who are acting systematically in an unjust manner, or creating popular pressures that influence decision makers to change their behavior.
One prominent example of injustice being addressed by replacing unjust decision makers is the case of budget process reform in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 1989, the Workers' Party came into power and, over the next two years, implemented a participatory budget mechanism that effectively shifted decisions concerning how the city's money was spent from the city council to a system of neighborhood and citywide popular assemblies. The priorities determined through annual cycles of open meetings are aggregated into a city budget.
This mechanism has been remarkably effective for Porto Alegre. Poor residents of the city are now much better off: the percentage of neighborhoods with running water increased from 75% to 90%, the percentage of neighborhoods with sewer systems increased from 45% to 98%, and housing assistance grew sixteenfold since the implementation of the participatory budget.
The participatory budget increased justice by changing who made the decisions — shifting authority from expert financial bureaus, a city council, and professional politicians to citizens themselves. Moreover, although the forums for participatory budget reform are open to all and participants self-select, lower-income residents in Porto Alegre are more likely to participate than wealthier residents. This is because the participatory budget process addresses problems that are far more significant to the poor.
Apart from directly replacing decision makers, mechanisms that use random selection or lay stakeholder involvement may also enhance equality if properly implemented.
Ineffectiveness may hinder decision making and implementation even when public decisions are made justly and legitimately. State agencies may lack the appropriate "information, ingenuity, know-how, or resources necessary to address social problems effectively," while citizens are capable of providing a diverse set of skills that may improve public action (p. 73). For example, including clients in the coproduction of public services such as education and human development may considerably enhance the quality of those services. Public safety and environmental regulation are also areas where citizens may possess more accurate and locally beneficial knowledge derived from close exposure to the problems at hand.
In both of these cases, the public may offer a framework that more closely matches their values, needs, and preferences than professionals can. Moreover, citizens offer innovative approaches to traditional problems precisely because they are removed from the embedded techniques and institutional habits of professional organizations.
As an example, Fung cites the Chicago Police Department's organizational shift from a classic hierarchy to a form of accountable autonomy. Instead of shielding its operations from public scrutiny and influence, residents in each of the 280 Chicago neighborhoods now meet with the police officers who serve their areas in open "beat meetings" (p. 73). Similar to the participatory budget process in Porto Alegre, residents in lower-income areas participate at greater rates than those in higher-income areas, because the problem being addressed — crime — is more prevalent in lower-income neighborhoods.
Case studies have shown that when these processes are run well, they produce innovative and functional strategies that draw on the capacities and knowledge of local residents. Fung identifies four factors that make this structure of citizen involvement successful: (1) exposure to public scrutiny has prompted officers to move away from standard, ineffective approaches to fighting crime; (2) when residents engage with police officers, they frequently develop approaches the police would not have reached on their own; (3) residents provide resources — such as refined, day-to-day knowledge of their neighborhoods — that "make different kinds of public safety strategies possible"; and (4) the mechanism of deliberative problem solving connects previously unused city resources (p. 73).
"Five purposes of citizen participation in policy stages"
"Six issue traits shaping participation design choices"
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