Participatory enthusiasms: a recent history of citizen engagement initiatives

ABSTRACT

There have been waves of enthusiasm for citizen participation before. I discuss several features that make the current one distinctive: Its scale and scope, its reliance on modes of collaboration made familiar by digital media, its dependence on coalitions of actors, within and outside the state, for its effects, and its professionalization in techniques of facilitated discussion. I focus on the latter, exploring how professionals’ understandings of the aims and limits of participation sometimes conflict with those of participants. More broadly, I argue for a better understanding of how models of participation diffuse across institutional settings and with what effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• deliberation
• public engagement
• participatory democracy

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the organizers of the ‘Thirty Years Later: The Participatory Turns’ Mirages and Realities Conference' for valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper, and to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the same vein, Pateman (2012) criticizes the subsuming of ‘participatory democracy’ under ‘deliberative democracy’ for neglecting participatory democrats' concern with democratizing formally non-political institutions like the workplace.

2. In the following, I discuss two initiatives, Imagine New York and Listening to the City. I joined the steering committee of Imagine New York in December 2001. I was trained and worked as a facilitator, helped to plan the workshops and to synthesize ideas generated in them for the draft visions, and interviewed organizers. My research team and I observed 12 workshops and the summit, and interviewed 32 workshop participants over the phone in open-ended interviews about their experiences of the workshops and ideas about the rebuilding process more generally (see Polletta & Wood, 2005 for a fuller discussion). I interviewed the organizers of Listening to the City, participated in the day-long event, and, with my research team, interviewed 50 participants. We interviewed 24 of them again a year later. In our interviews with participants, we asked several questions designed to get at the conversational and political models on which they operated. For example, we asked participants, ‘Have you ever done anything like Listening to the City (or Imagine) before?’ (and a follow-up: ‘Have you ever participated in a group discussion that was similar to this one?’) and ‘when you decided to come to Listening to the City, what did you imagine that you would do in it?’ We also paid close attention to the analogies that people cited in answer to other questions.

3. Interviews L1B-FP14; L1-FP11; I-GSA11.

4. Interviews L1-FP12; L1-FP2.

5. Interviews L1-FP12; L1-LW8; LIB-GE2; LIB-FP2.

6. Polletta notes from Imagine NY Summit, 1 June 2002, New York City. Polletta’s interview with Gianni Longo, ACP Planning and Imagine New York Steering Committee, New York City, 9 March 2002.

7. Polletta’s interview with Holly Leicht, Municipal Art Society, phone interview, 17 October 2002.

8. Polletta’s interview with Holly Leicht.

9. David Kallick email to Polletta, 14 November 2011.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number IIS 0306868].