城市可持续治理中的公民参与制度研究——西方的经验与启示

当前西方城市发展的主流思想是强调公民参与和以可持续治理为中心。在公民参与城市治理的制度建设方面,西方国家已经形成了较为系统全面的体系。反观国内,公民参与缺乏系统全面的制度保障,公民参与城市治理的机会太少,参与的有效性大打折扣,城市发展规划和城市管理的一些政策主要还是依靠领导＂拍脑袋＂做出,很少考虑到民众的利益诉求。为此,有必要吸收借鉴西方公民参与城市治理方面制度建设的先进经验来提升当前我国城市治理中公民参与的有效性和科学性,继而推进我国城市的健康持续发展。     

What does youth-led participatory budgeting reveal about youth priorities? Ideas,votes, and decisions

Youth involvement in community decision-making is considered a core principle of both youth advocacy and progressive governance. Yet, in many communities formal roles for youth remain limited. This paper presents data from a youth-led participatory budgeting process in Boston, Massachusetts (US). The City of Boston has institutionalized a formal process through which numerous youth can contribute ideas and vote on capital projects to receive city funding. A smaller group of youth are engaged in even greater depth. They are trained and work to facilitate submission of ideas, turn ideas into proposals, and encourage youth voting. We use data to identify concerns expressed by youth, their ideas for solutions, and the movement from ideas to funded projects. Implications for further development of participatory budgeting as a mechanism for youth civic engagement are discussed.     

The People's Budget? Politics,Participation and Pro‐poor Policy

Recent moves towards ‘participatory’ budgeting have raised hopes and expectations that spending and revenue generation can be made more pro‐poor if informed citizens and their non‐traditional political organizations participate directly in budgeting decisions. This article reviews experiences of participatory budgeting and pro‐poor policy‐making in Brazil, Ireland, Chile, Mauritius, and Costa Rica. It draws attention to several important issues: Who participates? What kind of institutional framework is necessary? What happened to the revenue‐generation side of pro‐poor budgeting? It points out that making spending and taxation more ‘pro‐poor’ has historically depended on pro‐poor political parties gaining power.     

Participation in the city: where do women fit in?

Women's priorities have often been ignored in the design of human settlements, the location of housing, and the provision of urban services. New forms of urban partnership are needed to develop participatory processes which include women and men at all stages of urban development. Participation is most commonly associated with political participation or activity. The author gives an overview of the "gendered city", then looks at how men and women benefit and contribute to urban life, through examples of opportunities for making a living and for using urban resources and services. She then moves away from participation as entitlement to consider participation as empowerment, looking at some problems faced by women in public office and grassroots organizations. The paper concludes in arguing that a gender perspective will not inform urban policy and planning processes automatically. Sections discuss gender and poverty in the city, making a living in the city, urban planning as a gender issue, getting around the city, access to resources and services, violence in the city, women's participation in urban governance, women's representation in public office, community organization and advocacy, men and gender issues, and forging linkages through participation.     

Public Sector Management and the Democratic Ethos: A 5-Year Study of Key Relationships in Israel

This article deals with the nexus between bureaucracy and democracyin a management-oriented public sector. The article developsthe idea that public administration plays a major role in determiningcitizens’ political attitudes and behaviors. A theoreticalmodel is suggested to examine the relationship among citizens’perceptions of involvement and participation in administrativedecision making, perceived managerial quality, perceived publicsector performance, and democratic participatory behavior (i.e.,trust in administrative agencies, political participation, andcommunity involvement). A sample of 2,281 Israeli citizens providedinformation on the research variables over a 5-year period (2001–05).Findings reveal that citizens’ perceptions of involvementand participation in administrative decision making are positivelyrelated with perceived managerial quality but are not relatedwith perceived public sector performance. In addition, perceivedmanagerial quality is positively related with trust in administrativeagencies as well as with political participation and communityinvolvement. Finally, public sector performance is a mediatorin this relationship. These findings lead to a discussion aboutthe linkage between the bureaucratic and the democratic ethosin modern managerial governance, theoretical and practical implications,as well as suggestions for future studies.     

Reflections on doing participatory research in health: participation,method and power

The author has reflected on her experience in facilitating three participatory research (PR) projects to identify key issues surrounding participation, method and power. The three PR projects in health, all undertaken in the same region in southeast Australia, assessed the needs of women who have experienced breast cancer, evaluated an Indigenous healthy lifestyle programme and developed and documented a model of coordinated care by a consumer group. In particular, the three participatory projects suggested that participants do not always want to maximise their own participation and may prefer external researcher involvement – relationships, confidentiality, anonymity and time‐impacted perspectives of participation. In one study, quantitative methods were selected and time and previous knowledge of research shaped participants' selection of method. In the projects, power relations were complex and issues of negotiation, inclusion, quality of research, agendas, roles and integrity are discussed. The lessons learned here are that participatory researchers can be open to differing levels of participation and methods while also comfortable with sharing decision‐making in research, even if it alters the research outcome.     

An equality of condition framework for user involvement in mental health policy and planning: evidence from participatory action research

Discussions about user involvement in the mental health services tend to throw up four major areas of concern: the capacity of service users to participate, their lack of participation skills, the need for a positive organisational culture and the need for arenas of participation. This article presents evidence from participatory action research with Irish mental health service users which explored how they could more equally participate in advisory committees. Participants identified barriers to their equal participation due to unequal cultural, physical, mental and economic resources, time, power, ‘stigma’(prejudice) and lack of respect for their experiential knowledge and emotional expression. These barriers fall within the ‘equality of condition framework’ developed by Baker and colleagues. Enabling equal user involvement in strategic decision‐making requires more than arenas of participation – it requires comprehensively addressing service users’ structural disadvantages throughout the process of involvement.     

Affective virtuosity: Challenges for governance feminism in the context of the economic crisis

This article explores the possibilities and constraints for feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and its influence over policy making and public debate in the context of austerity and neoliberal governance. By analysing the process in which a group of Finnish academic feminists used their expert position to influence government policy in 2015–2017, the article illustrates the strategies they adopted to engage in political debates and how they negotiated the new political landscape. The research material was derived from two years of action research and participant observation and is considered through the theoretical lens of governance feminism. The article makes a distinctive contribution to extant theories of governance feminism, by drawing upon theories of affects and ambivalence as a complement to governance feminism's focus on discourses and co‐optation. We coin the term affective virtuosity to highlight the importance of affect in feminist knowledge production and diffusion, and in shaping the various perspectives available to feminist scholars in encounters with politicians and policymakers.     

The Logic of A Co‐Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy,Creativity, Solidarity,and Common Purpose

Over the past 30 years, the collectivist‐democratic form of organization has presented a growing alternative to the bureaucratic form, and it has proliferated, here and around the world. This form is manifest, for example, within micro‐credit groups, workers’ co‐operatives, nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, self‐help groups, community and municipal initiatives, social movement organizations, and in many nonprofit groups in general. It is most visible in the civil society sector, but demands for deeper participation are also evident in communities and cities, and the search for more involving and less bureaucratic structures has spread into many for‐profit firms as well. Building on research on this form of organization, this article develops a model of the decisional processes utilized in such organizations and contrasts these “Democracy 2.0” standards for decision making from the Democracy 1.0 (representative and formal) standards that previously prevailed. Drawing on a new generation of research on these sorts of organizations, this article and this special section discuss: (a) how consensus decisional processes are being made more efficient; (b) how such organizations are now able to scale to fairly large size while still retaining their local and participatory basis; (c) how such organizations are cultivating a more diverse membership and using such diversity to build more democratic forms of governance; (d) how such organizations are combatting ethnoracial and gender inequalities that prevail in the surrounding society; and (e) how emotions are getting infused into the public conversations within these organizations and communities.     

Deliberate or Emancipate? Civil Society Participation in Trade Policy: The Case of the CARIFORUM–EU EPA

At both the multilateral and regional levels, there have been efforts to address the democratic deficit in trade negotiations. One such example is the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific group of countries where civil society participation was enshrined in the Cotonou Agreement. Yet, the CARIFORUM–EU EPA attracted much criticism from civil society. The paper argues that civil society failed to affect the outcome of the EPA because they participated in the process within a deliberative democratic framework which did not allow for emancipation or a challenge to global economic power and structural considerations in the negotiations; neither did it achieve citizen empowerment and ownership. We advocate the practice of participatory democracy in trade policy decision making—an ideal space for citizen participation—the former holding greater promise for influencing the trade policy agenda.     

Confronting the Informal in Good Governance: The Case of Decentralised Education‐System Reform in Guinea

For twenty years, technocratic planning and management approaches have dominated good‐governance reforms in developing countries. This is true even for newer ‘participatory’ and ‘citizen‐driven’ reforms that still struggle to engage with powerful informal forces affecting public service delivery. This article presents evidence from a case study of decentralised education‐system reform in Guinea, revealing a wide range of influential dynamics outside the technical realm. These corroborate the argument for ‘good‐fit’ alternatives to traditional governance approaches and concrete measures to better capture the constructive and disable the destructive effects of informality on development.     

Participatory Practices in Organizations

The literature on participatory practices in organizations has been less coherent and more limited to subspecialties than the literature on bureaucracy in organizations – despite a number of celebrated studies of participation in 20th century American sociology. Due to the practical nature of participatory reforms and the ambiguity of participation as a concept, attempts to review participatory knowledge have a tendency to focus on refining definitions and clarifying frameworks within subfields. This article instead provides a broad thematic overview of three different types of research on participation in organizations, all critical to an understanding of today's dramatic expansion of participatory practices across a variety of organizations. Classic research studied participation as dynamic and central to organizational legitimacy. Institutional design research has focused on participation as a stand‐alone governance reform with promising empowerment potential, but mixed results in domains such as health care, environmental politics, and urban planning. Finally, recent research seeks to place participatory practices in the context of shifting relationships between authority, voice, and inequality in the contemporary era. The article concludes with suggestions for building on all three categories of research by exploring what is old and new in the 21st century's changing participatory landscape.     

Beneficiaries’ participation in development organizations through local partners: A case study in Southern Africa

In a case study of one European non‐governmental organization (NGO) (data obtained from 10 staff members in Europe and Southern Africa, and 19 representatives of local partner organizations) we investigate whether the involvement of the partners in local and ‘northern’ policy‐making affects their perception of the governance quality of their organizations and that of the European donor organization, as well as the perception of the NGO's staff members. The answer is positive as to the local organizations, but local partners (as representatives of the eventual beneficiaries) are hardly involved in decision‐making at donor level. Finally, the presence of specific participation mechanisms seems to be more affected by beneficiary country factors than by activity‐related influences.     

Making a difference? Bringing children's and young people's views into policy‐making

As the participation of children and young people in policy decision‐making has spread in the UK, participation work is facing hard questions on its translation from principle to effective practice. The participation literature has been largely self‐referential in its consideration of policy influence. This paper considers the potential usefulness of the UK literature on policy networks, which categorises the relationships between government actors and other interests in policy‐making. A brief introduction is given to this literature. Then a participatory project is examined in light of certain key concepts within the policy network literature. The paper concludes by considering how both the participation and the policy networks literature might learn from each other in future conceptual and empirical work.     

Steering the Poverty‐Environment Nexus in Central Asia: A metagovernance analysis of the Poverty‐Environment Initiative (PEI)

The close and reciprocal ties between poverty and environmental degradation present significant potential for simultaneous improvement of the livelihood of the poorest along with increased opportunities and enhanced resilience of the environment and natural resources. By supporting governments and other stakeholders in designing and implementing development plans that tackle environmental and poverty concerns in a joint manner, the globally operating UNDP‐UNEP Poverty‐Environment Initiative (PEI) addresses a major governance challenge for sustainable development (SD) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in particular. Focusing on Central Asia, and specifically Tajikistan, a country outside the spotlight of studies concerned with SD governance mechanisms, and through the analysis of PEI programme documents and stakeholders’ interviews, this article probes into the governance and governance co‐ordination (metagovernance) settings for SD. The article closes by presenting a set of recommendations to improve governance co‐ordination, while achieving more inclusive decision‐making and ultimately increasing the impact of PEI on the society and the environment. Specifically, it argues for improved information policy and enhanced integration of endogenous knowledge. Furthermore, national and local development planning and private initiatives should be better linked, and the different levels of governance for poverty‐environment mainstreaming should be more coherent. The solutions discussed are of relevance for wider Central Asia and the global community engaged in moving the SDGs into the mainstream of governance and policy frameworks.     

公民参与视野下的地方政府治理能力建设——基于中国语境的分析

作为国家治理的重要组成部分,地方治理能力高低直接影响国家治理能力的提升。参与时代,地方政府与公众互动的能力是地方治理能力的重要表现。我国地方政府面对公民参与时能力不足的表现有:左躲右闪、打退堂鼓、束手无策。公民参与中地方政府能力建设应以最大化公民参与积极功能和最小化消极功能、保障政府的帮助者和伙伴者及服务者角色、维护和增进公民与政府的关系为依据。公民参与中地方政府能力建设围绕制度能力、参与网络管理能力、政府人员胜任力三个层面,包括信息公开制度、参与制度、政府回应制度、识别和整合利益能力、协调合作能力、维护参与网络能力、尊重公民权利能力、选择参与策略能力等八项建设内容。     

The Virtues of Participation without Power: Campaigns,Party Networks,and the Ends of Politics

Following Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund‐raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power.     

Why do we still need participatory technology assessment?

The paper contributes to the current discussion on the role of participatory methods in the context of technology assessment (TA) and science and technology (S&T) governance. It is argued that TA has to be understood as a form of democratic policy consulting in the sense of the Habermasian model of a ??pragmatist?? relation of science and politics. This notion implies that public participation is an indispensable element of TA in the context of policy advice. Against this background, participatory TA (pTA) is defended against recent criticism of procedures of lay participation which states that pTA is lacking impact on S&T decision making, that pTA instead of opening S&T policies to new perspectives is used as a means to support mainstream S&T policy and that in pTA procedure the authentic lay perspective is systematically contorted by dominant expert knowledge.     

Managing Stakeholder Involvement in Decision Making: A Comparative Analysis of Six Interactive Processes in the Netherlands

Initiatives to encourage and stimulate the involvement of citizensbut also various societal organizations in decision making canbe seen in a wide variety of European countries. Citizen panels,citizen charters, new types of participation, and other formsare being used to increase the influence of citizens on decisionmaking and to improve the relation between citizens and electedpoliticians. In the Netherlands a lot of local governments haveexperimented with interactive decision making that is enhancingthe influence of citizens and interest groups on public policymaking. The main motives to involve stakeholders in interactivedecision making are to diminish the veto power of various societalactors by involving them in decision making, improve the qualityof decision making by using the information and solutions ofvarious actors, and bridge the perceived growing cleavage betweencitizens and elected politicians. In this article six casesare evaluated. The cases are compared on three dimensions: thenature and organization of participation, the way the processis managed (process management), and the relation with formaldemocratic institutions. These organizational features (in termsof both formal organization and actual performance) are comparedwith the results of the decision-making processes in the sixcases. The article shows that the high expectations of interactivedecision making are not always met. It also shows that managingthe interactions—called process management in networktheory—is very important for achieving satisfactory outcomes.     

Moving the participation agenda forward

This article sets the scene for the other papers in this Special Issue on children's and young people's participation, by outlining the nature of the ESRC Seminar Series from which all are derived and by developing the main themes discussed at the seminars. The focus of this Issue is participation by children and young people as this relates to differing notions of social exclusion and inclusion. This article critically examines participation in the contexts of policy, practice, research and theory. In many respects the environments in each of these domains is supportive of increased participation, yet there is also much evidence of limited impact by recent participative measures and of disillusionment by many young people who have been engaged in consultation and decision‐making. A way forward is suggested, which entails collaboration among all the key stakeholders including children and young people, connects participatory and social inclusion aims and mechanisms, and is committed to achieving tangible outcomes based on the wishes of children and young people.