Introduction to the special issue: facilitating citizen engagement in interactive governance

Abstract

This is an introduction to the special issue on facilitating citizen engagement in interactive governance. In this special issue, we focus on facilitators: the professionals that support and organise various forms of collaboration between governments and citizens that elsewhere have been conceptualised as interactive governance. We explore the main pressures that facilitators face and how these are negotiated in deliberative forms of policy-making, the co-production of public services, and in community-induced civic initiatives. With this exploration, we contribute to a burgeoning literature on facilitators as in-between actors, we make a unique comparison across three forms of interactive governance that are often analysed separately, we bring together disparate literatures on democratic innovation and public policy implementation, and we offer nuances and perspectives from various countries with six articles addressing facilitation in Scotland, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands.