Citizen Participation and Collaboration

Abstract

The involvement of citizens in the governance of their societies is a vexed issue in many Western democracies where public participation rates are falling and cynicism about government and politics is a dominant feature. For some the problem lies with the role played by the state. For example, Ostrom (2000) argues that Scandinavian governments exhibit centralising tendencies which turn citizens into ‘passive observers’ and ‘crowds them out’ of participation in public policy (p. 12). For others the problem is linked to the state’s subjugation to global capital, diluting the act of citizenship to an exercise in making choices about consumption (Monbiot, 2000; Klein, 2000). Another explanation of limited citizen participation points to a wider societal malaise in which economic, social and technological changes have reduced citizens’ capacity to participate — what Putnam (1993) terms their ‘social capital’. The concern about low levels of public participation are reflective of an underlying unease about the health of Western liberal democracies and the legitimacy of their modes of governance (Daemen and Schaap, 2000).