scholarly journals Participatory governance and responsiveness: Do motivational interventions increase engagement with citizen input?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabelle Sophie Wittels

Participatory mechanisms are now widely used by national and local governments in developed and developing countries. While their purpose and form varies greatly, they all rely on the discretion of a professionalised bureaucracy to manage these processes and prepare their outcomes in a manner that they can feed into policy-making. Bureaucrats thus have a gate-keeping role. They can substantially influence whether and how information from participatory processes feeds into policy-making. Bureaucrats can thereby impact to what extent participatory mechanisms can deliver on their promise of giving citizens greater direct control over the policy-making process. Formal political control over the bureaucracy is limited in this case. Could informal controls make bureaucrats comply more with the demands of participatory mechanisms? This study employs a large field experiment (N=7,532) to test (1) whether citizen input filters through to bureaucrats tasked with policy design and implementation and (2) whether bureaucrats’ engagement with citizen input can be in- creased by using non-monetary rewards and value-based communication. The experiment accounts for heterogeneity by bureaucrat seniority, central versus street-level roles and involvement in the collection of citizen input. It finds no meaningful engagement at the baseline (C=0%) but that motivational interventions can significantly increase engagement (T1= 14%, T2=15%). The findings suggest that currently little input from citizens filters through to bureaucrats, but small tweaks substantially increase the democratic potential of participatory initiatives.

Author(s):  
Grazia Concilio ◽  
Paola Pucci

AbstractThe wider availability of data and the growing technological advancements in data collection, management, and analysis introduce unprecedented opportunities, as well as complexity in policy making. This condition questions the very basis of the policy making process towards new interpretative models. Growing data availability, in fact, increasingly affects the way we analyse urban problems and make decisions for cities: data are a promising resource for more effective decisions, as well as for better interacting with the context where decisions are implemented. By dealing with the operative implications in the use of a growing amount of available data in policy making processes, this contribution starts discussing the chance offered by data in the design, implementation, and evaluation of a planning policy, with a critical review of the evidence-based policy making approaches; then it introduces the relevance of data in the policy design experiments and the conditions for its uses.


Author(s):  
Cesar N. Cruz-Rubio

Due progressive influence of the Open-Government (OpGov) movement as an emerging paradigm over several nation state-reforms and over debates and processes around the world (Ramírez-Alujas & Cruz-Rubio, 2012) this paper seeks to identify and explore the main elements in defining and analyzing policy designs in the face of the Open Government perspective. Specifically, this effort addresses several questions: What policy-design dimensions (tools, instruments and rationales) may define a policy design as an “open policy design”? What directions should take policy-research in order to cope adequately with this (presumably) new subject of study?


2020 ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Suisheng Zhao

China’s foreign policy must rely on opaque and behind-the-scenes coordination organs to work through a large number of bureaucratic agencies of the state, party, and military, whose primary roles are information gathering and the implementation and recommendation of policy. In addition, some new players, such as think tanks, media, local governments, and transnational corporations, have played a variety of roles to influence China’s foreign policy. This chapter examines the evolving role of the paramount leader, the foreign policy coordination and elaboration organs, the bureaucracies, and the new players in the making and transformation of China’s foreign policy. Providing a historical overview, it also observes how President Xi Jinping has centralized and personalized foreign policy making power in the name of strengthening a unified party leadership.


2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flávia De Paula Duque Brasil

O artigo aborda as instâncias de participação nas políticas urbanas que se multiplicam no cenário contemporâneo, a partir do trânsito de projetos societários endereçados à democratização do planejamento e da gestão das cidades. Sustenta-se que, a despeito da heterogeneidade das experiências, dos seus limites, dificuldades e contradições (inerentes ao processo de reconstrução das relações entre Estado e sociedade no Brasil), os canais de participação têm configurado trilhas alternativas e novas linhagens de políticas locais. No primeiro momento discutem-se os conceitos de público e participação cidadã, mapeando possibilidades de influência dos atores societários na formação da agenda e produção das políticas urbanas. No momento seguinte, as instâncias de participação são objeto de exame, privilegiando-se os Conselhos Municipais de Política Urbana, suas características, papéis, potenciais e alcances. Finalmente, detém-se ilustrativamente no Conselho Municipal de Política Urbana e na Conferência Municipal de Política Urbana de Belo Horizonte.Palavras-chave: participação cidadã; política urbana; conselhos municipais. Abstract: This article addresses citizens participation in urban policies, focusing on participatory arrangements implemented by local governments since the late eighties in Brazilian context. These experiences could be regarded as expressions of collective actors democratizing projects referred to urban planning and management. This paper argues that, despite the experiences diversity, their limits, difficulties and contradictions, participation have produced alternative policies models. First, the text approaches public space and citizens participation concepts and stresses civil society possibilities to influence agenda-setting and policy-making process. Next, local-level participatory arrangements are examined, emphasizing urban policy municipal councils. Their character, roles, potentials and limits are pointed out. Last, Belo Horizonte’s Urban Policy Municipal Council and the Urban Policy Municipal Conference are analyzed as an illustrative case.Keywords: citizens participation; urban policies; municipal councils. 


Author(s):  
Mauro Palumbo ◽  
Sebastiano Benasso ◽  
Marcelo Parreira do Amaral

The chapter presents and discusses insights from comparative case study research. The multi-method and multi-level analysis of the case studies focused on the intersections between institutional, individual and structural aspects of the policy-making process and allowed exploration of the interactions between structural and biographical dimensions, the different stakeholders’ points of view as well as consideration of the relations between the different levels of LLL policy design and implementation — from local/regional to transnational. The comparative case studies adopted a storytelling approach that aims at grasping the complex interrelations among the different actors in the field of LLL policy-making. The chapter starts by briefly presenting and discussing the operationalisation of case study analysis in YOUNG_ADULLLT with particular attention to the narrative strategy adopted for the case presentations. Next, the chapter discusses distinct narrative strategies to telling the story while attending to various perspectives of the policy-making process, the varying entry points as well as relational aspects. The chapter deliberates on how policy analysis as storytelling can help us advance from case to knowledge, for instance, by overcoming a one-sided perspective of policy-making to include addressees’ standpoints in understanding policy-making while accounting for the complexity that characterises policy-making on the ground.


2012 ◽  
pp. 83-88
Author(s):  
A. Zolotov ◽  
M. Mukhanov

А new approach to policy-making in the field of economic reforms in modernizing countries (on the sample of SME promotion) is the subject of this article. Based on summarizing the ten-year experience of de-bureaucratization policy implementation to reduce the administrative pressure on SME, the conclusion of its insufficient efficiency and sustainability is made. The alternative possibility is the positive reintegration approach, which provides multiparty policy-making process, special compensation mechanisms for the losing sides, monitoring and enforcement operations. In conclusion matching between positive reintegration principles and socio-cultural factors inherent in modernization process is provided.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-171
Author(s):  
Jeong Ho Yoo ◽  
Yunju Yang ◽  
Ji Hye Choi ◽  
Seung Taek Lee ◽  
Rosa Minhyo Cho

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document