by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
The Eight Rungs of Citizen Participation
Tks to Dave, I have just read a great article written in 1969 (!) about citizen participation. Unsurprisingly, it is not about online participation, but nonetheless it is an interesting and useful framework. The ladder looks like this:
I was initially a bit worried to see consultation labelled as tokenism, but the article convincingly explains that traditional forms of consultation (public meetings, surveys etc) do not really empower citizens - they are only a step towards citizen empowerment if they are combined with some lever that gives the citizens' views real impact. An interesting illustration of the fact that the issues for online engagement are often the same as for offline engagement.
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Comments
Shelly Arnstein's work on the ladder of participation is classic and, therefore, timeless. I used it extensively in my earlier Masters work on social capital and an idea called 'place management', popular at that time in parts of Australia as a version of the 'joined up' government thesis.
Arnstein's insights are disruptive to the extent they challange many of the more comfortable concepts of consultation which, for some politicians and bureaucrats, pass for citizen engagement. You're right that Arnstein's wokr would have been even more powerful in the Internet age and she could reliably be predicted to have been a huge advocate for harnessing the potential of the social networking technology to move up the ladder. I guess that what's some of the experiments by governments in this space around the world are, more or less, trying to achieve.
I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the ladder's underlying messages have implications for deeper structural change that many in government would find hard to confront and even harder to operationalise...
posted about 1 year ago