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7 - Governance through community engagement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Stephen Bell
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Andrew Hindmoor
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Summary

Despite trends towards fragmentation and greater individualism in modern Western societies, there has been a growing interest in a wide range of governance engagements or partnerships between governments, citizens and communities. These arrangements vary from relatively inconsequential forms of public consultation to ambitious provisions for joint decision-making.

There is nothing new in the principle of community engagement, but this chapter describes precedents for apparently novel governance arrangements. The scale and scope of engagement efforts have increased over the last decade or more for several reasons.

  • The development of the internet and the explosion in the ownership of home computers has made it easier and cheaper for governments to solicit citizens' opinions. (On the possibilities of e-governance, see Torres et al., 2006; Dunleavy et al., 2006; Budd & Harris, 2008.) In 2006, when the UK prime minister's office launched a website (http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/) that allowed visitors to create or sign on-line petitions, one petition, calling on the government to abandon proposals to introduce a road-pricing scheme, attracted almost 2 million signatures.

  • At a normative level, democratic theorists have, in recent decades, championed the virtues of deliberation and civic engagement over established forms of representative democracy. It is now routinely argued that public deliberation in which citizens reflect carefully on and debate the merits of policies enhances the legitimacy of decisions (Barber, 1984; Elster, 1998; Dryzek, 2000; Besson & Marti, 2006).

  • Civic engagement and the fostering of ‘active citizens’ are key policy principles of the ‘communitarian’ (Etzioni, 1995) and ‘third way’ (Giddens, 1998) philosophies that proved attractive to a number of centre-left governments in the 1990s. They are argued to lead to healthier and more prosperous societies, where rights are balanced with responsibilities.

  • […]

Type
Chapter
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Rethinking Governance
The Centrality of the State in Modern Society
, pp. 137 - 161
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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