The focus of this chapter is public participation in policy making in South Africa, exploring how participation and deliberation can overcome the shortcomings of a purely representative democracy by connecting citizen voice with state decision making, thereby transforming broader social power relations and enabling responsive policy making. The chapter provides an overview of policy and legislative provisions for participation, existing mechanisms and practice and, through highlighting civil society experiences of these processes, it presents a case for the need to open up executive policy-making processes to engagement by affected communities.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR PARTICIPATION

Participatory policy making and the democratic ‘deficit’

Many authors have written about the notion of a ‘democracy deficit’ – the failure of established, liberal notions of representative or participatory democracy to link citizens with the institutions and processes of the state, affecting the quality and vibrancy of democracy and resulting in reduced accountability (Gaventa, 2004; Luckham et al., 2000). Many democracies are characterised by a sense of disappointment as to how little elections improve government accountability and performance.

Carothers (2005) notes that political participation declines where poverty, inequality and corruption increase and where citizens become increasingly sceptical and distrustful of political parties and institutions. This widening gap between citizens and state institutions results in what Skocpol (2003: 11) has called a ‘diminished democracy’. Where political parties focus on electoral processes to the detriment of effective representation, links between citizens and the state are eroded. The result, in most cases, is a weakened democracy with poor representation (Carothers, 2005).