The case studies in this book have not been presented as examples of ‘good practice’ in public participation. Rather, they highlight a set of issues and raise a series of questions that we argue might productively be addressed in future policy and practice. The value of the case study material lies in the detailed empirical work that underpins it: that is, our arguments and analyses go beyond normative approaches to public participation (this is what should happen, or this is what organisations ought to do to get the process right). There are already a host of practical guides and handbooks, and innovations designed to reach new audiences – through games, interactive technologies, television or radio broadcast – are appearing all the time. Rather, we have attempted to describe what actually happens when public bodies and publics engage with each other in the new participative and deliberative spaces that have been opening up as a result of the public policy developments described in Chapter Two.

But describing what happens is not enough. In Chapter One, we asked how we might understand the significance of the sheer range and diversity of the initiatives through which public bodies seek to engage in face-to-face encounters with the publics they serve. How far does this represent a fundamental change in governance? And what might be the potential of any such change to address inequalities of power, overcome social exclusion or to foster political renewal? To answer such questions we have, in the case study analysis, drawn on the bodies of theory set out in Chapters Two to Four: studies of policy discourse, social movement literature, theories of deliberative democracy, new institutional theory and theories linked to the cultural turn in social and public policy. This has, we think, enabled us to transcend the rather normative approach to questions of democratic renewal, social inclusion, user empowerment and so on that tend to pervade the literature. The interdisciplinary approach has also enriched the insights we have brought to the analysis of each case study. The three opening chapters drew rather solid boundaries around these different theories in order to present them with some degree of internal coherence.