ABSTRACT
Introduction Over the course of the past three decades citizen participation in the formulation and implementation of state policy has been portrayed as integral to the notion of good governance, however amorphously dened this concept might be. The literature is replete with debates on the prospects for participatory and deliberative democracy and co-production as ways of strengthening the state-civil society interface (Fung and Wright 2003; Cornwall and Coelho 2007). By far the bulk of this writing has focused on the design of eective participatory systems and processes, on the dangers of elite capture, and on state co-optation amongst other issues (Hickey and Mohan 2009). Where attention has focused on forms of state-civil society engagement which fall outside of the participatory domain, namely protest action, this has been addressed in the extensive social movement literature which has examined the multiple ways in which dierent social groups mobilise to actualise their rights. However, despite the proliferation of protest, particularly, but not exclusively, in emerging democracies in the global South, little attention has been paid by public administration theorists to the ways in which states respond administratively to this form of engagement and whether state ocials pay any heed to the demands put before them.
