ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the public and democratic participation in Malawi's constitutional environment by focusing on the following questions. How participation was really envisaged in the drafting process of the constitution enacted under the auspices of the democratic winds of change in the 1990s, how the international community and foreign countries affected public participation in the constitution-making process. These also include: whether the Malawian Constitution and legislation translated into practice its participatory spirit or not – and, if the latter were the case, which are the relevant discrepancies between the forms of participation embedded in the black-letter constitution and their effective implementation. Societal inclusion in constitution-making processes has proven to render durable the transition to democracy and therefore the new constitutional designs that have been developed: since the early 1990s, legacies of transition have continued to shape African constitutionalism.