ABSTRACT
What, if anything, is similar about citizen participation at the local level in China and Canada? This is the question at the heart of this collection of essays. In the concluding chapter we shall attempt to answer it. But, in this opening chapter, our task is to make explicit the obvious differences in the two countries, so as to provide a context for the essays that follow. Chapters 2 and 3 provide general introductions to the environment for citizen participation in each of the two countries, but they are not comparative. Our first objective in this chapter is to provide some
Contents 1.1 Citizen Participation ....................................................................................2 1.2 Governmental Structures .............................................................................5 1.3 Case Studies .................................................................................................9 References ...........................................................................................................10 Endnotes .............................................................................................................12
comparative context so that Chapters 2 and 3 can be readily understood in relation to each other. Our second is to explain the different meanings of “local level” in the two countries. This discussion inevitably takes us into the realm of governmental structures, which constitutes the second part of the chapter. In the third part, we shall outline the general content of the chapters that follow.
