ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 17.1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 367 17.2 E-Policy and the Web Site Survey ....................................................... 369 17.3 Case Studies............................................................................................. 372
17.3.1 Case 1: The Rushcliffe Borough Council’s Interim Local Plan Consultation........................................................... 372
17.3.2 Case 2: The City of Edinburgh Council’s Community Plan Consultation............................................... 374
17.3.3 Case 3: The London Borough of Lewisham’s Dialogue Project ........................................................................ 377
17.4 Notions and Other Components of Participation ............................. 379 17.4.1 Views of Officers....................................................................... 380 17.4.2 Views of Participants ............................................................... 384 17.4.3 From Notions to Theory .......................................................... 388
17.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 390 References ........................................................................................................... 392
In the United Kingdom, those in practice and research often treat public participation as a simple process. In local government settings it is often felt to have distinct stages of development, partly owing to statutory planning and the temporal phases of consultation associated with it. There are many assumptions about the nature and notions of public participation, alongside a belief that those who conduct exercises and those who respond share
them. In the context of U.K. local authority-initiated (or top-down) participatory activities, different elements need to be exposed and understood, in an era where greater public engagement in decision-making is proffered as a panacea to many policy or political ills. The assumed linearity, lack of complexity, and belief in universal under-
standings of public participation need to be challenged; theoretical understandings of this democratic activity should be furthered; and appropriate methods be developed in line with them. This is particularly important in terms of the emerging role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are playing through digital participation, and the hyperbole that surrounds the application of such technology to citizen engagement as a whole. Research by Smith (2001) investigated cyberdemocracy enthusiasts’
claims of ICTs for digital participation, highlighting some of the ways in which public participation has been approached and understood by various actors, both within organizations and the citizens who chose to participate. The research explored these emerging attempts through two main approaches that this chapter reports. The first involved an online baseline survey of local authority Web sites in early 1999. The second looked behind these digital fac¸ades to explore officers’ approaches to, and understandings of, public participation and what levels of response or engagement these early experiments had from the public. From this material, three in-depth case studies were then conducted with pioneering organizations. The case studies included reviewing the local authorities’ literature and
interviews that helped to uncover how actors understood activities and what public participation meant to them. Such ideas were then contrasted with a number of theoretical perspectives drawn from democratic and planning theories, in order to examine what components made up public participation, and what role the methods of participation were appearing to play. These not only involved digital methods such as e-mail, chat rooms, and Web sites but also more traditional methods including public meetings, writing letters, and exhibitions. As such, the research explores digital participation in an in-depth way, so that theoretical discussions can be equally applied to other participatory settings, including the emerging role of geographical information systems (GIS), and spatial information in general, for citizen engagement in decision-making. The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the research by
reporting some of the policy contexts and the results from the survey of local authority Web sites. This is followed by an outline of the leading case studies and an exploration of the notions of participation that existed for those involved. It should be noted that a discussion of the more theoretical material stemming from this empirical research is discussed by Smith (2006) and that ideas developed in this chapter adapt some work already published in French (Smith, 2004).
