LOCALIZING DEVELOPMENT: DOES PARTICIPATION WORK?
interventions in postconflict settings increased trust and cohesion, had an affect beyond the community level, or improved material outcomes.
Participatory Councils and Deliberative Spaces Public deliberation envisions a world in which citizens engage in reasoned, thoughtful debate to come to a consensual decision.
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Public deliberation envisions a world in which citizens engage in reasoned, thoughtful debate to come to a consensual decision. It is the ideal form of participation. Its goal is to aggregate preferences through conversation, to allow the diverse views of a community to be consolidated and presented as one representative view. Public deliberation is expected to have a number of beneficial effects—mirroring but intensifying the effects of participation. At the intrinsic level, public deliberation is expected to give voice and create a sense of agency and community; at the instrumental level, it is expected to enhance the capacity for collective action and repair civic failures by bringing the interests of citizens to the attention of the state. Important are not only formal deliberative forums but also what Mansbridge (1999) calls “deliberative systems,” where discussion and debate continue outside formal spaces as informal conversations between citizens and representatives, political activists, media, and other citizens. This everyday deliberation changes the nature of participation, making it more discursive and consensual than merely ritualistic. Mansbridge claims that “when a deliberative system works well, it filters out and discards the worst ideas available on public matters while it picks up, adopts, and applies the best ideas.” If, however, “the deliberative system works badly, it distorts facts, portrays ideas in forms the originators would disown, and encourages citizens to adopt ways of thinking and acting that are good neither for them nor for the larger polity” (Mansbridge 1999, 211). Deliberation is also at the heart of what Fung and Wright (2003) call “empowered participatory governance,” a system of governance that translates deliberative decision making into policy decisions and actions (see chapter 4). Two sets of questions arise in considering the effectiveness of such a system. The first has to do with whether deliberation that empowers all participants is possible in highly unequal societies. The second has to do with whether deliberative capacity can be built and nurtured. Can policy interventions induce a system of empowered participatory governance? In what contexts does deliberation work well?