1. IN THE GREY ZONE OF
PARTICIPATION
MIKKO RASK
N AT I O N A L C O N S U M E R R E S E A R C H C E N T R E
INUSE-seminar 8th of May 2012
2. BACKGROUND
• INUSE seminar 12th of December 2012: ”Influential participation:
How technology assessment changes the world”
• User and citizen participation is often portrayed as inherently
good, democratic and empowering (e.g. Fiorino 1990, Bellucci
2002):
• Good substantively: relevant wisdom is not limited to scientific specialists
and public officials; participation provides essential information for decision
making
• Democratic: citizens have the right (embodied in laws) to participate
meaningfully in public decision-making and to be informed about the
bases for government decisions
• Empowering and instrumental: participation supports actors’ agency and it
can decrease conflict and increase acceptance of and trust in decisions
made by public agencies
• In reality, however, it may happen that participation is not so
useful (substantively), is undemocratic rather than democratic,
and creates new obstacles for effective action rather than
empowers agency.
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3. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• What are the broadblocks to effective and efficient
participation?
• Are there different types of broadblocks to different
types of participation?
• Could it be useful to distinguish between the bright,
grey and dark zones of participation?
• Can we shed more light into the grey zone of participation?
• Can we get rid of the dark side of participation, and if so,
how?
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4. TWO TYPES OF PARTICIPATION:
SPONTANEOUS VS. PLANNED
Social movements Deliberation
Ontology Motion Contemplation
Focus Grievance Issue
Strategy Contest authorities Inform authorities
Knowledge base Experience Science
Image Drama Talk
Participant relations Solidarity Citizenship
Organization Spontaneous Planned
Source: Rask, M. & Worthington, R. (forthcoming): Prospects of Deliberative Global Governance,
Journal of Environmental Science and Engineering B 1 (2012) 4
5. THE DYNAMICS OF SPONTANEOUS
AND PLANNED PARTICIPATION
• (1) uneven voice to
stakeholders and
reproduction of
Remedies from civil
society actors, who
structural Problems?
inequalities;
can…
• (2) focus on
• Democratic deficits behind-the-scenes
and limited public • (1) relay information lobbying and Remedies from
accountability and analysis to dissemination of planned
governance agencies, flawed knowledge; deliberations
• nationalistic
conception of political space for • (3) liabilities and co-
demos and sites for marginal actors; optation by • (1) voices more equally to
democratic • (2) raise public government citizens and stakeholders;
governance awareness of agencies; • (2) public processes,
• state bureaucracies international laws and • (4) opaqueness of balanced information
seldom consult their regulatory institutions; civic organizations’ • (3) clear rules for
publics about • (3) fuel debate in and own activities; interaction and
policies on global about global • (5) self-selected accountability;
issues governance; leadership and • (4) High transparency;
• (4) increase public limited public • (5) randomised or
transparency; budgetary oversight; statistical representation;
Problems with global • (5) increase • (6) democratic
• (6) real democratic
governance democratic control and territorial spin-off processes replicable to
structures monitoring of global compromised local contexts
governance institutions
and
• (6) create spin-offs for Problems with social
the democratization of movements
territorial governance
Source of information: Scholte, J. Civil society and democracy in global
governance, Global Governance 8 (2002) 281-304. 5
6. IN THE GREY ZONE: PART I
• Inherent challenges with planned participation
Source: Rask, M. (2008). Foresight—Balancing between Increasing Variety and Productive
Convergence, Technological Forecasting and Social Change (2008), Vol 75 p. 1157–1175 6
7. BALANCING BETWEEN INCREASING REQUISITE
VARIETY AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERGENCE
• A trade-off: the productivity of participation increases with heterogeneity up to a point where it
becomes too difficult to deliberate and productivity is reduced.
• It is likely to be difficult to engage such actors, whose expertise or political influence is instrumental to
productivity and implementation of the results. If engaged, they are apt to have a strong personal stake in
the outcome of the foresight process, at the cost of displacing divergent perspectives.
• The ‘optimal’ balance between variety and convergence is contextually contingent
• Balancing strategies:
• (A) Secure a strong motivation among all participants.
• (B) High motivation is often linked to stakeholding that in some cases risks the creativity of participation, for
which reason actions to ensure the creativity of participation are needed.
• (C) Emphasizing creativity can take place at the cost of reducing the instrumentality, which in turn can be
counterbalanced by various means, including (C) mechanisms for consensus and priority setting, (D)
increasing of process efficacy and (E) developing an orientation to implementation.
• (F) The prioritization function, increased efficacy and a strong orientation to implementation, however, can
result in various kinds of biases, and undermine alternative perspectives and interests. Therefore, mechanisms
for (F) validation and (G) balancing are needed.
• balance of representation
• co-nomination
• ‘status quo’
• independence of the executive body
• freedom from vested interests
• balance through variety
• While a positive norm for balancing is difficult to derive, a less stringent negative norm can
provide a tentative guideline (Renn 2005, p. 50): “It is essential to monitor these processes and
make sure that particular interests do not dominate the deliberations.”
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8. HOW THEY BALANCE INTERESTS
Concept Balancing strategy Benefits Costs
Functionalist Expert perspectives Rational, systematic Narrow,
prioritized inadequately reflect
social realities
Neoliberal Statistical Politically neutral, Simplistic, vulnerable
representation; status descriptive to measurement
quo errors, self-fulfilling
Deliberative Relevant arguments Issue and context Rationalistic,
included sensitive, negotiative vulnerable to
strategizing, non-
neutral
Anthropological Randomly selected Common sense and Superficial,
lay perspectives disinterested unpredictable,
assessment irrational
Emancipatory Less priviledged Equality and fairness, Politically biased,
groups empowered corrective quasi solutions
Postmodern All perspectives Open, transparent, Irrelevant, biased,
equal inclusive sensational
Source from which modified: Renn, O. (2008). Risk Governance. Coping with
Uncertainty in a Complex World. Earthscan, London and Sterling. 8
9. IN THE GREY ZONE: PART II
• Deliberation is an imprecise art: a myriad of
judgement calls are an enduring feature
participatory methods.
• Study and reflection surely can strengthen the basis
for such judgements, but you’ll never get rid of
them.
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10. THE DARK ZONE OF PARTICIPATION:
PART I
• The ”tyranny of participation”:
• illegitimate or unjust exercise of power; naivety
with regard to the complexities of power
• Cooke and Kothari (2001) focus on
participatory development within
marginalized underpriviledged communities
• tyranny of decision making (existing legitimate decision
processes overridden)
• tyranny of the group (group dynamics leads to participatory
decisions that reinforce the intersts of the powerful)
• tyranny of method (participatory method is used at the
expense of other productive methods)
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11. THE DARK ZONE OF PARTICIPATION:
PART II
• The ”tragedy of citizen participation”
• while participatory agencies seek to develop
tools to help solve the legitimacy crises of
governance, they themselves are driven into
a functional crisis
• Despite welcoming rhetoric, real participation is hard to
achieve in some or most situations
• Different types of broadblocks
• cognitive: diffuse understanding of the usability of deliberation
as a component of policy making
• structural: inadequate infrastructures facilitating the translation
of deliberations to effective public policy
• operational: inadequate resources and skills in deliberative
bodies
Rask, M. (forthcoming): The Tragedy of Citizen Deliberation – Two Cases of Participatory Technology
Assessment, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management
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13. • Global participatory process on climate change
• Objective: to give citizens possibility to define their
positions on some of the issues and questions
central to the UN Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen 2009 (COP15)
• Organized in 38 countries in September 26, 2009
• Approximately 100 citizens in each event – 3800
globally
• The results communicated to COP15 negotiators
• Main coordinator: The Danish Board of Technology
(DBT)
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14. METHODOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS
• A hybrid based on well-tested citizen participation
methods (Bedsted et al., 2011)
• voting conference and interview meeting: voting on choices
• citizen hearing: table brainstorm and meeting priority-setting
recommendations
• consensus conference: principles of composition of the
information materials
• focus groups: test of information materials and questions
• Same method cluster as citizen summits
(AmericaSpeaks) and the Deliberative poll® (James
Fishkin)
• procedure of citizen selection more elaborate than in citizen
summit but less elaborate than in deliberative poll
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15. • CIVISTI gave citizens from 7 EU Member States an
opportunity to define and communicate their visions
of the future, and
• Transform these into relevant long-term STI issues
Objectives were to
• Produce a list of new and emerging issues for EU S&T
• Produce policy options of relevance to future FPs
• Base this on a novel process of citizen participation,
supported by analytical capacity of experts and
stakeholders 15
16. METHODOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS
• Participatory foresight
provides for insight into
the demand for future
societal development
• by directly involving the
citizens/costumers/users/
voters
• Participatory “demand-
side” foresight
• the supply-side over-
represented in other forms
of foresight
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17. THE PROBLEM
• Initial promises of the political relevance of the two
exemplary projects were set high
• Evidence of their actual policy effects, however, is
dismal
• The general pattern in the policy effects of large-
scale DDPs can be characterized as:
• high learning outcomes
• low implementation outcomes
• moderate socio-political impacts
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18. COGNITIVE LEVEL EXPLANATIONS
• The starting point
• The ’dominant shape’ of a participatory procedure was
approved by the organizer, for which reason the role of
external actors is in participating to the negotiation of the
’dominant meaning’ of that procedure (Meyer & Schuber,
2007)
• Some concepts to understand
• Path dependencies from organizational to cognitive level
matters (North, 2005)
• Interpretative frames (Garud and Ahlstrom, 1997)
• Waiting games (Borup et al., 2006)
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19. COGNITIVE ROADBLOCKS (RB)
• RB1: Attraction to conflicting narratives and big
numbers
• different expectations by the practitioners, politicians,
media
• RB2: Demand for technical expertise
• different expectations by the practitioners and policy
makers
• RB3: Risk of ’politically incorrect’ opinions
• different expectations by the practitioners and key
stakeholders
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20. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• The grey zone of participation is the judgemental
area in the design of deliberations
• we can better understand the trade-offs but never get rid
of them
• The ”tyranny of participation” is political misuse of
participation
• we can anticipate misuses and consider alternatives to top
down models of participation
• The ”tragedy of participation” turns high
expectations of consequantiality to dysfunctionality
• different types of roadblocks have to be cleared to
overcome the darkest zone of participation
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