Participatory Governance 2.0: a Systems Approach to Participation

Abstract

The systemic turn in deliberative theory has focussed on how political and social institutions interact at a macro-level to produce (non)deliberative outcomes. This is a welcome move away from the evaluation of the internal efficacy of discrete processes in meeting normative standards. However, in its generality it has been criticised for being poorly specified and focussing on sites that are neither deliberative nor democratic, thus running the danger of abandoning both deliberation and democracy (Owen and Smith 2015). An emerging approach to the institutionalisation of participatory governance that we label “participatory systems” has the potential to overcome the limitations of a discrete institutional design focus, and a general system focus. Participatory systems involve permanent and interconnected spaces of participation (Bussu 2020; Dean et al. 2019). The systemic approach to participatory governance attempts to respond to practitioners’ frustration with the limitations of isolated one-off experiments of public participation and the search for more permanent, diverse and interconnected processes with the potential to engender more meaningful policy and political impact. Unlike the deliberative systems literature, which focuses on the deliberative quality of whole democratic systems, including deliberative and non-deliberative sites, participatory systems have a strong focus on citizen participation through the ecosystem of participatory processes. In this panel, we explore theoretical and empirical perspectives on a systemic approach to participatory governance and address some fundamental questions: • Can systems-oriented participation help recapture the radical potential of participatory governance for social transformation? • What are the pragmatic challenges of designing complex participatory systems? • How do participatory systems interact with broader social and political institutions and structures?

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