In my paper, I analyse a special “participatory” project named Citizen Channel, which aimed to find and test new modes of citizen participation at the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The project was conducted by an NGO and it belonged to a policy programme, steered by the municipalities of the region and other public actors. I situate my research inside a wider framework of governance and democracy, where interactive governance can be seen either as a threat to the basic values of representative democracy or as a way to create more participatory and/ or deliberative forms of democracy.
I conducted interviews with the representatives of the policy programme in which the Citizen Channel project belonged to, with the administration of the Citizen Channel as well as with citizens who participated in the project. According to my research, the different actors had different interpretations of participation. At the programme level, participation was only a secondary theme, as the main objectives of the programme lied elsewhere. According to the interviews of the project administration, however, funding from the policy programme enabled to realise and a long-time dream about a project on participatory innovations. Finally, the participants of the project concentrated on concrete local issues, and the objectives of the project and policy programme were relatively unknown. My study showed that an NGO can have an important role in the implementation of a public policy and as an intermediary organisation between the municipal and the grassroots level. However, even if the project included various forms of participation, its relation to political influence remained unclear. Moreover, the transfer of knowledge from the project to regular municipal administration was challenging.
