Applying Genre Theory to Public Participation. The Case of the Public Consultation on the European Citizens Initiative

This paper is aimed at proposing a theoretical framework for the study of citizen participation in public policy making, based on genre theory. This paper suggests a series of theoretical perspectives on participatory genres, a notion freely borrowed from Erickson (1997) and applied to the methods, activities or applications of citizen participation in public policy making (in this case, the European Citizens Initiative). The starting point of the proposed approach is the idea that “genres of participation specify particular but recognisable social and semiotic conventions for generating, interpreting and engaging with embedded practices with and through media” (Livingstone & Lunt, 2011). The online consultation on the European Citizens Initiative serves here as study case: we apply our theoretical framework to the preliminary consultation in its implementation (November 2009 – January 2010). One of the interests of this preliminary device is to articulate two participatory genres: consultation and petition. The central thesis will be to demonstrate that the ambiguity in the genre definition of a participative project contributes to its failure. We shall show that there are expectations with regard to the genre. We argue that it’s important to take it into account in the project definition but also in the end use which is made. The proposed theoretical framework takes into account the contexts of participation as well as the interrelationships between participatory genres, and focuses on the repertoires of elements (Lacey, 2000) that characterize participatory genres in terms of ‘why’, ‘ how’, ‘what’, ‘who/m’, when’ and ‘where’ (Orlikowski & Yates, 1998). This article intends to contribute to the research on the successes and failures of citizen participation, on the reasons for which citizens do participate or not, or participate in a different way than the one expected and promoted by the organisers of participatory projects.