Constructing Legitimacy: Policy Actors’ Perceptions of Citizen Voice and its Influence on National Drinking Water Policy Development

It is argued that policy processes are legitimised when people judge them to be rightful, which can be assessed against conceptions of legality, justification and consent (Beetham, 1991; Parkinson, 2006). The premise for this study is that the democratic legitimacy of a policy process is not conditional on one objectively determinable action, rather the democratic legitimacy of a process is reinforced and maintained by those individuals involved in its development and implementation. This means that policy formation evolves temporally, intersectorally, and across hierarchies; evoking the idea of a policy being legitimised by different policy actors, from different levels - all of whom, either knowingly, or unknowingly, contribute to its legitimation. To build on this theory, I designed an interpretive qualitative study that follows two policy development processes that catalysed from contaminations to local drinking water supplies in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Norway. These comparable crises caused severe illness amongst the communities affected, leading to investigations of existing regulatory governance frameworks of drinking water policy in the two countries. Taking the position that citizen voice is an integral element of the democratic legitimacy of public policy, this study explores policy actors’ perceptions of the legitimacy of these policy development processes through the analysis of their use and interpretation of citizen voice. Here I explore an ongoing tension in public administration, the balancing of technical expertise and maintaining sufficient democratic legitimacy, through citizen voice (Fischer, 1990). In doing so, I provide some insights on the authority that policy actors place on citizen voice in decision-making processes. This paper offers a comparative and empirical contribution to our understanding of democratic legitimacy and citizen voice.