Training Participants: Building a Community of Practice to Negotiate Sustainability

Abstract

Sometime over the last two decades, the call for public participation seems to have turned sides. Where once social movements demanded inclusion in policy-making, governments are now asking or even demanding citizens and NGOs to get actively involved. In this turn, participation — and perhaps democracy itself — has become both a policy goal and a means of governing (Uitermark/Van Beek 2010). Participation is now widely embraced as a key element of the shift ‘from government to governance’, including by the EU, the UN, and most national and regional governments around the world (Bulkely/Mol 2003). Listed benefits of participation include higher levels of democratic legitimacy and local support, and increased effectiveness and efficiency of policy implementation. Governments’ demand for effective methods of participation has engendered a new domain for experts and professionals to provide knowledge and services in the design and management of interactions between state and civil society (Van der Arend 2007; Chilvers 2008). The dynamics in the market for these services may even generate a ‘supply push’ for particular participation methods — or ‘technologies of participation’, as they might be called in this respect (Voß/Simons 2014). So, over the years, participation has evolved from a socio-political ideal to an organisational issue, something to be understood by a new type of experts in the role of process managers, facilitators, or officeholders. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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