A Rural Perspective on the Practice and Challenges of Community Participation in Post-Apartheid South Africa Insights from Rural Beaufort-west Municipality

Post-apartheid South African (SA) government devised legalized platforms for citizen participation to channel their voice towards public policy formulation, implementation, outcome, and its impact. Instead of using these platforms, dissatisfied communities with service delivery resort to social protests and unrest. Indeed, citizens’ voice and participation in government decision-making through social protests, is among the critical elements to democracy and good governance. The study sought to investigate the practice and challenges there are, with regards to community participation at the local level within selected rural communities, in South Africa. The study relied on qualitative research methodology to gather primary data. Extant literature was consulted to collect secondary data so that the phenomenon is greatly understood. The results showed that community participation is practiced as a once-off event instead of being viewed as a process that is comprised of interrelated activities. The study concludes that effective community participation requires continual engagement across the entire policy planning, decision making, and implementation stages. Furthermore, as each public policy phase has its challenges, flexible strategies are required to facilitate community engagement and participation. This, for instance, will increase the degree of decision-making consensus, while by default reduce the level of community dissatisfaction with service delivery, which currently South Africa experiences, through social unrest. Keywords: Community participation, Service delivery, social unrest, Public engagement, Participation, local government, rural communities. DOI: 10.7176/PPAR/11-3-06 Publication date: April 30th 202

Using crowdsourcing to support civic engagement in strategic urban development planning: A case study of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Recently, advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have provided opportunities for governments to deploy e-participation to actively engage citizens in public policy-making processes. As often noted, the development towards e-participation not only transforms the nature of government interactions with citizens but also affects the efficiency and effectiveness of public services and thus fosters competitiveness. Crowdsourcing is one mechanism of undertaking e-participation. It is a method for harnessing the collective intelligence of online communities to solve specific problems or produce goods, which has proved to be a successful supplemental public participation tool for city governance, as a way to engage citizens in the process of urban planning. This paper highlights how crowdsourcing can overcome the limitations in a traditional urban planning process. Using Ostrava, Czech Republic as a case study, this paper explores how city government engages citizens in creating the strategic urban development plan. The results show how crowdsourcing contributes to better civic engagement, improves citizens' perceptions of their city, and thus helps to find ways to encourage the competitiveness of the city of Ostrava, which is facing the problem of depopulation

Exploring informants’ perspectives on the role of crowdsourced active travel data

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Citizen Participation in Decision Making Processes in Croatian Local Government Units

The structured dialogue is a powerful form of communication between citizens and decision makers in the local government units (LGUs). Present state analysis shows that the leaders of municipalities and cities are generally not open to the implementation of a structured dialogue, and that citizens are also not too interested for that process, because they do not believe they can make a difference. However, a literature review and analysis of the implementation of projects structured dialogue through the Youth in Action and Erasmus + programs indicates that there are success stories and examples of good practice in this area. These examples come also from the "neighbourhood", from small LGUs, not necessarily from highly developed countries or just from the big cities; but the number of those examples is low. This paper proposes a methodology for increasing the level of structured dialogue in fields of different social issues in small local government units in Croatia (or other LGU with similar characteristics outside Croatia). The methodology is based on the Deming cycle and Balanced scorecard (BSC). The methodology defines what actions need to be taken in order to come up with a solution to social problems in a LGU. To evaluate proposed methodology, it was applied to 5 LGUs. A prerequisite for the application of the methodology is the existence of the will and motivation of both parties (LGU and citizens) to work together on social issues. The paper proposes a brief question mark that can be used to quickly identify the readiness of local government to implement such a methodology

Citizen Participation in Decision Making Processes in Croatian Local Government Units

The structured dialogue is a powerful form of communication between citizens and decision makers in the local government units (LGUs). Present state analysis shows that the leaders of municipalities and cities are generally not open to the implementation of a structured dialogue, and that citizens are also not too interested for that process, because they do not believe they can make a difference. However, a literature review and analysis of the implementation of projects structured dialogue through the Youth in Action and Erasmus + programs indicates that there are success stories and examples of good practice in this area. These examples come also from the "neighbourhood", from small LGUs, not necessarily from highly developed countries or just from the big cities; but the number of those examples is low. This paper proposes a methodology for increasing the level of structured dialogue in fields of different social issues in small local government units in Croatia (or other LGU with similar characteristics outside Croatia). The methodology is based on the Deming cycle and Balanced scorecard (BSC). The methodology defines what actions need to be taken in order to come up with a solution to social problems in a LGU. To evaluate proposed methodology, it was applied to 5 LGUs. A prerequisite for the application of the methodology is the existence of the will and motivation of both parties (LGU and citizens) to work together on social issues. The paper proposes a brief question mark that can be used to quickly identify the readiness of local government to implement such a methodology

Global Austerity and Local Democracy: The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Guelph, ON.

This paper examines the role of participatory budgeting in policy-making at the municipal level, through a case study of the longest experiment with participatory budgeting in Canada, the Neighbourhood Support Coalition (NSC) in Guelph, ON. While existing scholarship tends to view participatory budgeting largely as oppositional to neoliberalism, I argue that participatory budgeting in Guelph is better understood as an adaptation of community groups to a neoliberal political context, rather than a direct challenge to neoliberal policies. When participatory budgeting began to be perceived as contravening neoliberal rationalities of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and marketization, the grassroots democratic elements of the practice were ultimately sacrificed in favour of a process that fit better with these logics. This work builds on previous research on participatory budgeting in Guelph by both bringing participatory budgeting in explicit dialogue with neoliberalism, and temporally extending the narrative of Guelph’s experience with participatory budgeting beyond 2009

Engaging Citizens in Sustainable Development Policy in Regional Planning: A Comparative Study of the Regional Municipalities of York (Ontario) and Wood Buffalo (Alberta)

This paper explores whether changes in direct settlement patterns by recent visible minority immigrants influence the development and implementation of sustainability planning policy—the Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (ICSP)—for two regional municipalities in Canada—York (Ontario) and Wood Buffalo (Alberta). Since 2005, having ICSPs has been required in Canada; furthermore, it has become a well-documented fact that Canada's current population growth is largely attributed to migration by ethnic visible minority immigrants. While historically, immigrants settled in traditional urban areas (i.e. Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver), recent immigrants are increasingly directly settling in suburban regions. As such, sustainability and sustainable development are the site of policy and politics at which this study will examine public engagement and consultation practices of the two regional municipalities, in regards to their changing social composition. Specifically, this study is interested in whether there has been culturally appropriate and adequate response by the two regional municipalities to the change in social composition that has occurred through migration by recent visible ethnic minority immigrants in terms of public engagement and consultation in the development and implementation process of their respective ICSPs

eParticipation in the institutional domain: a review of research: analytical report on eParticipation research from an administration and political perspective in six European countries

This deliverable of DEMO-net Project provides an analysis of existing research about eParticipation in the institutional domain. It includes a review of the empirical research about eParticipation in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden) and in the international research. This report also provides a comparative picture of national and international research, and outlines overall research findings and research gaps