Participatory Governance in the EU

Participatory Governance in the EU
Author: K. Lindgren
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230347797

An empirical assessment of whether participatory governance reforms within the EU enhance or endanger democracy. Many consider allowing civil society to take an active role in EU policy-making to offer the most effective means of enhancing democracy in the EU, whereas others argue that such attempts deepen the EU's democratic deficit.

Participatory Budgeting in Europe

Participatory Budgeting in Europe
Author: Yves Sintomer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317083911

Can participatory budgeting help make public services really work for the public? Incorporating a range of experiments in ten different countries, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in Europe and the effect it has had on democracy, the modernization of local government, social justice, gender mainstreaming and sustainable development. By focussing on the first decade of European participatory budgeting and analysing the results and the challenges affecting the agenda today it provides a critical appraisal of the participatory model. Detailed comparisons of European cases expose similarities and differences between political cultures and offer a strong empirical basis to discuss the theories of deliberative and participatory democracy and reveal contradictory tendencies between political systems, public administrations and democratic practices.

Participatory Democracy in Southern Europe

Participatory Democracy in Southern Europe
Author: Joan Font
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1783480750

Citizen participation is a central component of democratic governance. As participatory schemes have grown in number and gained in social legitimacy over recent years, the research community has analyzed the virtues of participatory policies from several points of view, but usually giving focus to the most successful and well-known grass-roots cases. This book examines a wider range of participatory interventions that have been created or legitimized by central governments, providing original exploration of institutional democratic participatory mechanisms. Looking at a huge variety of subnational examples across Italy, Spain and France, the book interrogates the rich findings of a substantial research project. The authors use quantitative and qualitative methods to compare why these cases of participatory mechanisms have emerged, how they function, and what cultural impact they’ve achieved. This allows highly original insights into why participatory mechanisms work in some places, but not others, and the sorts of choices that organizers of participatory processes have to consider when creating such policies.

Participation for Effective Environmental Governance

Participation for Effective Environmental Governance
Author: Elisa Kochskämper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-09-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351758691

Does participatory governance benefit the environment? The European Water Framework Directive (WFD), which came into force in 2000 with the aim of revolutionizing European water governance, mandates participatory river basin management planning across the European Union. The belief of European policymakers and the European Commission is that participation will deliver better policy outputs and implementation. This book examines a range of approaches to participatory river basin management planning, and considers whether and how participation impacted on the environmental standard of planning documents, quality of implementation, and social outcomes. It draws on evidence from WFD implementation in eight case studies from Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom on the basis of a matched comparative case study design. The Directive sets common timeframes and procedural requirements, which provides a perfect test-bed and unique opportunity to study the effects of participation on implementation and outcomes in comparative perspective.

Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance

Civil Society Participation in European and Global Governance
Author: J. Steffek
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2007-12-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230592503

It is often argued that the enhanced consultation of civil society contributes to the democratization of European and global governance. This collection investigates whether this theoretical argument is supported by empirical evidence. Ten original essays analyze current patterns of civil society consultation in 32 intergovernmental organizations.

Local Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy

Local Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy
Author: Nils Hertting
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315471159

Over the past few decades and throughout the world, numerous government-initiated experiments and attempts at directly engaging and including citizens have emerged as remedies for a variety of problems faced by modern democracies, including political disaffection and insufficient capacity to deal with the complexity inherent in many contemporary public problems, such as climate change and segregation. In practice, these attempts are given many names, such as citizen panels, deliberative fora, collaborative dialogues, etc. In the academic literature as well, the phenomenon falls under many different headings, for instance collaborative, deliberative or interactive governance. Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy refers to this empirical phenomenon as local participatory governance, that is, government-sponsored direct participation between invited citizens and local officials in concrete arrangements and concerning problems that affect them. Participatory governance, we argue, may take many forms, regarding (1) type of interaction and type of communication between participants within the specific participatory arrangement (e.g., deliberative vs. aggregative) as well as regarding (2) the relation and connection between the specific arrangement and the more traditional representative structures (e.g., compatible, incompatible, transformative or irrelevant). The proposed edited volume addresses the matter of institutionalization, highlighting the difficulties associated with establishing stability and a shared understanding of the roles and rules among citizens, local politicians and administrators in participatory arrangements.

Engaging Citizens in Policy Making

Engaging Citizens in Policy Making
Author: Randma-Liiv, Tiina
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800374364

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Exploring academic and policy thinking on e-participation, this book opens up the organizational and institutional 'black box' and provides new insights into how public administrations in 15 European states have facilitated its implementation.

Participatory Governance in the Europe of Cross-Border Regions

Participatory Governance in the Europe of Cross-Border Regions
Author: Peter Ulrich
Publisher:
Total Pages: 689
Release: 2021-02-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9783848747931

This policy analysis examines geopolitical and sociocultural bordering practices in Europe's cross-border regions and their impact on civil society participation and governance in state peripheries. The normative hope of democratisation and the legitimisation of European politics in European Union border regions are connected with a greater degree of cross-border citizen engagement in Euroregional institutions and politics. Using the example of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation, this study analyses and compares four cross-border Euroregional case studies: Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino, Galicia-North Portugal, SaarMoselle and the planned German-Polish TransOderana EGTC.

Participatory Democracy, Civil Society and Social Europe

Participatory Democracy, Civil Society and Social Europe
Author: Gautier Busschaert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Citizenship
ISBN: 9781780683959

Participatory democracy has become a buzzword in current discussions about how to democratize the EU. European institutions associate it with civil society involvement in European governance and claim that it might reduce its so-called democratic deficit. The Treaty of Lisbon formalizes this promise by enacting a new Article 11 TEU specifically dedicated to participatory democracy as a founding principle of the EU legal order. However, two fundamental paradoxes have been overlooked. Whereas participatory democracy was traditionally meant to further the maximum participation of citizens in political life, the EU supports a modern version of the participatory ideal where citizens are represented by a self-designated elite of civil society experts. This book takes a critical stance on that technocratic form of government. At the same time, it examines whether there are realistic ways for a bureaucratic organization like the EU to involve a truly civil society of active citizens in governance. This book claims that European civil society may only flourish if social Europe acts as a counterweight to economic Europe. It analyzes whether the EU has developed a social dimension strong enough to protect civil society from the colonizing forces of European economic integration. (Series: Law and Cosmopolitan Values, Vol. 8) Subject: EU Law]

Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe

Participatory Democratic Innovations in Europe
Author: Brigitte Geißel
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3847403974

Representative democracy is often seen as a stable institutional system insusceptible to change. However, the preferences of the broad public are changing and representative, group based democracy has lost importance. This development made it necessary to change established ways of decision making and to introduce participatory democratic innovations. Many national and sub-national governments followed this route and implemented various kinds of participatory innovations, i.e. the inclusion of citizens into processes of political will-formation and decisionmaking. The authors analyse and evaluate the various effects of these innovations in Europe, providing a bigger picture of the benefits and disadvantages different democratic innovations can result in.