This week I’ve been at a very good conference on ‘Deliberative and Participatory Democracy in the UK and Ireland’ organized by the PSA’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group.
My paper focused on e-participation policy and the design and evaluation of local e-participation projects. I contrasted two general approaches. The first is technical, based on finding out ‘what works’ and identifying the ‘right tools for the job’. The objective here is to determine what software ‘tools’ or ‘solutions’ prove most effective by testing and objectively evaluating them within short-term pilot projects. This approach assumes there is only a small group involved in designing, developing, and evaluating projects and that these actors share a definite idea of what project objectives should be and what success looks like. The second approach, typical in more innovative e-participation projects at local level, involves the participation of various stakeholders in design and is necessarily more communicative and relational. Here the goals being pursued within projects are more contested, dynamic, and open to negotiation among stakeholders. Projects are not limited to the technical question (‘what’s the right tool for the job?’), but also involve the practical question (‘what should be done?’). Indeed, in this view, reasonable agreement on project objectives and a shared commitment to them among different relevant stakeholders is an important part of what counts as success.
