GV4K1      Half Unit
Participatory Governance

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Participatory governance – involving ordinary people in policy making and implementation – is increasingly being adopted around the world and across many different policy areas. This includes initiatives like consultations, coproduction, petitions, policy crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, complaints mechanisms, service delivery reporting, “civic tech” platforms, and citizen assemblies. These forms of participatory governance also vary in important ways, including the deliberativeness of interactions, the mode of participant selection, the role of technology, and the nature of linkage with public authority. While many scholars and policymakers hail the potential for public participation to lead to more effective, representative, and legitimate governance, others raise important concerns such as risks of exacerbating inequalities, limited accountability, or serving as mere “window-dressing,” among others. 

This course examines participatory governance in theory and practice, with a global scope covering applications in both “developed” and “developing” countries as well as at a global level. It surveys theories of participatory and deliberative democracy, and their relationships with representative democracy, as well as themes of coproduction, collaboration, and social accountability; and their applications to applied policy cases and lessons for policymakers. The course also examines key cross-cutting questions, such as who participates and why, the possibilities of meaningful deliberation, relationships with political authority, and applications of information technologies and artificial intelligence. The course also incorporates recent empirical research on the impacts of participatory and deliberative governance and on the representativeness of participation in different settings. Students will have opportunities to apply these concepts and themes to specific case studies in their course essay.

30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Essay (1000 words) in Winter Term Week 11

Students will have the option to produce one formative essay of 1,000 words, due by the end of Week 11 in the WT.

Fung, Archon, and Erik Olin Wright. 2001. “Deepening democracy: Innovations in empowered participatory governance.” Politics & Society 29(1): 5-41.

OECD. (2020). Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. OECD Publishing, Paris.

Peixoto, Tiago, and Micah L. Sifry. (2017). Civic Tech in the Global South: Assessing Technology for the Public Good. World Bank.

Nabatchi, Tina, Alessandro Sancino, and Mariafrancesca Sicilia. (2017). "Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction." Public Administration Review. 77(5): 766-776.

Boswell, John, Rikki Dean, and Graham Smith. (2023). "Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: Lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies." Public Administration. 101(1): 182-200.

Landemore, Hélène, and Scott E. Page. (2015). "Deliberation and disagreement: Problem solving, prediction, and positive dissensus." Politics, Philosophy & Economics. 14(3): 229-254.

Gonzalez, Yanilda, and Lindsay Mayka. (2023). "Policing, Democratic Participation, and the Reproduction of Asymmetric Citizenship." American Political Science Review. 117(1): 263-279.

Parthasarathy, Ramya, Vijayendra Rao and Nethra Palaniswamy. (2019). "Deliberative Democracy in an Unequal World: A Text-as-Data Study of South India's Village Assemblies." American Political Science Review. 113(3): 623-640.

He, Baogang, and Mark E. Warren. (2011). "Authoritarian deliberation: The deliberative turn in Chinese political development." Perspectives on Politics. 9(2): 269-289.

Wampler, Brian, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton. (2021). Participatory budgeting in global perspective. Oxford University Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in Spring Term Week 1