Citizen Involvement in Public Policy-making:

In some policy areas such as urban planning, waste management or environmental policy widespread demands for citizen participation have been met in the last twenty years or so. Participation has become a prominent means of social inclusion. Recently, the participatory discourse has entered the till then highly expert-oriented debates over science and technology policymaking. In the field of technology assessment in particular, different types of participatory procedures have been developed such as discourses, scenario workshops, and consensus conferences etc., which aim to include stakeholders, those directly affected and/or the general public at local, national, or even European level. Numerous procedures have been employed – above all with regard to social conflicts over biotechnology – in many European countries, but also elsewhere in the world. This debate is influenced by an almost romanticising picture, which assumes that the key to resolving the dilemma of citizen involvement versus system effectiveness is better participation. Participatory procedures are believed to (1) increase the motivation of those involved, (2) enhance the knowledge and values basis of policy-making, (3) initiate a process of social learning, (4) open up opportunities for conflict resolution and achieving the common good, and (5) improve the level of acceptance and legitimacy of political decisions. These claims are based on a reductionism of what ‘true’ democracy is, i.e. deliberative democracy, whereas empirical research on the impacts of participatory procedures displays a more differentiated picture. Participatory procedures are still in an experimental stage and their linkages to the political system vary from case to case and from country to country. Their linkage to political institutions is, by and large, empirically weak as well as theoretically vague. Consequently, many procedures have, at best, a limited impact on the socio-technological conflict and its resolution. I argue that participatory procedures do not per se improve the democratic legitimacy and accountability of policy-making in the difficult field of science and technology. In order to do so, their linkages to the political system have to be practically strengthened. This, in turn, also requires better theories of participatory procedures as well as linking them to democratic theory. In my paper, I will use case studies from technology assessment in order to draw some broader theoretical lessons.