10.3.4.3 Participatory Forms of Decision-making
A substantial body of work on participatory approaches to the decision making
process has emerged in the 1990s. Theoretical roots of this resurgence originate
in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and, more concretely, in Habermas’
ideas of discursive ethics (Habermas, 1979; O’Hara, 1996). Discursive ethics
views rationality as a social construction, inseparably linked to and informed
by the human experience of a social, cultural, and ecological life world, which
constitutes the context of human experience. It presupposes no norms other than
the acceptance of a reasoned, reflective, and practical potential for discourse:
that is, the mutual recognition and acceptance of others as “response-able”
subjects (O’Hara, 1996). The main contribution of discursive ethics is
to offer a conceptual framework for making visible the hidden normative assumptions,
behaviours, and motivations that influence de facto decision-making and valuation
processes.
Despite the resurgence of interest in public participation, no widely accepted
consistent method has emerged to evaluate the success of individual processes
or the desirability of many participatory methods. Diverse perspectives together
with country-specific conditions favour different forms of participation. In
most developed societies, participatory discourse has been motivated by public
concerns on the rigid and constraining forms of technocratic decision-making
practices, and their institutionalized forms of bureaucracy and social control.
Following Beierle (1998), divergent models of the role of civil society in decision
making arise from differences of view on the nature of democracy. A managerial
perspective acknowledges public preferences as vital to the managerial role
of democratic institutions in identifying and pursuing the common good, but
public participation in decision making conveys the threat of self-interested
strategic behaviour. Under a pluralistic perspective there is no objective “common
good”, but a relative common good that arises out of the free deliberation
and negotiation among organized interest groups. The role of the government
is arbitration among these groups. Lastly, a popular perspective calls for the
direct participation of citizens as a mechanism to instil democratic values
in citizens and strengthen the body politic. Each view provides different forms
of participation: the managerial perspective may favour information flow mechanisms,
such as surveys or the provision of right-to-know information; the pluralist
perspective prefers stakeholder mediation; and the popular perspective favours
citizen advisory groups (Beierle, 1998).
Participatory forms in decision making carry a distinct connotation in developing
countries. They are rooted in the idea of grassroots participation, promoted
by international development aid agencies since 1990 (UNDP, 1992). The concept
is far from new, but in recent years it has received a different connotation.
Before, participation was considered as an extension of partnership between
governmental institutions and development institutions at the operational level.
The scheme was oriented mainly to relieve the state of some of its executorial
responsibilities without any effective form of decisional decentralization (Lazarev,
1994). Participatory development as it is envisaged today aims to renew these
ideas of partnership, but to give due recognition to the role of local populations
by letting them generate, share, and analyze information, establish priorities,
specify objectives, and develop tactics (World Bank, 1996). It is viewed as
a social learning process within which stakeholders, by generating and internalizing
their own aspirations, themselves enable a social change process.
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