Participatory Democracy: the Importance of Having a Say When Times are Hard

Furthermore, it is clear that younger generations crave participation. The Youth for Climate movement is a case in point. Participatory democracy processes can answer this call, enabling generations to have their voices be heard. People want to participate, it’s now a matter of helping them find spaces where they can do so. 

What are the ways and tools available to instill democracy and trust-building?

Participatory democracy needs to be entrenched in representative institutions. Concretely for Parliaments, that means creating spaces for citizens and civil society organizations to voice their opinions. This can be achieved by engaging people through communication channels that consider the questions of "who to bring in", "for what purpose" and "at what level". For example, the UK House of Commons is currently organizing an inquiry on the UK preparations for COP26 in Glasgow. The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee has collected inputs from citizens, civil society organizations, business associations, academia, etc., over a period of several months, in order to deliver a report that holds the government to account. 

Representation and demographic inclusion remain a particular challenge for participatory democracy. How many people do you need to consider for the participation of citizens to be sufficiently representative? Who participates in these processes? This brings forward the question of equal access, because not everyone has the ability to understand the political processes and legal technicalities, when no effort is made to explain these to the citizens. This has a two-fold implication: firstly, it means that people should be given the tools to understand the content of the debates; secondly, it means that each stage of the decision making process has to be fully transparent. On both of these issues, civil society can be an effective conduit to gathering citizens’ views and feeding them back to the decision making process. 

That all being said, it is important to point out that scholars are inconclusive on whether participatory democracy leads to more trust of citizens in democratic processes. It is not because people are more involved that they will automatically regain trust and confidence towards the democratic system. But neither does the system need people to trust in it blindly. Rather, we need to seek a middle ground: a "critical truster", a healthy skeptic able to maintain a critical reflection towards a system in which they believe in. 

In the last few years we have witnessed a democratic backsliding, a pandemic that urged the centralization of decision-making and the spread of authoritarian methods, among other things. Based on your observations of civic participation in this period, how do you see the future of participatory democracy?

The pandemic has really tested a lot of governance systems around the world. Emergency measures were put into place in strong and stable democracies in a way that was unthinkable just two years ago, with little to no public scrutiny, in some cases without time restrictions, and without a test of proportionality or necessity. Ultimately that has really led to a restriction of civic space, a limit on public expression and assembly, both offline and online. These civic spaces are crucial for a healthy democracy, and their restrictions often go hand in hand with the restrictions of political space. The existing trends that tame the two are extremely worrying. 

However, throughout the pandemic we’ve seen examples of civic support, demonstrations, and a range of civil society organizations that have stepped up. A guide from Civicus shows countless examples around the world where citizens and civil society organizations have increased their efforts, despite the restrictions imposed upon them. In Chile, for example, street art has been a vital part of the ongoing protests for political and economic change. It recently moved online, with the creation of a virtual protest mural, while protest images were projected onto buildings in the capital, Santiago.

We have also seen how, in some democracies, new spaces have been created for citizens to participate in the post Covid-19 recovery and beyond. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Taiwan has involved citizens in its decision making using digital tools for engagement. The UK city of Bristol established a citizen assembly to discuss and make concrete recommendations on the recovery. In France, some Members of Parliament developed a national platform to gather citizens' ideas. 

These three very different examples show us that participatory democracy will not end with Covid-19, even if the pandemic has put a strain on it, as it has certainly been more difficult to engage citizens beyond the online spaces. Going forward, participatory democracy will need to continue to involve more citizens, especially those who are more apathetic to the political debate. It will also need to find innovative ways to target citizens' engagement on issues they care about, while leaving the door open for everyone to participate. 

Copyright: MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP