Wednesday, 22 January 2020 at 1:30 pm – Wednesday, 22 January 2020 at 3:00 pm

Citizen participation 2.0

Part of the Politics and International Relations Public Lecture Series

Date: Wednesday 22nd January 2020

Time: 1.30pm – 3pm

Location: GM 3.42, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond St West, Manchester M15 6LL

Tickets: Free – Available on Eventbrite

Participatory innovations such as Assemblies of randomly-selected lay citizens are increasingly seen as a vital tool in battling against political polarisation and declining citizen confidence and engagement in democracy. Participatory governance, however, is much more than the occasional citizen assembly. Increasingly practitioners are moving away from a one-off approach, which to date has had limited impact, towards more complex participatory interventions that look like systems of permanent and interconnected online and offline spaces of participation, with multiple opportunities for citizens to influence policymaking at different points.

The lecture will cover some of these developments and discuss some recent examples, based on current work that Sonia Bussu is carrying out with Adrian Bua, De Montfort University, and Rikki Dean, Goethe University Frankfurt, to understand the impact of these participatory systems:

  • Can systems-oriented participation help recapture the radical potential of participatory governance for social transformation?
  • Can it provide a means for social movements to realise bottom-up demands?
  • What are the pragmatic challenges of designing these complex participatory systems?
  • How can they manage the tensions between the different demands of lay citizens, organised civil society, and public officials?

Sonia Bussu is a public policy scholar and her main research interests are participatory governance and participatory action research. Over the years, she has led research and published on participatory and deliberative processes, community engagement, and coproduction of public services.

For more information, please contact:

Kathryn Starnes · K.Starnes@mmu.ac.uk

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