The Normative Desirability of Participatory Governance

Abstract

The basic assumption from which the demand to extend public participation in the process of policy design and implementation within the EU is inspired seems to be straightforward, and it comes in two parts. First, the institutional chain of (indirect) democratic legitimacy in a multi-level context is necessarily rather weak and porous. This is not least because the network-driven logic of policy formation crosscuts the logic of representative accountability and thus introduces additional intra- as well as inter-institutional tensions into the European institutional system (see Christiansen 2001). Therefore, one obvious solution to the “democratic deficit” is to draw more systematically on the direct inclusion and involvement of citizens, both individually and collectively. And second, this “participatory recipe” for curing the structural shortcomings of representative institutions within a system characterised by dispersion, polycentricity and fragmentation (von Bogdandy 1999) derives its attractiveness from the assumption that there is a direct and mutually reinforcing link between the virtues of direct participation on the one hand and the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of policies that emerge under such conditions on the other.