Do it Yourself Citizen Participation?
A Review of The Next Form of Democracy
First, the tangled web of federal-state-local rules and funding makes the government connections to community problems necessarily complex. Shared governance will still have to deal with divided institutional power.
Second, consistency and follow-through will be a stumbling block for maintaining active citizen engagement. Building institutions that effectively cross neighborhood, class and language divisions will be uneven at best. Leighninger acknowledges this hurdle and notes citizen activist burnout and impatience with one another, even when goals are shared.
Third, Leighninger gives little attention to the concentration of media ownership, including newspapers, for avenues of citizen contact and connectedness. I believe that the power of bridging people through common news sources is currently one of the weaker dimensions in building shared governance.
Finally, how does everyone–regardless of role–wrestle with the hurry-up, divided attention society of the X-box, automated teller, text-messaging, and shopping by phone or computer? Leighninger notes these atomizing influences, and rightfully points to the on-the-ground examples of citizen engagement to show that the modern age of “multi-tasking” is not an insurmountable barrier.
Leighninger and other shared or collaborative governance analysts and advocates have a lot to offer for how the public administration professional will adapt to more muscular forms of citizen engagement. Balancing his thought provoking argument with contrary trends and attitudes will be a common challenge for citizens, public servants and their shared, democratic government.
By John Stephens
John Stephens is an associate professor at the School of Government, UNC at Chapel Hill. He teaches citizen participation and public dispute resolution to MPA students and North Carolina public officials. This review is excerpted from the American Society for Public Administration’s February 2007 PA Times.