[Digital Enablers] Realising Constructive Participation

Participation or Citizen Engagement are all too often presented as the go-to solutions to enable communities and cities to respond to the livelihood concerns of citizens. Yet a steady flow of studies and observers have pointed to associated downsides, and the risk that participation can lead to hollow or unsatisfactory outcomes. URBiNAT’s report, “Portfolio of Purposes, Methods, Tools and Content: Forming Digital Enablers of NBS,” takes note of such risks while considering how digital enablers may offer help in overcoming them.  

Participatory practices can be viewed favourably as lending citizens – not least citizens from more vulnerable or disenfranchised sections of the population – a voice. However the same practices, if not implemented properly, can also result in the elevation of populist agendas, or campaigns of influence based on one-sided perspectives, “cherry-picking” benefits readily at hand. Linked to this, participatory practices may deflect attention away from more profound, long-term considerations. Warnings by scientists and experts that certain patterns of consumption are excessive, or that certain types of urban expansion are unsustainable, may go unheeded.  

Digital enablers are not a panacea for overcoming such risks, as can be seen from the explosion of misinformation and manipulation brought about by the social media revolution. News coverage in many countries around the world has been reduced to short-form, shallow messaging, benefitting narrow commercial interests and, in some cases, leading to the rise of autocratic regimes.

Digital communication brings about multifaceted opportunities, however.  Purposefully deployed, so-called digital enablers of participation may help address the issues at hand.

For one, digital enablers may be used so to compel local, regional and national authorities to be more transparent and efficient, including when it comes to consultations with citizens and diverse interest groups.

Digital enablers can be usefully deployed to bring about a maturing of quality assurance, accumulating shared experience of processes that enable success in raising user involvement as well as the effective hearing of expertise and stakeholders.

Decades ago, Healy (1999), among others, argued that extended peer communities had to be created as a basis for establishing the trust required for coming to grips with, and addressing, complex societal problems. Online communication vastly expands the speed and efficiency with which this can be achieved, paving the way for constructive peer-processes and exchanges on terms that facilitate compromise.

Digital enablers can be devised to promote teamwork (de Vries et al., 2018), and to instigate bonding between social networks (Guerrero et al., 2015). Dialogue and cooperation can be promoted within local communities, while reducing dependency on government (URBACT, 2019). Coming into play here are design approaches, operational efficiency, and participatory processes operating at community, or group level, with social relations awarded strong attention (Nam and Pardo, 2011).

A related aspect here is the scope for digital enablers to shift the perspective, by going beyond a narrow “what is in it for me?”, to discover “what is in it for us?”. Studies of vulnerable groups point to a combination of challenges and negative impacts of intensified exposure to digital communication, but also to the scope for remedial action. An example is digital support targeted to the needs of a child who suffers increased vulnerability due to the absence of an educated and caring parent, through means that strengthen the social fabric surrounding the child along with mechanisms for offering protection in case of an emergency.

In this way, technological advances need to be accompanied by the ambition and capacity to fulfil the organisational requirements for sustainability.  To succeed, leadership arrangements need to evolve so as to promote shared objectives and responsibilities (Johnson et al., 2015).

The willingness and capacity to embrace such aspects is, in effect, shifting from being a side-affair to becoming a watershed factor, a defining tenet for smart city designers, urban planners.

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