Citizen Paticipation

Citizen participation presents a new way of thinking about growth and development. It exemplifies the idea that citizens can actually assist themselves; that they can express their own needs and find the solutions to address them; that they can be active participants rather than mere beneficiary of development processes. Citizen participation presents a whole new interpretation of ideas of citizenship and governance. Before, citizens mean “had to be governed.” As good citizens, people were expected to abide by rules and fulfill certain obligations to other citizens and to leaders. The leaders in return had the duty to provide citizens with protection and assistance to help them solve problems and make their lives better. Citizen participation suggests that citizens can govern themselves by influencing decision-making processes that affect their lives, their livelihoods, their communities, their environments and their societies. They have governments to rule them but not to rule them completely and not without question.

Citizen participation is important because first, citizens elect people into government thinking they can represent their needs and interests. No matter how government tries, however, it is impossible for them to reach all citizens. It has to rely on assumptions about what citizens need and cannot possibly know everything about their situation. Citizen participation can help to fill this gap. Through active participation, citizens are able to directly voice out needs and concerns. They can complement government initiatives with their own and thereby put their voice forward. Second, Citizens cannot just wait for governments to solve their problems for them. Neither can they expect all government officials to perform their tasks well without exacting accountability to ensure that they do these efficiently and effectively. Government’s power to make decisions has to be checked. Politics cannot be left to politicians alone. Being citizens does not start and end with electing public officials. Governments are, essentially, bureaucracies. They are large-scale organizations with defined rules and hierarchical structures. The task of citizen participation is to ensure that bureaucracies work for the constituencies they were meant to serve. Third, Citizens know best what they need and therefore should take part in creating solutions to these needs. Conventional technical expertise can not do the job for them. It is the farmers, for instance, who know best where to build farm-to-market roads. An engineer might do the job but it should not be up to him or her where these markets should be located and how they should be built. There is a need to complement technical expertise with local knowledge and homegrown skills.Toward this end, participatory methods of information gathering, collective analysis and aggregation of interests are highly significant. And lastly, for many, government is distant. Government matters only, or mostly, when people go to the polls to vote or pay their taxes. More often than not, they refuse to trust public officials at the same time feel powerless to change the way they do politics. A society cannot be considered truly democratic if its citizens feel powerless to change things. The point is to make governments work for citizens rather than against them. Citizen participation allows this to happen because citizens and governments are able to create spaces for working together. This does not mean a conflict-free partnership. It can mean, however, that citizens are claiming their space as equal partners in development and governance and thereby make government responsive to their needs. Citizen participation allows them to negotiate with government and not simply accept the terms of development.