The Modernisation of Local Decision Making: Public Participation and Scottish Local Government

Single Outcome Agreements and Partnership Working in Scottish Local Government – Year One

“…This study suggests that the 2008 SOA was an opportunity for local authorities with stronger CPPs to engage partners in the development of the documents which partially confirms the positive relationships between the strength of partnerships and the effectiveness of partnership working in policy development and implementation (Geddes et al, 2007: Gillanders andAhmad, 2007) The views expressed through this study do not sufficiently include those of elected members. The difficult relationships between elected members as advocates for democratic accountability and other key players advocating participatory accountability through community planning initiatives have been observed (Orr and McAteer, 2004;Geddes et al, 2007: Laffin, 2008. Partnership working exercised through community planning reflects ideals of participatory democracy and equality between partners (Balloch & Taylor, 2001:2).…”

Web 2.0 for eParticipation

“…It could be argued that by viewing people as consumers of services rather than democratic citizens (McLaverty, 2010) this demonstrates a devaluation of the role of citizenship and represents an erosion of the ideals of public participation. Orr and McAteer (2004), however, dispute the notion that citizenship and consumerism are necessarily mutually exclusive concepts and are also rather dismissive of the dichotomous view of participative and representative democracy arguing that the lines between the two are not as clear as some of the literature implies. Hui and Hayllar (2010) concur with the notion that there is not an inherent problem with the notion of citizen as a consumer of services and argue that Web 2.0 technologies have the potential to facilitate 'Citizen Relation Management' in a similar way that private sector organisations use these technologies for customer relations management.…”

“…Web 2.0 technologies such as social media have greatly increased in popularity with a huge growth in the use of social networking sites such as Facebook in the UK (OFCOM, 2010). However, when Internet use is broken down by demographics it becomes clear that different age groups do not use the Internet in the same way with younger people more likely to use the Internet for leisure activities and older people for functional purposes to find out specific information or complete tasks (OFCOM, 2010).…”

“…However, when Internet use is broken down by demographics it becomes clear that different age groups do not use the Internet in the same way with younger people more likely to use the Internet for leisure activities and older people for functional purposes to find out specific information or complete tasks (OFCOM, 2010). With any eParticipation initiative there is the potential for digital exclusion and that instead of broadening the base of participation, web 2.0 tools for eParticipation could end up simply giving the already engaged more opportunities to participate.…”

“…' (mysociety.org, 2011) While social media platforms provide relatively low cost opportunities for government organisations to develop new ways of communicating with their citizens there are concerns over the permanence of these new platforms. For example, in the UK over the last few years social networking sites such as Bebo, Myspace and Friends Reunited have all significantly declined in popularity as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr have risen in popularity (OFCOM, 2010). Content must be designed for a particular site and there have been concerns expressed regarding ownership of material .…”