When Does the State Listen?

Multi-stakeholder initiatives, policy learning and institutionalization: the surprising failure of open government in Norway

“…Attention to the contextual manifestation of power relationships and control is also prominent in "bottom up" and ad hoc evaluation frameworks for evaluating novel forms of participation (see, for example , and features in typologies like the IAP2 which distinguish categorically between types of participation (see also the categorical distinctions between consultation and collaborative problem solving in Loureiro, Cassim, Darko, And, & Salome, 2016). This suggests control as a second meta-level design consideration for civic participation in the context of government responsiveness and accountability.…”

Look Who's Talking: Assessing Civic Voice and Interaction in OGP Commitments

“…Research published by the World Bank distinguishes types of "government feedback loops" according to the basic communicative functions they perform (Wittemyer et al, 2014, in Gigler & Bialur, 2014 and curates taxonomies of digital citizen engagement organized according to variables such as spectrums of participation, directions of engagement and initiating parties (Peixoto, Fall, & Sjoberg, 2016: 18-19). Similarly, Kosack & Fung's (2014) review of 16 experimental evaluations leads them to propose typologies distinguished by the types of actors and interactions they encompass, while Loureiro et al (2016) draw distinctions by the degree to which government actors listen to the people they consult, or engage directly with them in collaborative processes.…”

“…This mode indicates a government commitment to receive information from non-government actors, without any explicit commitment to react to that information. A significant portion of these activities ( 19) represented consultation processes in a traditional sense, without explicit follow ups, what Loureiro et al (2016) would call hearing but not listening. A narrow majority of activities ( 29) sought non-governmental feedback on specific policy objects or public services (as coded according to message dependency), while a handful of activities established mechanisms for citizen input without specific topic limitations.…”

“…This assumption might not be valid, however. As Loureiro et al (2016) note, governments can be quite good at receiving feedback and CC: Creative Commons License, 2017. yet to do precisely what they have already determined they are going to do. Actual listening and concerted action might not follow directly from a government reference to "dialogue".…”