Why Deliberate? The Encounter Between Deliberation and New Public Managers

Abstract

A number of organizations in Britain's National Health Service (NHS) have been experimenting with ‘deliberative’ techniques of citizen involvement, techniques that were designed with democratic imperatives in mind. However, political practices are moulded by their institutional settings and the goals of their proponents, so it is unlikely that they have been left ‘pure’ following their encounter with public management imperatives.This paper offers an explanation for the interest in deliberative processes in the NHS by comparing deliberative and public management imperatives, as well as discussing more case‐specific motivations, drawing on interviews with health policy actors between May and July 2001. I then use those insights to highlight gaps between the deliberative ideal and deliberative practice, showing what has been gained and what has been lost in the encounter between deliberative democracy and new public managers.

Beyond radicalism and resignation: the competing logics for public participation in policy decisions

“…Though legal juries are not a form of policy decision-making, they were an inspiration for the policy innovation of citizens' juries that have increasingly been employed as a participatory policy-making mechanism in recent years. Moreover, Parkinson (2004) has argued that citizens' juries have been employed in this fashion, as a means to break through deadlocks in public debates that have become a polarised battle between interest groups. Bingham, Nabatchi and O' Leary (2005) have also noted the tendency for the public to take on a quasi-judicial role in new governance processes such as mediation, facilitation, minitrials and arbitration.…”

“…Although a number of researchers have noted the impact of different ideological influences on the way that participation is both constructed and practised (Pearce 2010;Martin 2008;Parkinson 2004;Papadopoulos and Warin 2007;Abelson et al 2003;Barnes, Newman, and Sullivan 2007), this has mostly been a tangential component of their studies rather than the direct object of investigation. A typology that systematically outlines the different ways we construct participation and the respects in which these constructions are similar and different from each other will help to clarify our understanding and avoid many of the confusions and omissions that are characteristic of thinking about public participation in policymaking.…”

Counter-Governance: Citizen Participation Beyond Collaboration

“…Two such urban governance cases that have been thoroughly documented are: the use of a citizens jury to breakthrough a deadlock resulting from local opposition to the proposed restructuring of health services in the English city of Leicester (Parkinson, 2004), and a citizens assembly launched in response to a stalemate when residents of Vancouver mobilised in opposition to a City Council neighbourhood plan that they viewed as unduly influenced by property developers (Beauvais & Warren, 2015). Nevertheless, as deliberative democratic innovations, these cases are analysed in deliberative democratic terms and their potential agonistic function is underappreciated.…”

Deliberative future visioning: utilizing the deliberative democracy theory and practice in futures research

“…Currently, the concept is used more extensively to refer to a failure to meet public expectations of democracy. [1][2][3] management reform, motivated by advancing the accountability and transparency of public policy making [6][7][8]. The concept of deliberative democracy (DD) is an umbrella term covering different forms of electoral democracy.…”