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4 Citizen Engagement in Practice
The fast growing and increasingly widespread interest and global activity
in citizen/stakeholder participation and engagement have spawned numer-
ous experiments, pilots, initiatives and projects for a variety of purposes.
Despite the plethora of initiatives, however, documenting, reporting and
evaluation of the varied exercises has not been systematic. Referring to pi-
lot exercises in e-participation in countries using the Government Online
International Network (GOL), Macintosh (2004) observed: “
although some
governments and research centres have already undertaken a number of
surveys in this area there is no standard way to describe the approach and
to detail the outcomes
.”
Furthermore, while some initiatives have been evaluated by independent
reviewers, most have not, and material which is in the public domain has
often been produced by members of the project team, often the project
champion. This sometimes makes it difficult to ascertain objectively the
success of the exercises reported. There is variability in the amount of de-
tail about what has been done, with whom, how, and to what effect. Yet to
inform and guide effective citizen engagement initiatives worldwide re-
quires the sharing of exactly this type of knowledge and good practice. It is
especially important that governments can benefit fully from their invest-
ment in the many exploratory and innovative exercises in participation
they have instigated. For this to happen detailed and clear analysis of the
varied initiatives is required. We seek here to provide an enriched frame-
work for such analysis.
4.1 Characteristics of Citizen Engagement Initiatives
In this topic we have necessarily only been able to include a small sample
of the numerous and highly diverse citizen engagement initiatives which
are taking place across the globe. Given the relative lack of systematic
reporting and analysis, we have selected cases which offer what we believe
to be valuable insights into the practice and outcomes of citizen engage-
ment. We have attempted to show the global extent of initiatives by taking
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