Clarissa Kugelberg – författare

Over the past few decades and throughout the world, numerous government-initiated experiments and attempts at directly engaging and including citizens have emerged as remedies for a variety of problems faced by modern democracies, including political disaffection and insufficient capacity to deal with the complexity inherent in many contemporary public problems, such as climate change and segregation. In practice, these attempts are given many names, such as citizen panels, deliberative fora, collaborative dialogues, etc. In the academic literature as well, the phenomenon falls under many different headings, for instance collaborative, deliberative or interactive governance. Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy refers to this empirical phenomenon as local participatory governance, that is, government-sponsored direct participation between invited citizens and local officials in concrete arrangements and concerning problems that affect them. Participatory governance, we argue, may take many forms, regarding (1) type of interaction and type of communication between participants within the specific participatory arrangement (e.g., deliberative vs. aggregative) as well as regarding (2) the relation and connection between the specific arrangement and the more traditional representative structures (e.g., compatible, incompatible, transformative or irrelevant).The proposed edited volume addresses the matter of institutionalization, highlighting the difficulties associated with establishing stability and a shared understanding of the roles and rules among citizens, local politicians and administrators in participatory arrangements.

Over the past few decades and throughout the world, numerous government-initiated experiments and attempts at directly engaging and including citizens have emerged as remedies for a variety of problems faced by modern democracies, including political disaffection and insufficient capacity to deal with the complexity inherent in many contemporary public problems, such as climate change and segregation. In practice, these attempts are given many names, such as citizen panels, deliberative fora, collaborative dialogues, etc. In the academic literature as well, the phenomenon falls under many different headings, for instance collaborative, deliberative or interactive governance. Participatory Governance and Representative Democracy refers to this empirical phenomenon as local participatory governance, that is, government-sponsored direct participation between invited citizens and local officials in concrete arrangements and concerning problems that affect them. Participatory governance, we argue, may take many forms, regarding (1) type of interaction and type of communication between participants within the specific participatory arrangement (e.g., deliberative vs. aggregative) as well as regarding (2) the relation and connection between the specific arrangement and the more traditional representative structures (e.g., compatible, incompatible, transformative or irrelevant).The proposed edited volume addresses the matter of institutionalization, highlighting the difficulties associated with establishing stability and a shared understanding of the roles and rules among citizens, local politicians and administrators in participatory arrangements.

Medborgardialoger handlar om att politiker och tjänstemän ska samråda med invånarna inför olika typer av beslut. Men hur väl fungerar olika typer av dialogprocesser och hur kopplar man ihop dialogprocesser med de konventionella beslutsprocesserna? Kan medborgardialoger göra politiken mer tillgänglig för invånarna? Lyckas dialoger involvera grupper som hittills varit underrepresenterade i det politiska livet? Skapar dialoger förtroende för politikerna och därmed för beslutsprocesserna? Clarissa Kugelberg och Eric Trovalla vid Uppsala universitet har studerat vad som händer när invånarna och beslutsfattarna i Botkyrka kommun söder om Stockholm möts i olika typer av dialoger. Författarna tar upp många olika aspekter av dialoger och analyserar även dialogpolitiken ur ett vidare demokratiskt perspektiv. De har också studerat vilken betydelse dialogen har för den enskilda deltagaren och lyfter särskilt fram unga människor som en viktig målgrupp för dialoger. Samverka och/eller styra diskuterar ett intressant och för framtiden allt viktigare ämne. Med sina många konkreta exempel på såväl konstruktiva som misslyckade dialoger erbjuder den tankeväckande läsning, inte bara för politiker och tjänstemän som arbetar med dialoger utan för alla som intresserar sig för hur demokrati fungerar i praktiken.