Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future

Abstract The past two decades have seen a proliferation of large‐ and small‐scale experiments in participatory governance. This article takes stock of claims about the potential of citizen participation to advance three values of democratic governance: effectiveness, legitimacy, and social justice. Increasing constraints on the public sector in many societies, combined with increasing demand for individual engagement and the affordances of digital technology, have paved the way for participatory innovations aimed at effective governance. Deepening legitimation deficits of representative government create opportunities for legitimacy‐enhancing forms of citizen participation, but so far, the effect of…