Conference Agenda

Local self-government and sub-municipal self-government in particular, especially in larger urban areas, is a natural environment for democratic innovation practices such as participatory budgeting. However, engaging citizens to participate and co-create local budgets could be challenging due to several factors such as lack of resources, declarative political will to engage citizens, lack of motivation on the side of citizens, lack of knowledge, non-implementation of recommendation of previous endeavors, etc. This is particularly the case in the context of weak administrative capacity for innovation management on the side of city administration and its sub-municipal units. The paper will research the challenges and outcomes of citizen participation in the context of weak institutional and administrative capacity. In Croatia, the city of Zagreb as the capital city enjoys special status and legal regulation. Its sub-municipal self-government is organised in two tiers through directly elected councils of city districts (gradske četvrti) and sub-municipal councils (mjesni odbori). Although they have legal personality, they have scarce funds, limited competences and weak administrative support. They are very much dependent on the goodwill of the city authorities and their urban decentralization policy. The City of Zagreb in 2024 conducted a pilot project of participatory budgeting in selected city districts and plans to continues with such practice in 2025. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the role that city districts played in the process of participatory budgeting under their weak institutional position. On the other side, there is clearly a strong political commitment and available funds to wider scale implementation of participatory budgeting in other city districts. The paper will explore under which conditions the spillover effect of a relatively successfully implemented pilot project can be expected in other city districts in the upcoming period having in mind the weak administrative capacity of city districts. The research will be carried out through analysis of data on sub-municipal self-government and the implemented pilot project of participatory budgeting in the City of Zagreb, as well as through semi structured interviews with representatives of city districts and other actors that participated in the pilot project.

Questions of citizen participation have become an important component of academic discussion on public decision-making and public governance. In addition, methods, models, and even legislature for engaging citizens have emerged in the domain of public administration (see, Kurkela et al. 2024). There are multiple reasons behind these developments, one of them being the discussion around democratic deficit, which is illustrated by dissatisfaction and mistrust towards the political system and diminished interest towards electoral democracy (Hay & Stoker 2008; Whiteley 2009). Generally, against this backdrop, there seems to be wide consensus of the need to enhance the possibilities for citizens to participate in public decision making. Yet, what is still needed is more integrated knowledge, connecting different methods and models of citizen participation, to support its execution and planning.

Using the method of systematic literature review, our aim is to illustrate the main challenges and obstacles for citizen participation in public decision-making. Instead of focusing on citizens' attitude, expertise or resources such as knowledge, this paper takes on a political systems perspective and considers both the participatory and deliberative democracy aspects of citizen participation (see, Carson & Elstub 2019). Participation here is understood as citizens taking part in public decision-making as themselves, instead of delegating power to their representatives (Birch 2002; Nabatchi & Amsler 2014). This definition can include various practices, such as surveys and digital platforms for participation, deliberative forums, such as mini-publics, and participatory budgeting. However, questions of representative democracy, activism and micro-level service encounters and interaction (such as doctor-patient interaction) are excluded from this study.

The protocol for systematic literature will follow the definitions presented earlier. In our analysis, we will review research articles published in academic journals using the PRISMA-method. Our search query is following: “(challeng* OR weak* OR problem*) AND ("citizen participat*" OR "citizen engag*" OR "deliberati* democracy" OR "participatory democracy" OR “citizen involve*”)” and the search has been conducted in Scopus and Web of Science databases. Initial search (after removing the duplicates) gave us 3514 articles for further screening. Our initial results show that articles on citizen participation have been published in various academic fields, such as political science, administrative sciences, health sciences, technology, as well as geography and urban planning. This will give us a multifaceted picture concerning the challenges of citizen participation, including for example technical solutions, processual questions and organizational preconditions.

This study is part of a research project called “STRONG- Institutionalising Democratic Innovations” (funded by The Strategic Research Council, SRC), in which the aim is to develop the Finnish democratic system by studying democratic innovations, such as mini-publics, and their institutionalization as well as their possibilities to enhance democratic inclusivity and trust towards the political system. In the context of this research project, the aim of this current research paper is to offer information for further research and especially for experiments of mini-publics.

This paper investigates how prior coproduction performance information impacts public coproduction willingness. By drawing on the literature on coproduction and performance feedback, and employing two survey experiments based on public reports of safety hazards, this paper reveals that positive coproduction performance information boosts coproduction willingness, while negative coproduction performance information does not deter it. Notably, when negative performance is attributed to limited influence on service outcomes but substantial impact on government professionals, it can even increase public willingness to coproduce. This paper suggests that coproduction performance information can serve as a tool to encourage ongoing public coproduction.