With the role of government changing in the modern society, public governance and citizen participation have been given increased attention in the last 20 years (e.g. Peters and Pierre 1998; Bovaird and Löffler 2009; Edelenbos et al. 2010; Klijn 2012). From a government point of view, there are several reasons for encouraging citizen participation. In particular, citizen participation is important to strengthening democracy (Pestoff 2009) and the knowledge provided by citizens is believed to improve the outcome and the quality of public services (Bryson 2004; Martin 2009). Furthermore, pragmatic legitimacy and influence legitimacy often arise when organizations work close to their constituents and are willing to relinquish authority and be responsive to constituents’ needs (Suchman, 1995). Thus, involvement of citizens’ groups is believed to enhance a government’s legitimacy (Martin 2009; Klijn 2012). This potential outcome of citizen participation represents a key issue due to the fact that legitimacy is important for all organizations (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975), and especially crucial for municipalities that are expected to increase the accountability, transparency and the public confidence in the municipality (Martin 2009; Klijn 2012).
This paper will fill a gap in the public management and governance literature by investigating what are the main drivers of gaining legitimacy by citizen participation. A longitudinal and qualitative case study analysis was used to explore the drivers for legitimacy by citizen participation. It will thus shed more light about how citizen-government interactions work in a participatory governance setting and which can be the impact of participation on legitimacy, a normative and empirical issue still unclear (Fung, 2015).
The empirical context is a typical municipality in the south part of Sweden, Kristianstad Municipality, with around 80.000 inhabitants. The municipality launched a new vision “We grow and develop together”, in 2014, which will last until 2030. The vision project was unique in its ambition to include citizens in the design of the new vision and to actively use their input to form the vision.
Data have been gathered by non-participant observations, documental analysis and semi-structured interviews with public officials in charge of the vision project as well as residents who actively contributed to the project. Our theoretical backdrop was provided by Fung’s framework on “The democracy cube” (Fung, 2006). The questions who was involved in the process and how they were involved offered an important background to explore the crucial third question; how did the residents’ participation impact the strategic work in terms of gaining legitimacy for the project.
Our preliminary analysis, which will be further developed up to the Conference, is showing the key role of participation rituals to foster processes of institutional embodiment by the citizens with the municipality. Moreover, citizens helped gain legitimacy, not only by their concrete contribution to the vision, but also by spreading the vision through word-of-mouth with other non-participating citizens, acting on government’s initiatives reputation.
Strategic management and public service performance in the New Public Governance era
