LIST OF PANELS

Presented as a promising way to reform public and administration processes , public participation practices remain relatively understudied in the public policy field.. Also, research in this field has only established a limited dialogue with other contributions coming from political theory, comparative politics, or political behaviour. One way of explaining the lack of public policy studies of public participation comes from the fact that a lot of participatory processes are typically one-off experiments that occur over a short time period. But after decades of public participation practices, there is more and more of them that last and repeat over time. The organizers of this panel would like to take this opportunity to better understand how public participation influences the ‘world’ of the public decision-making process. There is a lot of scepticism about the real effect of public participation, but in the meantime, there are a few studies that have tried to measure the influence. We are here interested in two questions. First, how do public authorities receive and manage citizen opinions? This question refers to the potential effects of participatory arrangements on the final public policies (or policy content). Second, how does public participation change the context of the public decision-making process? The issues of diffusion and learning are central in this question. Who are the actors responsible for the growing use of the participatory arrangements? What mechanisms do they use? This panel will also welcome papers with methodological issues regarding measurement and evaluation of the two topics (impact and diffusion).

Public participation is a paradoxical object from a public policy point of view: presented as a promising way to reform public and administration processes, public participation practices remain relatively understudied in the public policy field. Also, research in this field has only established a limited dialogue with other contributions coming from political theory, comparative politics, or political behaviour. However, the public policy field possesses very interesting tools to answer different questions related to the  practice of public participation, such as: how the decision-making process is affected; the influence of the participation process on the final decision; how different actors concerned by new participatory tools learn of this new context and change their action (for example, public servants, representatives, proponents, etc.); the creation of new policy professions and expertise adapted to this new reality; the diffusion process at the local, national and international level that can explain why some participatory tools are more used than others, etc. There is a real opportunity here for public policy scholars to look at these questions, because they are not fully examined by other fields interested in public participation. This could be an interesting contribution from our field in the discussion of the value and effects of public participation arrangements in a context where they are increasingly used. One way of explaining the lack of public policy studies of public participation comes from the fact that a lot of participatory processes are typically one-off experiments that occur over a short time period. But after decades of public participation practices, there are more and more participatory arrangements that last and repeat over time. The organizers of this panel would like to take this opportunity to better understand how public participation influences the ‘world’ of the public decision-making process. There is a lot of scepticism about the real effects of public participation, but in the meantime, there are few studies that have tried to conceptualise and measure this influence. We are interested in two questions. First, how do public authorities receive and manage citizen opinions? This question refers to the potential effects of participatory arrangements on the final public policies adopted (or policy content). Second, how does public participation change the context of the public decision-making process? The issues of diffusion and learning are central in this question. Who are the actors responsible for the growing use of the participatory arrangements? What mechanisms do they use? This panel will also welcome papers with methodological issues regarding measurement and evaluation of the two topics (impact and diffusion).  Session 1: Public participation impact public policies. Really?  Session 2: Diffusion process in the public participation field: Actors and organizations