What is Citizen Participation?
It is the integration of citizens into your city Government decision-making process. In other words, for a modern city like Madrid to offer citizens the best services and opportunities, it must have an open and receptive local Government, inclined to listen to what citizens want to tell it as a means of contributing to improved politics and public affairs administration. That is what Citizen Participation is: the essential participation of all neighbours wishing to engage with the problems that concern them, contributing points of view, concerns and solutions.
The concept of citizen deliberation covers a host of methods used to involve citizens in political decision-making processes. The main point of citizen deliberation is that a plurality of perspectives on political issues makes for more thorough and well-grounded decisions. Having evolved since the 1970’s and 80’s, citizen deliberation is now an integrated part of many countries’ democratic models. Still, in many parts of the world, citizen deliberation is a very new thing and only exists at a grass-roots level.
