Why open up participation?

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Engaging constituents through digital channels can require significant work before, during, and afterwards to encourage people's active involvement. And any strategy to involve more people in decision making often consumes significant time and energy, not to mention budgets.

So why do it? Global reports find that a majority of people around the world, and especially those living in democratic nations, feel like "they have no voice in politics and that their governments are not acting in their interest." The UNDP's 2024 Human Development Report likewise found that half of people worldwide report having no or limited control over their lives, with over two-thirds feeling that they have little influence in the decisions of their government.

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Add graph from https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1J0PyynOcxQ3z7_KCPVZp4BJCPhuiM7Tk

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Graph produced by Dalia Research for the Global Perceptions of Democracy report.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals include targets and indicators related to participation. SDG target 16.7 calls for "ensuring responsive, inclusive,

participatory and representative decision-making at all levels". Nation states and other institutions looking to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals must work to introduce participatory decision-making, and participation platforms are one of the best ways to achieve this goal at national scale.

Research suggests that governments and institutions that introduce more open and inclusive decision-making see an abundance of interrelated benefits. Residents and participants are more likely to:

  • Gain civic skills they can use in other arenas, including leadership capacity.,

  • Have higher confidence in and satisfaction with local governance.

  • Report access to higher-quality public infrastructure.

  • Have a better understanding of their own rights and duties.

  • Enjoy stronger ties to their communities.

In addition, governments and institutions are more likely to:

  • Directly address the needs of under-served or hard-to-reach communities.,,

  • Include people's opinions in their problem-solving, and in doing so create more effective public services.,

  • Experience less corruption, thus allowing limited public resources to be stretched further.

  • Enjoy better dialogue between participants and government leaders.

Researchers have observed these benefits around the world, from rural Russia, to large American cities, to entire countries like Brazil. Open participation takes different shapes in different contexts. In Brazil, for example, participatory budgeting programs were launched in places as varied as its wealthy South and impoverished Northeast. This wide variety of contexts suggests that open participation is flexible enough to meet local needs in diverse places.

On a global level, the United Nations E-Participation Index found a strong correlation between governments' improvement of digital services with their adoption of digital participation platforms. The greater a national government's level of digital development, the greater their score on the E-Participation Index. Governments offering better digital services are more likely to adopt digital participation platforms, and vice versa. Outliers exist, however, and this finding does not imply causation in either direction.