Who Engages in e-Policymaking Processes?

Krems.
The final presenter on this first day at CeDEM 2011 is Rebecca Schild, whose interest is in engaging policy communities online, in Canada. Canada is at an important crossroads in public consultation at this point; there has been substantial consultation in the past using older media technologies, but since the 1990s there was a neoliberal shift towards a more exclusive policy process that became dominated by private sector interests. Can this be redressed using e-participation?

Does the Internet increase participation in policy processes, then, and for whom? Can this draw on the emerging networked public sphere, or does it fall prey to fragmentation and polarisation? How may socio-cybernetic governance be made to work, and how can participatory inequality be addressed?

Rebecca’s study used interviews with stakeholders in the policy community, and content analysis of engagement contributions in a specific consultation forum. Major stakeholders included industry associations and businesses, but also individual participants. There were a number of layers in the policy community, then: unorganised publics, emerging smaller-scale organisations and stakeholder groups, and institutionalised top-tier groups.

The latter group of stakeholders were also closely networked, though not necessarily publicly so, and did not engage in online discussions beyond stating their predetermined positions; emerging groups, by contrast, actually used the public participation process itself to organise and network amongst one another. Unorganised groups, finally, had no formal organisations structure, and were drawn in by the Web presence of policy consultation processes, but failed to generate much more than noise online.

For many especially in this latter group, online participation consisted mainly of ‘drop-in dialogue’: they made one contribution, but did not engage further – 72% of participants contributed only one message to the policy forum which Rebecca studied, while 2% of participants were responsible for almost a quarter of all messages; where dialogue did ensue, it took place mainly between likeminded individuals.

This is not necessarily a negative where such ad hoc formation of interest groups generates better visibility of their issues, but can be problematic where an organised discussion between major stakeholders crowds out other, alternative views. Additionally, those topics which had been voted to the top of the list tended to attract the most attention – which is good exposure for them, but also crowds out those ideas which are not at the top of the list, of course. (Some more sophisticated site design might be able to address this.)

The Net’s role in driving policy engagement remains unclear, then; it did offer an opportunity for more networking between stakeholder groups especially amongst smaller-scale groups, however. It will be interesting to see whether this networking can also lead to greater institutionalisation (and thus greater impact for these interest groups), in the longer term. Individual users continue not to have a significant voice in all of this, though.