Participatory Policy-Making to Combat Elite Capture

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is María Soledad Segura, whose focus is on the elite capture of communication policies in Latin America. Such capture has a very long history in Latin America: policy-making processes are unequal and worsen the asymmetries in public communication. But in the past decades there has been greater focus on reform, creating participatory institutions for the development of new communication policies; the present paper explores their operation in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. But did such efforts have any real impact on policy-making processes?

Such participation is as important as plurality and diversity, but not necessarily as valorised; a study of the institutionalisation of such participatory processes can provide new insights into how such processes can make meaningful contributions to policy-making, overcoming the limitations of the multi-stakeholder policy-making paradigm.

The project studied citizen participation across a number of policy-making processes in the four countries, as well as interviewing some 18 state officials and civic activists. It identified two key models: the advisory or consultancy models, where specialists and experts were engaged in writing recommendations but had only advisory roles; and the participatory or citizen model, where representatives of social organisations, universities, communities, and other groups promoted greater engagement and influence over policy-making processes.

But instability was also a recurring characteristic of how such processes were implemented; it is caused by overall political disputes, funding limitations, membership of policy bodies, government interest, mobilisation capacity of social organisations, cooperation or confrontation by political oppositions, and the strength of corporate resistance. Participation is costly for non-industry or government representatives, and this needs to be supported sufficiently, if it is not to depend entirely on the personal or institutional commitment of participating members. Additionally, participants also needed to develop their approaches to participation, and a formal participation pedagogy is required to support this.

Autonomy of the participatory bodies was also seen as critical, as was their diversity: greater diversity reduces the speed and efficiency of such bodies, but also improves the quality of deliberations. Further, transparency is critical, and at times governments did not sufficiently support or even worked against such transparency. But if run well, such efforts can occasionally limit or work against elite capture of these processes. There are also unexpected results, as participants learn more about policy-making processes in general, and professional policy-makers build new connections with civil society organisations and representatives.

Especially where such participatory activity was constant and continuous, it also had the potential to have genuine impact. This is true especially for citizen involvement models; if bodies had a mere advisory profile, they had considerably less impact. Better design of future initiatives might further strengthen these bodies, and enable them to work against elite capture of policy-making.