Citizen participation is almost without exception touted as a positive value that seems to unite otherwise incompatible ideologies. For the left, participation is a way to empower the weak; for the right, it is a way to emphasize individual responsibility. Governments and the nonprofit sector embrace participatory platforms because they promote the public good; companies, because they create new markets and opportunities. Across all these diverse perspectives, it is not always clear whether participation is seen as a means to an end or a value in itself. Part III of this book examined the interactions between citizen and government through civic technologies at the granular level, but has not addressed the role of participation from a broader perspective. Some questions remain about the purposes and politics of civic technologies.
As policy researcher Sherry Arnstein noted, perhaps somewhat sarcastically, “The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you” (Arnstein 1969). Unless, as she argues, participation raises questions of power distribution, in which case it quickly becomes a controversial issue. Arguing for a more nuanced view of participation, she presents a ladder of citizen participation as a typology of involvement ordered by the degree of control afforded to the participant—ranging from pseudo-participation that placates users to real citizen control with delegated power.
It makes sense to use a similar lens for examining the scope of participation in civic technologies, considering the generous use of the term in this field. As noted earlier, participating in service provision is a somewhat ambivalent action. It is often less an enactment of democratic values and more a coping strategy for living with poorly functioning services. It can be a burden as well as a value. Since urban services are participatory almost by definition, it is imperative to take a closer look at the functions of participation and its beneficiaries.
On the lowest rung of the ladder, participation can simply mean using a system as intended by its designers. In this sense, urban services are participatory by definition; Arnstein would probably describe it as nonparticipation. Waste management service providers and recyclers, for whom configuring the behavior of the user in accordance with the system is often an operational necessity, nevertheless employ the rhetoric of participation.
Besides familiar calls to participation such as educational programs, appeals to civic duty, or slogans such as Don’t Litter, Recycle More, and Keep America Beautiful, compliance is increasingly manufactured through design techniques known as gamification or nudging. For example, a smartphone app from aluminum producer Alcoa rewards users with points for every can returned to a recycling center (Alcoa 2010).
“Gamification,” which is “the use of game design elements in nongame contexts” (Deterding et al. 2011), involves, for example, rewarding desirable behaviors with points and encouraging users to compete against each other and compare their scores. “Nudging” is a related approach to influence behavior without enforcement by carefully tweaking the choice architecture of the environment in which citizens make decisions (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). Nudging starts with acknowledging the behavior-shaping role of default settings offered to the user, but can also employ more aggressive forms of behaviorist-style self-conditioning.
Both gamification and nudging are seemingly apolitical, outcome oriented, and free of moral appeals or coercion. Nevertheless, one must still question who defines what constitutes desirable, positive behavior. What does it mean when an aluminum producer rewards citizens for every single beverage can they recycle? While the app might be the result of a genuine concern for the environment, it also offers incentives for buying more cans in the first place and reminds users about their environmental responsibilities. In the words of political scientist Michael Maniates, this form of individualization “understands environmental degradation as the product of individual shortcomings … best countered by action that is staunchly individual and typically consumer-based … It embraces the notion that knotty issues of consumption, consumerism, power, and responsibility can be resolved neatly and cleanly through enlightened, uncoordinated consumer choice” (italics in original; Maniates 2001, 31).
The next level of user agency is feedback. Users can either be a passive source of information about their needs and wants or actively submit information. As a passive source, users may not be aware that they produce data simply by using a service. Participation in polls and citizen report cards such as New York’s Project Scorecard, which has been deployed since the 1970s to gauge street cleanliness (Melosi 2004, 252), requires more involvement but is still only one-way communication. In more active forms of feedback, users volunteer information by submitting complaints or service requests.
Ideally, feedback mechanisms benefit the provider, who can gather performance metrics that allow for a more targeted service provision, as well as the users, as long as their concerns are addressed and acted upon. In practice, this has not always been the case. In a comparative study of feedback mechanisms used in development projects, many initiatives failed to improve service (Cavill and Sohail 2004). Despite the simplicity and immediacy of the short route between users and private service providers, users felt that their complaints were ignored. The long route of accountability, for example, by approaching elected public officials with complaints about service provision, yielded better results.
Another concern is that feedback systems reinforce existing inequalities, in which those with the loudest voice and biggest influence receive the most attention and resources. Studies of citizen feedback systems have shown that residents in deprived areas often complain less compared to better-serviced residential areas of the middle class (Verplanke et al. 2010; Martínez, Pfeffer, and van Dijk 2009).
If citizen feedback is connected to enforcement mechanisms, participants gain a stronger voice, which can also benefit the systems governors in several ways. Cities can enlist constituents to monitor private service contractors such as waste haulers or recyclers. In many cities, citizen satisfaction is used for evaluating contractual performance. In international development, lenders and agencies may attempt to prevent waste and corruption by calling on communities to monitor the use of funds for the construction of streets or sanitation systems. This practice of participatory monitoring also entails involving a community in measuring the quality of service provision (Estrella and Gaventa 1998). When accountability mechanisms are absent, citizens might form watchdog initiatives themselves, forcing local governments to listen to them using informal means of public shaming.
Integrating citizen data into service provisions like trash collection faces a number of challenges, including the credibility of information generated by amateurs. The same, however, is true of official sources; data collected by public officials and professionals often are equally prone to biases. A study of street maintenance in New York City found that citizen-generated data are in some cases more accurate than authoritative data sources, independent of socioeconomic factors (Van Ryzin, Immerwahr, and Altman 2008).
Increased responsibilities for users and higher expectations of data quality require a better understanding of who the users are. Different groups, ranging from the casual contributor to the fully committed expert, have different motivations to contribute, which need to be addressed in the architecture and design of the system (Coleman, Georgiadou, and Labonte 2009).
Structural constraints of voluntary data collection are harder to address. Volunteer data are nonprobabilistic and subject to various systematic biases. Systems such as Wikipedia generally have a highly asymmetrical relationship between readers and contributors: 2.5 percent of the users generate 80 percent of the total content (Rafaeli and Ariel 2008). Jacob Nielsen coined the 90–9-1 rule to reflect that 90 percent of social media users consume but do not contribute, 9 percent contribute occasionally, and only 1 percent contribute on a regular basis (Nielsen 2006). Similar distributions are found in many other volunteer-driven systems. In the context of infrastructure management, these sampling issues limit the usefulness of generated data, highlighting a conflict between the expectation of a homogeneous and reliable service and the uneven nature of user participation. Cities address this issue by targeting a smaller group of motivated expert users rather than trying to overcome the structural limits of participation.
Within the conventional paradigm of urban services, involving users directly in service provision is the exception rather than the rule. The organization and maintenance of self-organized infrastructures are not trivial; building an infrastructure is easier than maintaining it. Nevertheless, a number of examples exist. Nonprofit organizations frequently maintain physical infrastructures based on volunteer work. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy in New England, for instance, maintains an extensive network of hiking trails entirely through the labor of over six thousand volunteers. Other examples include resident-driven paper and cardboard collection systems in the Netherlands (De Jong and Mulder 2012).
Such models of community-based service provision can be successful if the volunteers are at the same time the beneficiaries of the service. Co-production, involving residents and recipients in the planning of infrastructure projects, can be successful if it takes the needs and knowledge of locals into account (Ostrom 1996; Ibem 2009, 130).
Volunteerism in service provision is frequently accompanied by a rhetoric of empowerment, which in the hands of a power holder can quickly become condescending. Participation can be a burden. Paraphrasing policy expert Peter Schübeler, why should citizens in poorly serviced neighborhoods concern themselves with service provision when the local government provides better service to neighborhoods of a higher socioeconomic status (Schubeler 1996, 32)?
The failure of the Big Society policy initiatives under former British Prime Minister David Cameron illustrates that volunteer-driven initiatives rarely work as a replacement for public services, but on the contrary, require public support to flourish. After the initial success of the volunteer program during the 2012 London Olympics, the initiative has received criticism for masking an agenda of dismantling public services and using volunteers to compensate for it. Studies suggest that volunteerism declines when government intervention decreases (Bartels, Cozzi, and Mantovan 2013).
The most fundamental critiques of participatory models of infrastructure provision and maintenance concern the concept of participation itself. The value of participation is often taken for granted as a means as well as a prerequisite for a just and inclusive society, to the point where participation has been called the new “grand narrative” (Cooke and Kothari 2001, 139).
When engagement is celebrated for the sake of engagement, the IKEAization of service provision can create an atmosphere of activity that can distract from larger systemic challenges. As waste management expert and environmental scholar Samantha MacBride observes, Busy-ness is a handy method of maintaining the status quo yet is simultaneously active, optimistic, and often makes people feel better (MacBride 2012, 6). It is desirable for citizens to be able to report potholes or broken electricity poles. It is even better if the city responds to these requests in a timely manner. However, the energy and cost that go into incremental fixes can come at the expense of more comprehensive solutions, such as using a road surface less prone to potholes or burying power lines to minimize outages.
The virtues of incrementalism and solution-oriented attitudes can lead to stagnation by limiting a society’s gaze to the inconveniences of the everyday. These unintended effects show that participation for its own sake is not enough if principal benefits are simply assumed to exist. One must look closer at the model through which participation is enacted.