Second, Eberlei (2007) and Fung (2003) argues, institutionalized participation needs to engage with governance structure. Eberlei point out that, formerly developed participatory structures were weakened because they were not embedded in institutions. Thus, he asserts, “sustainable participation requires clearly defined political structures for dialogue between all stakeholders at national and local levels” (Eberlei, 2007: 3). It means that government has to show strong commitment with the institutionalizing participation by offering invited space of policy deliberation for different stakeholders. By implication, institutionalizing participation has to produce an increase of political empowerment, mutual learning and an integration of interests and ideas of stakeholders.
To do so, Brett (2003), Guarneros-meza (2010) proclaims, institutionalizing participation requires an open system and enforceable rules with the supports of governance institutions. King (1998), Turnbull & Aucoin (2006) argue that the institutionalizing participation should facilitate structural and attitudinal changes, in the sense that the communication and cooperation between citizens and government officials and among government organizations should be strengthened. Political parties need to show their effort to engage their members and the public in shaping public policies. Experience from the cases in UK, Italy, Bolivia, Irish shows that normally institutionalization process results procedural mechanisms and assessment that enable the interaction between political representatives and their constituents and to measure the performance of political actors. There could be a committee/central office/ city council which provides support, coordination for reaching out different interest parties and cultivating public interest in politics. Deliberation was a mode supporting to continual interaction between citizens and their representatives which fostered a bargain in the political arena. New participative structures with proper monitoring and evaluation mechanisms could help the voters have a base to choose the best representation of their population (Joop de Wit, 2002; Woods, 2009 and Fungm 2003)
What is more, Carpini, (2004) and Fung (2003) strongly recommend, government has to devolve power to localities to support bottom up participation, because policy issues are various, depending on local socioeconomic characteristics and spacialities. More deeply, the involvement of political parties in the institutionalization process of different sectors, different local government levels is essential to provide commitment to power devolution and finance allocation (Ackerman in Cornwall, 2008). There is also a need of creating an open forum or sector working group to maintain dialogue structures within the local governments. Participation has to combine with decentralization to promote local ownership of development and commensurate reorganization of state agencies.
Although, it should be acknowledged that, public as an entity has continually reconstituted itself and the roles of politicians will change in different periods. Hence, the political transition will be slow and fluctuated. Actually, there always a tension and contradiction between authoritarianism and democracy, individualism and collectivism (Guarneros-Meza, 2010). In the opinion of Thomson (1996) and Ahmad al et (2005), an existing conservatism mindset or historically high degrees of centralization of resources or power will cause a bureaucratic and authoritarian inertia. This possibly hampers the process of fiscal decentralization, preserves patrimonial issue and retains an inequality of accessing resources and political arena. As Bardhand and Mookherjee, 2006 (in Guarneros-Meza, 2010) points out, in South Africa, although the efforts of State to decentralize power and establish non-racial local governments, the country remains high level of political centralization. Besides, it is easy to appear a form of elite domination or patronage in the community due to social polarization, social and cultural fragmentation (Rao & Ahmad, 2005). In addition, Ebeirlei (2007) and Thomson (1996) believe that the contradictory among donor policies is inevitable because the domination of donors in almost development programs. And social inequality which bundles in different categories for instance gender, culture, ethnicity, religion (Cleaver, 2001, Tilly, 2003, Diane & Guthrie, 2008) still challenges participation. These power resistance probably leads to the arbitrariness of local authorities and the apathy of citizens. To overcome these challenges, capacity building is the most important element as following discussion. Discussing on the third dimension, scholars argue that capacity building is often a prerequisite for participatory processes (Eberlei, 2001, 2003, 2007; Diane & Guthrie, 2008m UNDP, 2009). According to Eberlei, UNDP institutionalized participation requires to build capacity of stakeholders, not only technical capacity but also political capacity. By implication, he claims building capacity of both government and non-government stakeholders in terms of knowledge of the rules, resources and experience with political negotiation processes, advocacy skills, access to information, specific knowledge. Likewise, Bherer (2010) highlights, the institutionalization process has to encourage the active participation of individuals, so-called “capacity to aspire” (Deth and Maloney, 2012:77), empower citizens and make them more experienced. As such, with reference to the important role of local government, building capacity of local authorities is necessary not only in term of changing their attitudes to offer better opportunities for public participation, but also guiding them how to stimulate properly public interests. And capacities are perceived either skills of mobilizing support, leadership, power relationships and intensively technical capacity to make law and policy which has to be relevant and serves the public needs across sectors such as livelihood, poverty, economic development, etc (McGee R. al et, 2003). Even, it includes the capacity to recognize the injurious aspect of participation since, sometimes management is likely better when the order and discipline were imposed by a strong caste authority, found by Mosse, 1997 (in Diane & Guthrie, 2008). Nevertheless, it is worthy to note that there is often a capacity gap in reality, which arises due to the change and rotation regarding knowledge, roles, technology and the tensions of realities such as between policy constructed and policy interpretation, the desire of scaling-up participation and limited time or resource, etc. This gap could be shaped by limited information access, poor quality information and education or the shortage of skilled trainer-practitioners which Thomson (1996:6) called as a “lack of capacity to strengthen capacity”. In the developing countries, the demand for participatory training and technical support is growing and need to repeat while few qualified agencies become overwhelmed by assistance requests. There always exists the contradiction between strengthening participation and limited resource, especially capacity (Martin 2005 in Guarneros-Meza, 2010). The existing challenges probably weaken the institutional capacity which could lead to the contradictions between participation legislation and other laws and policies, lack of operational guideline or failure in policy monitoring, evaluation and implementation (Thomson, 2001; McGee al et, 2003 and Diane & Guthrie, 2008).
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