Completing the Citizen Participation Cycle

Client: Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken Date: February 2022 - July 2022 Course: Master Graduation Project Coach: Carine Lallemand & Jop Japenga

Participatory policymaking aims to include the perspectives of all individuals affected by a new policy in the process of designing the policy. Often, this process is guided by external researchers leading to three main perspectives contributing to the policy: citizen, policymaker, and researcher.

Through two case studies I investigated the roles of these perspectives in the process of participatory policymaking, and how we might anchor transparency and reflection into the participatory policymaking process for all stakeholders. From the cases I noticed that often citizens are not yet included in activities of processing and reflecting on results, leading to a participation ‘black box’ where citizens are unsure if and how their input contributed. I created Agora a platform that embeds transparency into the process of analyzing information as a place for recording knowledge and experience from all perspectives, where interconnections between assumptions, raw data, and results are made explicit. Through Agora, citizens are invited to view how their input contributed to conclusions.