Anchoring Participatory Communication in South Africa’s Municipal Citizen Participation During Integrated Development Planning (IDP) Processes

Despite the fact that the South African government has legislative guidelines to guarantee that local citizens have a say in defining a local social change and development agenda, through citizen participation processes across all municipalities; several studies contend that although there is some degree of mass consultations taking place across South Africa’s municipalities in the name of community participation, there are cases where there is no genuine citizen participation in several municipalities where citizens are mere ratifiers of pre-planned development interests of municipal authorities. What is glaringly obvious is that in practice, the facilitative nature of communication in municipal public participation processes remains unrecognised even though, from a communication perspective, dialogic and anti-dialogic actions and their relationship to participation outcomes are inherently central to citizen participation. Through the exploration of participation, where participation is deconstructed through the employment of, for instance, Tufte and Mefalopulos’ (2009) typology; we can evaluate participatory processes and determine if there is passive participation, on the one hand, or active/empowered participation on the other. To this end, this chapter advances the need to explore citizen participation processes in local government, from the vantage point of participatory communication, which helps us to study this facilitative nature of participation. This is an area that remains severely underexplored, especially in the research domains of public administration and local government studies, development studies, and political sciences, especially in instances where citizen participation in local government is the subject of research interest and scrutiny.