With the advent of the Internet along with the vastly evolving digital tools and technologies, digital participation bears great potentials for better democratic participation and the inclusion of less active citizens and marginalized groups. In this chapter, we discuss digital participation at the municipal level from an urban-rural perspective. We outline the different circumstances for (successful) digital participation. Among the promises of digital participation in local governance are the empowerment of citizens, the enablement of new forms of citizen participation in political decision-making such as co-creation, and the Internet serving as a vehicle for revitalizing or reforming democracy. We also discuss whether the potential for better participation is more promising at the local level than at the national or global levels, and we identify the spatial scope as an important factor. Among the pitfalls and challenges of digital participation, we identify the lack of enduring leadership of participatory governance initiatives, the risk of triviality of non-electoral participatory initiatives that leads to disappointment of citizens, and the difficulties in assessing the impact of citizen participation initiatives. While technology is not the main factor of successful and impactful digital democratic participation, the challenge lays rather in how technology is embedded in the wider participatory governance process. The rise of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offers new potentials of digital participation at the local level. However, further research is needed to thoroughly embed such technologies in the vastly dynamic environments of local governance.

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Digital Democratic Participation in Local Governance from an Urban-Rural Perspective

  • Marianne Kneuer,
  • Maria A. Wimmer,
  • Giulia Bahms

摘要

With the advent of the Internet along with the vastly evolving digital tools and technologies, digital participation bears great potentials for better democratic participation and the inclusion of less active citizens and marginalized groups. In this chapter, we discuss digital participation at the municipal level from an urban-rural perspective. We outline the different circumstances for (successful) digital participation. Among the promises of digital participation in local governance are the empowerment of citizens, the enablement of new forms of citizen participation in political decision-making such as co-creation, and the Internet serving as a vehicle for revitalizing or reforming democracy. We also discuss whether the potential for better participation is more promising at the local level than at the national or global levels, and we identify the spatial scope as an important factor. Among the pitfalls and challenges of digital participation, we identify the lack of enduring leadership of participatory governance initiatives, the risk of triviality of non-electoral participatory initiatives that leads to disappointment of citizens, and the difficulties in assessing the impact of citizen participation initiatives. While technology is not the main factor of successful and impactful digital democratic participation, the challenge lays rather in how technology is embedded in the wider participatory governance process. The rise of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) offers new potentials of digital participation at the local level. However, further research is needed to thoroughly embed such technologies in the vastly dynamic environments of local governance.