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Participation is a basic principle of democracy. Taking part in elections, referenda, official opinion polls and petitions are all forms of participation. Alongside these arrangements, which are usually regulated by law, people are increasingly demanding and using ways of active participation in connexion with projects and developments in the public sector, either as ordinary citizens or as representatives of an interest group.
Often participation is treated as synonymous with “citizen participation“. In a narrow sense this is taken to mean citizens taking part in a project, either as individuals or in a grassroots initiative, so as to table their interests as private persons or as a group.
The notion of “civic participation“ has a wider scope; it covers involving various groups of agents in a participation process. This applies to individual citizens and grassroots initiatives just as much as to representatives of lobbies such as environmental organizations, youth groups or professional associations, who make the concerns of the group they represent known. Lobbyists are known collectively as “the organized public“.
As far as possible any process of participation should be open to all stakeholders and everyone interested, i.e. to a wide public. In some cases, though, that is not feasible, because the resulting group would be too large to function effectively. Then it is up to “the organized public“ to represent all stakeholders’ interests.
