评公民参与和地方治理理论的创新

公民参与作为公共参与的一种重要表现形式,体现出公共治理的基本价值;公民参与是治理理论针对西方民主制度的缺失进行反思后的一种回应;公民参与充分体现治理理论倚重的社群主义和合作主义的思想;新公民参与运动在实践上进一步丰富和推进了在公共决策中公民参与形式的创新,公民参与的可操作性在公共治理理论中也得到了丰富和发展;公民治理是更高层次的地方治理中的公民参与.     

治理视野下我国国家与社会关系的重构

治理是政府与公民对公共生活的合作管理,体现了政治国家与公民社会的一种新颖关系。我国国家与社会关系的演变体现了强国家——弱社会模式,要解决这一模式带来的种种弊端,应该将界定国家限度的制度创新与构建公民社会的制度创新结合起来,运用治理理论重构我国国家与社会关系。     

公共管理模式嬗变的反思——基于公民性的变迁与重塑

自古希腊的"原始公民性"开始,从公民意识与公民精神两个维度考察,公民性经历了以臣民意识为特征的公民性缺失、捍卫公民权利的消极公民、具有责任和参与意识和公共精神的积极公民的变迁过程,这一过程与公共管理由"统治型"、"管理型"向"服务型"的嬗变相互交织,是公共管理嬗变的社会基础和内在动力。现代"服务型"公共管理的发展伴随着公民意识和公民精神的共和主义复归与重塑,并有赖于从社区开始的多中心治理机制、沟通与协商机制、合作与共治机制的构建。     

论公共服务型政府构建与公民参与

党的十六届六中全会把服务型政府建设作为构建和谐社会的必然要求,确立其为目前我国政府改革的重要目标。公共服务型政府强调以服务公民为导向,让公民参与到公共治理中来,由政府单项度治理向政府、公民和社会合作的多元化治理转变。借鉴西方诸国的政府管理经验和新公共服务理论,结合我国的实际国情,构建公共服务型政府列入我国政府改革的日程。构建公共服务型政府,政府本身的改革是首要的,而这其中更离不开公民有序的参与过程。     

新公共服务与新公共管理：相生还是相克

新公共服务理论是在批判新公共管理理论的基础上兴起的一种理论,其对新公共管理的批判主要集中在对新公共管理将政府角色定位为“掌舵者”、将公民当作顾客及提倡企业家式政府的批判。事实上,新公共服务的批判有曲解新公共管理或避开重点之嫌,首先,“服务而非掌舵”这一口号本身就存在矛盾;其次,反对新公共管理将公民当作顾客的理由并不充分;第三,对新公共管理所提倡的企业家式政府的批判也不是非常有力的。这两种理论实质上是相生而非相克的关系。     

公民参与的诸模式:公共行政理论的观点

20世纪60年代以来,公民参与与公共行政之间的关系开始成为公共行政理论研究的重要主题。20世纪60年代以前,公民参与具体表现为以投票、选举等形式的政治参与,而无行政之公民参与。而20世纪60年代以来,特别近几十年来,公民更多地直接参与公共行政过程。在公共行政理论发展的不同历史阶段,公民参与具有不同的模式,具体包括传统公共行政时期的无公民参与模式、新公共行政学派的作为“公民”的民主参与模式、新公共管理理论中的作为“顾客”的回应型公民参与模式、新公共服务时期中的作为“公民”的强势公民参与模式和治理与善治理论中的合作式公民参与模式。     

公民参与的深度扩展:从代议民主制下的传统政府管理到治理

公民对公共政治生活的平等参与是民主政治的首要基准。在代议民主制下公民政治参与的主要形式有:选举、个人或者集体形式同政府的接触、少量的直接民主等。公民通过政治参与对公共政策发挥重要影响,但传统政府管理的某些结构性缺陷也制约了公民政治参与的有效性。与之相对照,在近年兴起的治理实践中,公民被赋予了积极的治理主体资格,因而能够在公共生活中进行更有效的深度参与。     

公民资格理论的新发展及其启示

金里卡研究了公民品德、工具性品德、公民共和主义、公民品德的苗床以及世界主义的公民资格等理论,是对新近流行的公民资格理论发展概况做了一个述评。金里卡指出公民资格理论的新发展表明政治哲学关注的焦点从正义转移到了公民资格,他说这种话语转移是政治哲学自身话语困境的一种论证转移。他认为公民资格的新语言不过是对社会制度正义问题上的争论的一种掩饰,这恐怕是新瓶装旧酒的策略。其实,公民资格理论的复兴还是具有积极的启示意义的,本文对金里卡的观点做了简要介绍并探讨了公民资格理论复兴的意义。     

公共决策中的公民参与——论约翰·克莱顿·托马斯的公民参与的有效决策模型

约翰.克莱顿.托马斯在《公共决策中的公民参与:公共管理者的新技能与新策略》一书中构建了一个公民参与的有效决策模型,为公共管理者提供了5种可供选择的决策方式:自主式管理决策、改良的自主管理决策,分散式的公众协商、整体式的公众协商、公共决策。公民参与的有效决策模型为公共管理者提供了管理的新技能和新策略,也为公共管理学者提供了一条研究公民参与的路径。中国在公共决策中如何吸纳公民参与,是公共管理者必须面对的重大问题,托马斯的模式可以作为借鉴和参考。     

美国新公共治理实践及其对我国的启示

新公共治理理论的兴起标志着公共行政理论研究范式由"新公共管理"和"新公共服务"向"新公共治理"转变,其目的是不断调整政府、市场和社会之间的管理边界,实现三者之间更为良性的互动。通过公共部门、私人部门和非营利机构组成的网络结构,公共事务管理者创新公共治理的工具和手段,为利益相关者和公民参与公共事务的管理提供新的通道。西方国家尤其是美国通过制度化和法治化的方式,充分利用准立法程序和准司法程序,丰富拓展新公共治理实践,提升了公共事务管理的效率和效能。考察美国新公共治理的实践和过程,对中国国家治理体系的构建和治理能力现代化的实现具有借鉴意义。     

公民政策参与的功能分析

公民政策参与是指公民参与和影响公共政策过程的行为和活动。公民政策参与对于实现民主价值、保障公民权利,维护和增强政府合法性,保证政策的科学制定和顺利执行,保证政策的公共价值和提高公共服务的品质和效能等方面都有重要的积极意义。但公民政策参与并不必然对所有方面的政策问题解决都带来积极的效果,它也可能会使政策的质量、成本、利益取向以及政府效率和权威方面产生问题。重要的是要把握好“度”,尽可能地因势利导,使其扬长避短。     

Government intervention and the empowerment process: Citizen involvement in the 2010 Shanghai World Expo

Citizen involvement in major government initiatives is increasingly favoured in the evolving theory and practice of public administration. As a mega project, the Shanghai Expo featured citizen involvement both as a publicity idea and as a pragmatic approach for obtaining resources and support from citizens. Due to the lack of a participatory democratic tradition, the Shanghai municipality has sought to promote citizen involvement through specific social projects over a short time. The paper explores the evolution of citizen involvement from consumerism to collaborative governance, and suggests the concept of empowerment as a crucial perspective in the promotion of such citizen involvement. Within this framework, two projects of the Shanghai Expo are analysed as case studies focusing on the empowerment process in citizen involvement. In conclusion, the study offers some reflections on the current state of citizen involvement and puts forward suggestions for post-Expo governance in Shanghai. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In Search of Society? The Limitations of Citizen‐Centred Governance

Democratic governments have spent much of the last two decades attempting to recalibrate their governance systems around a single focal entity: the citizen. The all‐pervasive rhetoric of citizen‐centred governance has seen policies conceived, delivered and evaluated in terms of the satisfaction levels achieved by individual ‘citizens’. This article argues that by disaggregating societal interests down to the smallest available individual unit – the citizen – policy makers have created unrealistic expectations of individual participation, leading to public distrust when ‘citizen‐centred’ rhetoric does not match reality. Simultaneously, the focus on individual outcomes has narrowed the policy‐making gaze away from wider society‐level measures that could create more robust policy options in the face of ‘hard choices.’ The result – paradoxically – is that the more government focuses on pleasing the individual citizen, the less trusting those citizens are of government's ability to deliver meaningful outcomes.     

From Responsiveness to Collaboration: Governance, Citizens, and the Next Generation of Public Administration

The evolution of the New Public Management movement has increased pressure on state bureaucracies to become more responsive to citizens as clients. Without a doubt, this is an important advance in contemporary public administration, which finds itself struggling in an ultradynamic marketplace. However, together with such a welcome change in theory building and in practical culture reconstruction, modern societies still confront a growth in citizens' passivism; they tend to favor the easy chair of the customer over the sweat and turmoil of participatory involvement. This article has two primary goals: First to establish a theoretically and empirically grounded criticism of the current state of new managerialism, which obscures the significance of citizen action and participation through overstressing the (important) idea of responsiveness. Second, the article proposes some guidelines for the future development of the discipline. This progress is toward enhanced collaboration and partnership among governance and public administration agencies, citizens, and other social players such as the media, academia, and the private and third sectors. The article concludes that, despite the fact that citizens are formal "owners" of the state, ownership will remain a symbolic banner for the governance and public administration–citizen relationship in a representative democracy. The alternative interaction of movement between responsiveness and collaboration is more realistic for the years ahead.     

街政治理中的公民参与:现实意义与建设途径

本文以街政流程为线索,具体分析了街政治理中公民参与的现实意义。在此基础上,提出了加强新公民资格培育、拓殖社区参与公共领域等五条加强公民参与机制建设的对策建议。     

The New Governance: Practices and Processes for Stakeholder and Citizen Participation in the Work of Government

Leaders in public affairs identify tools and instruments for the new governance through networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. We argue the new governance also involves people—the tool makers and tool users—and the processes through which they participate in the work of government. Practitioners are using new quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial governance processes, including deliberative democracy, e-democracy, public conversations, participatory budgeting, citizen juries, study circles, collaborative policy making, and alternative dispute resolution, to permit citizens and stakeholders to actively participate in the work of government. We assess the existing legal infrastructure authorizing public managers to use new governance processes and discuss a selection of quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial new governance processes in international, federal, state, and local public institutions. We conclude that public administration needs to address these processes in teaching and research to help the public sector develop and use informed best practices.     

Repositioning American Public Administration? Citizen Estrangement,Administrative Reform,and the Disarticulated State

Levels of citizen estrangement from government in the United States have risen rather consistently since the late 1960s and have reached all‐time highs in recent years. Evidence is accumulating in political science research to suggest that public administrative theory may have contributed to this trend since the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. The authors develop this thesis by arguing that administrative theory in the United States has persistently portrayed public managers as “bridge builders” who link an expertise‐challenged citizenry to government in ways that emphasize bureaucratic over democratic administration. Moreover, despite claims of yet another “new” paradigmatic shift for the field, collaborative governance scholarship to date exhibits similar tendencies. To support this argument, the authors assess the common citizen‐marginalizing tendencies of three sets of administrative reforms in American public administration: the progressive, associationalist, and polycentric heritages. They offer counterarguments to this thesis and call for critical self‐reflection by the field and a more empirically robust research agenda on this topic.     

FIGHTING CORRUPTION WITH SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS' POTENTIAL TO REDUCE CORRUPTION IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Given the poor track record of traditional anti‐corruption initiatives, donors and governments are increasingly looking at how civil society can fight corruption in public administration. Social accountability mechanisms intend to perform this role by holding officials directly accountable through citizen engagement. However, this article argues that social accountability mechanisms are only capable of reducing corruption systemically if they activate horizontal accountability and sustain it through the sanctioning mechanisms of electoral accountability. A comparative case study analysis using the cases of the Ugandan Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and the Bangalore Citizen Report Card is applied to test this hypothesis. The Tanzanian Public Expenditure Tracking Survey and an example of citizen engagement in Mumbai are employed as shadow cases to provide additional evidence for the hypothesis. The results indicate that social accountability mechanisms must be inclusive, broad, with public effect and embedded in other accountability relationships to fight corruption effectively. Electoral accountability is key, and support to social accountability mechanisms should therefore always be well placed within a broader agenda aimed at strengthening democratic governance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Reform of the Local Administration in Spain in Terms of Population

Spanish Local Corporations are playing an increasingly important role in the provision of public services without reducing their function of consolidation and structuring of the current sociopolitical system. This reality implies an increase in their need of financial funds without new compensation resources. Also, there is a certain tendency to loose population in many counties along with a greater organic and territorial dispersion that accelerates their financial weakening. This makes necessary to find management alternatives ensuring the appropriate provision of local public services and thus the Local Corporation reform becomes an alternative. In this context, the present paper approaches the analysis and the results based upon a territorial balance criterion on the population and its distribution, aiming ultimately to design an indicator able to measure the need of the Spanish local government structure according to its population and the size of its municipalities. This indicator might measure the regional impact to any variation both in the distribution of its population and in the number of municipalities.     

政府公共关系的科学化与专业化探析——基于“新公共管理”的视角

政府公共关系是政府实施公共管理的一项重要职能。随着政府治理和新公共管理实践的发展，迫切需要重新发掘政府公共关系的价值，促进其科学化和专业化。对于处在社会转型和逐步融入国际社会的发展中国家来说，是否具备科学化和专业化的政府公共关系职能，已经成为衡量政府治理能力现代化的重要指标。适时提出政府公共关系的科学化和专业化，是深入贯彻落实科学发展观，提高政府治理效能、转变政府职能、促进公民政治参与、构建和谐社会的需要，也是“新公共管理”实践发展的必然要求。