Bureaucratic Readiness in Managing Local Level Participatory Governance: A Developing Country Context

Participatory governance in developing countries is broadly viewed as an essential prerequisite for successful implementation of public projects. However, it poses many challenges for public bureaucrats in terms of their skills and willingness to engage citizens. Despite the growing evidence of the pervasiveness of participatory governance, research to date has not explored bureaucratic readiness to adopt participatory practices. This research presents findings of a bureaucratic readiness assessment for participatory governance in Bangladesh by exploring how public bureaucrats perceive the value of participation; how they are educated to collaborate with stakeholders; and the extent to which their attitudes are amenable to enhancing participatory governance. Our findings suggest that we can classify readiness in terms of both motivational and educational factors. The study has implications for how readiness can be developed in public officials that may assist in fostering participatory governance in Bangladesh and be informative to other countries experiencing similar issues.     

Democratic Culture and Participatory Local Governance in Bangladesh

The government of Bangladesh has introduced several initiatives seeking to develop participatory governance at the local level in order to maximise the outcomes of aid-assisted development projects. This article examines the impact of these initiatives and demonstrates that participatory local governance faces a number of challenges in Bangladesh, in particular, absence of democratic culture and tradition and disengagement of citizens, asymmetric distribution of patronage and weak institutions. In theory, political elites and bureaucrats in Bangladesh advocate democracy, accountability and local-level participation, but in practice, they have an affinity for power and centralised authority. Their reform initiatives seem half-hearted and disjointed restricting the growth of democratic culture and participatory local governance at the local level in Bangladesh.