Prøveforelesning: Idunn Johanne Bjøve Nørbech

Oppgitt emne:

Public Participation: Bridging Democracy and Bureaucracy?

Motivasjon:

The title of the trial lecture is: “Public Participation: Bridging Democracy and Bureaucracy?”. The past 60 years have been replete with efforts in the EU and beyond to augment public participation in government agency policymaking. In this public lecture, we invite the candidate to reflect on and assess the state of knowledge and practice incorporating public engagement into governmental policymaking. We offer the questions below as potential prompts for the candidate to consider. Given time constraints, we do not expect the candidate to discuss all of these issues or do so with equal depth.

• What are primary ways the EU (and others) have incorporated public participation into agency policymaking? What does public participation entail in practice?

• How has the effectiveness of public participation been assessed?

• What does prevailing scholarship suggest about its effectiveness vis-à-vis democratic legitimacy and vis-à-vis government performance? When and how does public engagement work well? When and how does it not work well?

• What should policymakers do if they want to enhance democratic legitimacy and technical performance? Where should scholarship and policymaking go from here?