Authors: Merlijn van Hulst, Martine de Jong en Ingmar van Meerkerk.
Rules of thumb for participation
Setting up good participation processes is not easy. There are often many parties and people involved, their interests are often contradictory and an initiative is often related to other initiatives. Where do you start with participation and when do you do it right? In practice there is a need for principles or standards. These are rules of thumb for a sound and proper participation process that are independent of the specific context.
Which principles do we see recurring, implicitly or explicitly? And which ones are experienced as preconditions for good participation practice? To discover this, we studied various guidelines, memoranda, step-by-step plans, checklists and principle documents, as well as the motions that have arisen in response to them in, for example, the municipal council. These overviews have been compared to the national success factors and laws of the participation directorate and to the international principles of IAP2 and the Mutual Gains Approach (MGA). These have been compared with a number of scientific publications on participation, stakeholder management, negotiation and mediation.