Public support for participation in local development

Public participation in local development is an integral part of democratic agendas across the world. Yet not much research specifically focuses on people’s perspectives of participation, especially among underprivileged populations. Gaining a better understanding of people’s support for public participation is, however, important as it may inform people’s interest in future engagements with the state for local development. This paper contributes to the extensive interdisciplinary literature on public participation in local development by taking a people-centric view. Drawing on an original face-to-face vignette survey experiment (n = 502) and group interviews in Bramfischerville, a low-income residential area in Johannesburg, we examine whether people generally support public participation in local development and explore how different design features of participatory processes inform public support for participation. Overall, our mixed methods study reveals strong support for public participation, with higher support levels for more inclusive and interactive forms, meaning processes, which are open to all residents and where participants are invited to discuss priorities and needs. This, despite people’s awareness of the transaction costs of participation, such as time and energy. Moreover, we find that people’s support for participation is influenced by their experiences and satisfaction with infrastructure provision. These findings underline the importance of understanding the specificities of the given socio-economic context and people’s everyday lived realities. It also draws attention to people’s relationship with the state, as the main provider of this infrastructure. Therefore, a context-sensitive interpretation of people’s infrastructural preconditions and their relationship with the state are necessary to understand their attitudes towards participation and, more generally, for advancing participatory governance in the given context and beyond.