Accessibility to democracy through participation -A case study of how social vulnerability and marginalisation is taken into consideration by local governments in their participatory process

Abstract: Participation as a way to ensure equal accessibility to democracy has gained importance alongside the concept of sustainability. At the same time, it has become clear that not everyone has equal opportunity to participate in these participatory events, creating power issues that leave out the voices of certain societal groups from the political context. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to research how this issue can be solved, by looking at how local governments are working to ensure that everyone is given equal opportunity to participate when it is of relevance to them. The purpose is also to specifically research how social vulnerability and marginalisation is taken into consideration in the participatory process. The researched questions used to fulfil this purpose is: 1) How do local municipalities work to ensure equal accessibility to participatory events? 2) How is social vulnerability or marginalisation taken into consideration in the participatory process? 3) Can the strategies used by the municipality be argued to increase citizens’ accessibility to democracy? To answer these questions this study uses a case study design and a combination of two methods: interviews and text analysis. The data material consists of interviews with public officials and politicians at Örebro municipality along with the guidelines and handbooks developed by the municipality about their work with participatory events. The study concludes that Örebro municipality uses a number of different strategies that arguably enables them to have a more inclusive participatory process. They for example uses target group analysis, adapts the event to the group it concerns, take language, place of event, method of announcement into consideration and adapts the language to make the event more accessible. The study could conclude that through these strategies, along with directed efforts towards socially vulnerable and marginalised groups, the municipality appears to take these aspects in to consideration and therefore enhance the possible for more citizens to participate. The questions whether the strategies used by the municipality could increase citizens accessibility to democracy through participatory events generated a more ambivalent discussion and could not be giving a clear answer. There were aspects that to a certain degree could indicate that it was made possible through the strategies used by the municipality. But other aspect such as the ambiguity related to the purpose and definition of the participatory events contradicted this and showed that there exists a tension between wanting to enforce decisions and including citizens perspectives and input.