Participatory Experiments from the Bottom up - The role of environmental NGOs and citizen groups

While there is a vast body of literature on participatory planning, researchers have hardly addressed the question of how traditional modes of governance can be turned into more democratic forms of decision-making. The aim of this article is to investigate to what extent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can serve as change agents. Following the classical role of NGOs as a watchdog over governmental operations, it is hypothesized that participatory experiments instigated by NGOs might come closer to the communicative ideal than their government-initiated counterparts. The hypothesis is tested using an experiment with democratic planning in Haifa, Israel. The main conclusion of the analysis is that NGOs may be able to pressure governmental institutions into altering existing practices, but that the dominant actors remain the ones that shape such new practices. The consequence here being that NGO-instigated participatory practices suffer from the same shortcomings as the democratic experiments initiated by governmental bodies. The article ends with two suggestions on how NGOs could gain more control over the design of new democratic practices.