An essential public engagement resource compiling 60 international public participation models dating back fifty years to Arnstein’s influential ‘Ladder of Citizen Participation’.
Last year, Sherry R. Arnstein’s “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” celebrated its 50th anniversary. Originally published in the Journal of American Planning Association (JAPA) and one of its most cited articles to date, the longevity and impact of Arnstein’s Ladder can be recognised in the emergence of 60 public participation models since its inception.
Yet, Arnstein’s vision from 50 years ago bridges decades in more ways than one. Not only through its dynamic iteration in the history of public engagement frameworks and practices. Indeed, it provides a foundation for many of the central concepts that shape public engagement research and practice today. For just as current public participation spectrums continue to engender the work of shifting power in public decision-making – central to Arnstein’s vision – they also open out onto theories, methods and ideas that exist between the spectra.
But the inception of Arnstein’s Ladder in 1969 coincided with a shift in focus of the role of ‘citizens’, or public, and the conception of ‘participation’. Published at a “major inflection point” in the United States, with the Civil Rights Revolution, Vietnam war protests, the devastation of urban renewal, urban riots (Watts Riots and Newark Riots, for instance) and the increasing awareness of global environmental and ecological disasters, it demarcates the shift in the activation of citizens. Outgoing JAPA editor, Professor of Community and Regional Planning, University of Texas, Austin, Sandra Rosenbloom recently notes: “One result of the tumultuous events and major societal changes challenging the country at that time was a greater focus on the role of citizens in determining their own destiny and that of the neighborhoods and communities in which they lived. Citizen participation became both a duty and a rallying cry, but one that Arnstein viewed with great scepticism.”
While, in some countries, terminology has evolved to address exclusivity and divisive categorisation in the shift to from ‘citizen participation’ to ‘public engagement’, the link to contemporaneous challenges is evident in the need for people to determine their own destiny – to have their say – cutting across major changes posed by Black Lives Matter, climate chaos and increasing inequity resulting from population densification and urbanisation – not to mention the coronavirus pandemic that, in forcing a reset, prioritises equity considerations for marginalised and other equity-seeking groups and renewed efforts at fortifying community resilience. With democracy in crisis, public participation, it can be argued, has again become a “rallying cry” as governments scramble to connect to a disconnected public and, in a wake-up call to correct the balance of widespread mistrust, strive towards transparency, increased trust and legitimisation of public decisions.
As democratic societies across the globe increasingly commit to collaborative governance, public participation has thereby emerged as a rich arena. This includes the “deliberative wave” that has gained ground since 2010 that seeks ongoing, continuous and open dialogue and engagement between the public and public decision-makers. The recent focus on democratic innovations as a result of increased digitisation, too, emphasises a concern for the deepening of public participation in decision-making, where inclusive online engagement is one of the ways in which governments can engage communities. For benefits of online public engagement include improved governance, greater social cohesion, informed decision-making, community ownership, better responsiveness and transparency as well as increasing legitimacy of public decision-making.
Grounded in the democratic notion that public decisions should be shaped by people and communities affected by those decisions, public participation models have emerged not only to better map engagement in practice and theory but to ensure that people can shape decisions that affect their everyday lives.
David Gilbert’s Patient Leadership Triangle embeds patient engagement in operational settings with a relational and systemic framework for patient leadership. The Triangle illustrates the roles and relationships around three key points in a transformative patient-led engagement ecosystem. The Patient Director at the executive level, the Patient and Carer Forum in corporate governance, and Patient and Carer Partners at the level of design, delivery, improvement and team governance. Challenging traditional top-down models of patient engagement, it offers a pathway for the development of an impactful, shared understanding of health and related decision-making.
In ‘Towards a balanced E-Participation Index: Integrating government and society perspectives’, Ali Pirannejad, Marijn Janssen, and Jafar Rezaei extend the UN’s government-focused E-Participation Index to address the social and political infrastructures that impact e-participation. The Balanced E-Participation Index invokes the UNDP’s Human Development Index and Freedom House Democracy Index to include society-led initiatives in its assessment of e-participation at the national and international level.
The Community Engagement Components Practical Model offers a comprehensive, flexible framework for a ‘common dialog about community engagement practices’ in the context of academic health centers’ (AHCs) programs and missions in the United States. The model identifies five major components of community engagement activities across diverse community engagement programming in the institutional context: 1) Community Outreach and Community Service, 2) Education, 3) Clinical Care, 4) Research, and 5) Policy and Advocacy. Covering a broad spectrum of activities supported by administrative functions and infrastructure, the model helps situate community engagement activities in relation to institutional priorities, capabilities, and ongoing programs.
The Canadian Union of Skilled Workers conceptualises a member participation model that illustrates the interaction of Units, Committees, Representatives, E-board, Members in the workplace and across the Union. The model represents the Union’s commitment to ensuring that members can actively contribute to driving change and discussing workplace issues.
In his article ‘Is the Spectrum dead?’, Les Robinson proposes an alternative spectrum for the effective identification of community engagement objectives and tactics: the Curiosity-ometer. Robinson’s model locates consultation objectives along a spectrum that ranges from ‘endorsement seeking’ to ‘open-mindedness’ – and maps the corresponding methods.
Capire Consulting Group’s The Engagement Triangle is a spatial conceptual tool to help practitioners navigate objectives, stakeholders and techniques for effective engagement. The Triangle pinpoints three overarching objectives for engagement outcomes: informing decisions (to enable input on decision-making processes), building capacity (to enhance knowledge, awareness, or behaviour), and strengthening relationships (to foster or improve connections with community). The framework helps position engagement based on intent, and further maps it to a selection of tools and techniques.
The Spectrum of Public Involvement developed at the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identifies the following five outcomes for citizen involvement in agency decision-making: outreach, information exchange, recommendations, agreements, and stakeholder action. Each purpose corresponds to a commitment from the agency and a selection of methods to achieve it, spanning the basic provision of information, more interactive participation through to enabling community, voluntary or industry action. The framework looks to the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation (see entry 48) and supplements the EPA’s Public Participation Guide.
South Africa’s Parliament Public Participation Model captures the stages of public participation in correspondence to the increase in opportunity for community members to influence decision-making processes: Inform, Consult, Involve, and Feedback. The framework outlines standards for the involvement in the legislative and related processes of Parliament. It adapts Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation with a best-fit approach, speaking to institutional features across culture, processes, and objectives.
The Community Engagement Model, developed for IAP2 Australasia, illustrates profiles of collaborative relationships between organisation and community around leadership, responsibility, and action. The model identifies five profiles: 1) organisation leads, informs the community and decides, 2) organisation leads, community acts, 3) community leads, organisation acts, 4) community leads, and takes responsibility for action, 4) shared leadership and action toward shared outcomes.
The Scottish Government’s Digital Participation: A National Framework for Local Action is a resource for the implementation of their national plan for digital literacy and connectivity towards a digitally empowered Scotland. The guide features a digital participation pathway that illustrates progressive phases and related competencies, representing a spectrum going from passive to proactive participation.
Thomas A Bryer, at the annual seminar of The City Factory, identified a model for utilising social media for effective public participation in urban planning. Bryer’s model presents four forms of civic engagement necessary for meaningful participation through social media: adversarial engagement, information exchange, civil society, and collaborative engagement.
The Kaizen Partnership developed a framework to identify and illustrate the different core archetypes of community participation, suitable for application across scales and sectors. The model explains community participation as activity that is: helping, reactive, responsive, strategic, supportive, generative, and engaging.
Harry Shier, Marisol Hernandez Mendez, Meyslin Centeno, Ingrid Arroliga, and Meyling Gonzalez published ‘How Children and Young People Influence Policy-Makers: Lessons from Nicaragua’ in Children and Society. Reflecting on a participatory research project on youth political advocacy in Nicaragua, this model identifies eight key concepts for effective and responsive youth participation, drawing on human rights and human development approaches.
Naima T. Wong, Marc Zimmerman, and Edith Parker, in their article ‘A Typology of Youth Participation and Empowerment for Child and Adolescent Health Promotion’, published in American Journal of Community Psychology, present a conceptual framework to identify degrees of youth-adult participation. They identify five types of youth participation: vessel, symbolic, pluralistic, independent, and autonomous. The typology articulates degrees of participation for the promotion of youth health.
Tim Davies, Sangeet Bhullar, and Terri Dowty, in their article ‘Rethinking responses to children and young people’s online lives’, published as part of the EU Kids Online 2 project, transform the rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into a triangular framework for participation, protection, and provision. The model articulates a responsive, digitally enabling, empowering, resilience-building, positive and youth-driven approach to youth participation in projects.
Pedro Martín in E-Participation at the local level: the path to collaborative democracy, offers a comparative view of Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (see entry 60), the IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation (see entry 48) and the OECD’s Active Participation Framework (see entry 44). The comparison highlights the importance of the transfer of power and control impactful participation. Martín contends that the ‘vicious cycle of participation’ – of heavy investment and little impact – is a result of ignoring the role and location of power.
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, in their book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, present a ladder of online participation founded on the concept of social technographics which views online activity from spectator to creator. While the ladder shows ascending degrees of participation, it does not represent a sequential progression. Overlapping levels are profiles rather than segmentations, reflecting the nature of participation.
‘Youth Participation in Development: A Guide for Development Agencies and Policy Makers’, a manual published by the DFID CSO Youth Working Group, UK Department for International Development, presents a three-lens approach to participation. As an assets approach to youth participation in development, this approach involves working for youth as beneficiaries, engaging with youth as partners, and supporting youth as leaders.
BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Grid, developed to arrive at a clearer understanding of behaviour change, represents 15 ways behaviour can change with different persuasion techniques and psychological strategies. The Grid offers a model to identify and analyze specific behaviours, with each behaviour type linked to its own psychology.
Harry Shier, in ‘Pathways to Participation Revisited: Learning from Nicaragua’s Child Coffee Workers’, published in A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, illustrates participation as a tree, with each part representing various functions, stakeholder groups, roles, spaces and processes. The leaves of the tree represent youth in impactful, meaningful roles as community educators, rights defenders, representatives.
The UK’s Communications Consumer Panel published their Digital Participation Research Review, presenting a model for digital participation. It takes consumer perspectives to identify consumer needs, including provisioning and assessment needs. The framework illustrates five stages in the digital participation journey: getting interested, getting online, making it work, enjoying the benefits, and managing the risks.
David Driskell and Neema Kudva present key dimensions of participation in ‘Creating Space for Participation: The Role of Organizational Practice in Structuring Youth Participation’, published in Community Development. This model represents participation as a spatial practice made up of five overlapping dimensions: normative, structural, operational, physical, and attitudinal.
In his article ‘Can social networks bridge the participation gap?’, Tim Davies builds on Hart’s Ladder of Participation on its vertical axis, with a horizontal axis comprising varying participation approaches that range from short- to long-term. Davies’ matrix offers a way to interrogate engagement initiatives for sustainability.
The Pathways through Participation project published ‘Understanding Participation: A literature review’, in collaboration with the UK’s National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) and the Institute for Volunteering Research (IVR). The review presented a model that articulates participation through experiential elements: actors, activities, locations, time.
Responding to the OECD Framework (see entry 44), the State Services Commission of New Zealand created the Participation 2.0 model, published in their Guide to Online Participation. The model articulates the ability of the Web 2.0 user to create and share content and communities – and illustrates citizen-government interactions in the digital and offline contexts.
In Making a Difference: A Guide to evaluating public participation in central government, published by the UK Department for Constitutional Affairs and Not-for-Profit organisation Involve, Diane Warburton presents a model for public engagement that offers methods for various stages of the policy process.
BJ Fogg and Dean Eckles, in ‘The Behavior Chain for Online Participation: How Successful Web Services Structure Persuasion’, published as part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science in 2007, identify a digital participation behavior chain. They analyse more than fifty online services and examine how these services invited participation from users, to find that effective digital services shared a pattern of target behaviors.
Laura Lundy’s article ‘’Voice’ is not enough: conceptualizing Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’, published in the British Educational Research Journal, presents a model that conceptualises a child’s right to participation. Lundy’s model features four interrelated elements of the UNCRC provision in rational chronological order: space, voice, audience, and influence.
Derek Wenmoth illustrates participation in digital communities with a model that arranged a cumulative relationship between the four Cs of online participation: Consumer, Commentor, Contributor, and Commentator. Wenmoth’s diagram identifies phases for digital participatory behavior, with participants moving from passive to active to proactive involvement in their digital communities.
In Finding the Spaces for Change: A Power Analysis, published in Exploring Power for Change, Institute of Development Studies, John Gaventa presents a power cube that identifies levels, spaces, and forms of power and illustrates how these aspects relate to each other. The forms, spaces and levels refer to the manifestations of power, participatory spaces, and decision-making layers.
Vivien Lawndes and Lawrence Pratchett, in CLEAR: Understanding Citizen Participation in Local Government – and How to Make it Work Better, developed at the Local Governance Research Unit, De Montfort University, offer a diagnostic tool for identifying barriers to empowerment and connecting these to decision-making. The CLEAR model establishes five enabling factors for impactful participation: what citizens ‘can do’, ‘like to do’, are ‘enabled to’, are ‘asked to’, and are ‘responded to’ for meaningful participation.
The 4L Model – Linking, Lurking, Learning, Leading, first published on the Learning Circuits Blog of the American Society for Training & Development, built on patterns of community interaction behavior to present four types of roles in digital communities. Blurring the boundaries between each type of role reflects the nature of member participation in these communities, with members determining the nature of their participation.
Archon Fung’s article ‘Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance’, published in Public Administration Review , presents a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for citizen participation. Fund identifies three dimensions along which mechanisms of participation can vary: the selection of participants, the nature of communication and collaborative decision-making between participants and how these deliberations manifest in policy action.
Crafted by Sandy Heierbacher and scholars and practitioners at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), the Engagement Streams Framework helps align dialogue and deliberation methods to engagement goals, contexts, needs, and resources. It provides a navigation tool to orient engagement methods, objectives and approaches for optimal effectiveness. The framework presents four categories – Exploration, Conflict Transformation, Decision-Making, and Collaborative Action – and details a range of proven dialogue and deliberation methods that can be used to facilitate engagement.
Robert Silverman published ‘Caught in the Middle: Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and the Conflict between Grassroots and Instrumental Forms of Citizen Participation’ in Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society. Silverman presents a continuum that illustrates the range of potential grassroots activities and outcomes that a community organisation could pursue. It identifies driving stakeholders and participatory forms with instrumental participation at one end, and grassroots participation at the other.
Presented through the PICT conference, Robin S Smith’s paper ‘Digital Participation for Planning Practice’ addresses the diverse ways in public participation is understood across territories, and acknowledges its fluidity. Smith approaches the definition of participation comprising five related but distinct components: notions, issues, audience, outcomes, and methods.
The United Nations’ E-Participation Index, the first index to evaluate e-participation global initiatives, is a global framework for assessing e-participation initiatives. It provides a qualitative, comparative indicator of the willingness and ability of national governments to connect and engage with their citizens through information and communications technologies (ICTs). Developed to supplement the UN E-Government Survey, the Index examines how governments use digital engagement to enable the following: E-information (digital access to public information), E-consultation (digital citizen engagement and deliberation on services and policies), and E-decision-making (co-design and co-production of services and policies).
Adam Fletcher generates a ladder of volunteer participation in Purpose, empowerment and the experience of volunteerism in the community, a resource created for the Freechild Project. Adapted from Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation (see entry 57), it is designed to realise the emancipatory potential of volunteerism for volunteer and community stakeholders.
The Funder’s Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO) developed a continuum of youth engagement as part of their Occasional Papers Series (OPS), OPS1 – An Emerging Model for Working with Youth. The continuum arranges participatory approaches into five broad, related categories, from traditional youth services to youth organising.
Marc Jans and Kurt de Backer in ‘Youth (-work) and Social Participation’, a research report for the Flemish Youth Council, argue that youth participation would be energised by a dynamic balance between challenge, capacity, and connection. Represented by a triangle of participation, a ‘challenge’ would entail a relevant and motivating theme as an incitement for participation, while the dimensions of ‘connection’ and ‘capacity’ manifest community and competency as enabling factors.
Marc Jans and Kurt de Backer build on their Triangle of Youth Participation (see entry 40), ‘Youth (-work) and Social Participation’, Flemish Youth Council, with an illustration of internal versus external participation, and direct versus indirect participation in interactions between youth, organisations, society and other stakeholders.
David Driskell, in collaboration with the UNESCO Growing Up in Cities Project, published Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth: a manual for participation as a resource for community development practitioners and planners. Driskell presents a model which borrows from Arnstein and Hart to organise a model with two defining dimensions: the decision-making power of youth, and youth interaction with community.
Mark Francis and Ray Lorenzo, in their article ‘Seven Realms of Children’s Participation’, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, review youth participation in urban planning and design to discuss seven participatory approaches or realms. The seven realms (romantic, advocacy, needs, learning, rights, institutional, proactive), conclude with proactive participation that suggests youth involvement as a visionary, communicative, learning activity.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the landmark handbook Citizens as Partners: Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-Making, developed by the OECD’s Public Management Service (PUMA) Working Group on Strengthening Government-Citizen Connections, drafted by Marc Gramberger. It conceptualised information, consultation and active participation in relation to the nature of government-citizen interaction. In this model, active participation suggests a collaborative relationship in which citizens actively shape the process and content of public policy.
In ‘Pathways to Participation: Openings, Opportunities and Obligations’, published in Children & Society, Harry Shier presents a model for children’s participation built on Article 12.1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). As a practical resource for planning and assessment, the Pathways to Participation model is designed to help practitioners enable youth participation through a flow chart in a matrix of participation levels and commitments.
Clare Lardner utilises the Edinburgh Youth Social Inclusion Partnership (EYSIP), Phil Treseder’s Degrees of Participation (see entry 50) and David Hodgson’s outline of five conditions for youth participation in social work (1995). This model presents a grid for the evaluation of the degree of empowerment offered by different participatory approaches and methods. The Clarity model features six dimensions of participation across a continuum of power.
‘The Participation Rights of Adolescents: A strategic approach’, a UNICEF Working, presents a strategy for youth participation as a resource for practitioners and advocates with the objective of encouraging participation for youth at local, national and global levels. The model focuses on capacity-building, increasing opportunities and enriching supportive environments for youth participation, represented diagrammatically across intersecting axes.
The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) created the Spectrum of Public Participation in 1999 as a learning resource and an integral component of their overarching mission published thereafter. The Spectrum offers a matrix of participation levels designed to aid defining levels of citizen participation in line with project objectives. The Spectrum consists of five levels of participation – inform, consult, involve, collaborate, empower – and shows the increasing level of public impact progressing from inform through to consult. Widely referenced, this framework illustrates the varying levels of participation, their legitimacy, and relationship to project objectives and resources.
Moving away from earlier, hierarchical models, Scott Davidson’s Wheel of Participation, developed in collaboration with the South Lanarkshire Council and published in Planning, offered an innovative approach to implement effective levels of public involvement in the planning system. The Wheel’s quadrants present a strategic framework that conceptualises engagement and communication processes so that participation techniques can be leveraged in the most effective way to achieve identified objectives.
Phil Treseder’s Empowering children and young people: promoting involvement in decision-making was published by Not-for-Profit organisation, Save the Children as a practitioner’s resource. Building on Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation (see entry 57) and informed by David Hodgson’s widely referenced outline of five conditions for youth participation in social work (1995), Treseder’s model presented five degrees of participation that replace progressive hierarchies and sequences of earlier frameworks toward improved responsivity, access and agency for youth in participatory processes.
Responding to the contested meanings of empowerment, Elizabeth M Rocha developed ‘A Ladder of Empowerment’ published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. Informed by Arnstein’s ladder, Rocha’s Ladder of Empowerment is arranged from individual to community empowerment as follows: atomistic individual empowerment, embedded individual empowerment, mediated empowerment, socio-political empowerment, and political empowerment.
In her article ‘Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of participation’ published in Development in Practice, Sarah C. White offered a model of participation that looked beyond previous parameters and into the diversity of function and form. White identifies four forms of participation with corresponding characteristics of interests and function for top-down and bottom-up stakeholders. Her typology drew out the tensions around stakeholders and power in the politics of participation. White argued that full, meaningful participation would include public involvement in the management and decision-making processes.
In ‘Participatory Learning for Sustainable Agriculture’, published in World Development, Jules Pretty presents a typology of participation in the context of development programs, identifying seven types of participation with distinguishing characteristics. These types are located along a spectrum from passive to consultative, incentive-driven to interactive, manipulative participation, passive participation, participation by consultation, participation for material incentives, functional participation, interactive participation, and self-mobilisation.
In ‘Participation in strategies for sustainable development’, a paper for the International Institute for Environment and Development, Stephen Bass, Barry Dalal-Clayton, and Jules Pretty identify a typology of participation in policy processes and planning. The typology speaks to the context of environmental, social, and economic sustainability in development, suggesting that the type of participation can correspond to the strategy task at hand. The framework spans six levels from participants listening, giving information, being consulted, providing analysis and agenda-setting, reaching consensus on strategy elements, and involvement in decision-making.
David Wilcox’s ‘Guide to Effective Participation’, presents a framework for participation shaped by three dimensions: levels of participation, phases of participation, and the people involved (local groups, businesses, residents, activists, officers, politicians). Wilcox identifies five levels of participation – information, consultation, deciding together, acting together, and supporting independent community initiatives – and four phases of the participatory process: initiation, preparation, participation, and continuation.
Peter M Wiedemann and Susanne Femer published ‘Public participation in waste management decision making: Analysis and management of conflicts’ in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. This offers a comparative analysis of case studies of public participation in risk-related decision-making. It locates case studies along a ladder of participation that ascends from the public right to know, information, the right to objection, participation in agenda-setting, risk assessment, and solution recommendations, and topmost, to public partnership in final decisions.
Borrowing from Arnstein, Roger Hart, in ‘Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship’, his Innocenti essay for UNICEF, created a ladder representing eight levels of young people’s participation in projects. Hart’s model ascended from non-participatory involvement to information, consultation, adult and youth-initiated collaboration, and ultimately placed-shared decision-making between youth and adults. This model was also featured in Hart’s groundbreaking book Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care, published in 1997.
Desmond M. Connor, in his article ‘A New Ladder of Citizen Participation’ published in the National Civic Review, builds on Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (see entry 60) to create a systematic approach for the prevention and resolution of public controversies on programs, projects, or policies. The rungs of the ladder begin with education, information/feedback and consultation, moving upwards to joint planning, mediation, litigation, and finally resolution/prevention.
Norman H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and Jae-on Kim propose a model that addresses transactional cost as a variable that affects engagement. The model features in Participation in America: Political democracy and social equality (1972) and Participation and Political Equality: A Seven-Nation Comparison(1978). It suggests a relationship between participation and the public’s socio-economic status: that participation is higher when transaction costs are lower.
First published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA), Sherry Arnstein’s ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ describes a ladder made of eight rungs, each representing a higher degree of citizen power in the interaction between decision-making agencies and citizens. Arnstein’s typology of citizen participation equated citizen participation with citizen power, arguing that effective public involvement in planning processes would require the sharing and redistribution of power. This influential model remains one of the most widely referenced in participation theory and practice and was the subject of a fifty-year celebration by JAPA where the original article was republished in its entirety.
