Much of the literature on public participation is highly normative; the emphasis is on how new ways of engaging with the public can empower citizens, open up new forms of consumerism and choice, involve the public as stakeholders in communities or in the improvement of public services, or induce more responsible attitudes and behaviours. This normative emphasis stems in part from the policy climate discussed in Chapter Two, where public participation is viewed as a means of improving public services and delivering more effective outcomes; but it has also been generated by some of the academic work discussed in Chapter Three, where deliberative democracy is viewed as a means of democratic renewal. Here our emphasis is rather different; that is, we set out to understand the extent to which, and in what ways, the plethora of new initiatives might be able to produce fundamental shifts in relationships between state and citizens, public bodies and publics. To do so we draw on two different bodies of theory. New institutional analysis opens up questions about the influence of rules and norms about participation and deliberation. Such rules and norms shape the extent to which new relationships between public bodies and their publics, between officials and lay members of deliberative forums, might be possible. For example if the rules and norms of the council chamber or trades union are imported into what is intended to be a much more informal site of deliberation, the impact may be to constrain who feels entitled to speak and what contributions are viewed as legitimate. However, this body of theory can also illuminate the ways in which new rules and norms may emerge in the deliberative process itself. It can offer suggestive questions about how such rules and norms, and ‘logics of appropriate action’, may influence patterns of agency on the part of both officials and lay members of forums, and shape the depth of deliberation that occurs.

The second body of theory looks beyond institutions to problematise notions of ‘the public’ itself. The discussion in Chapter Two of the policy discourses that informed the rise of public participation initiatives under New Labour suggests that ideas about the public – whether it is to be empowered or responsibilised, conceptualised as consumers or stakeholders – may have profound consequences for the formation and conduct of deliberative forums.