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[av_heading heading=’ Participatory governance and open government’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY IKE SEÑERES
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I REMEMBER attending a forum before, wherein a government official was talking about open data, at a time when there was no Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill yet.
Of course, we still do not have the FOI Bill up to now, but at least, we already have the Executive Order (EO) that somehow fills in the void in the meantime.
I mentioned this as an opening statement, to stress the point that there is a direct correlation between open data and FOI, and there is no way of going around that.
In a similar manner, there is a direct correlation between participatory governance and FOI, and there is also no way around it. In much the same way that there could be no FOI if there is no open data, there could also be no participatory governance if there is no FOI.
Every now and then, new buzzwords would come out of popular usage, but sometimes a new buzzword does not differ much in meaning when compared to an old one. For example, we have long heard about “good governance” even if we have not experience much of it. Now comes “participatory governance” and we hope to experience much of it, even if seemingly sounds like good governance also.
Not that I would want to dwell too much on semantics, but in theory, good governance has to be participatory, because it is a two-way process that involves the participation of both the private sector and the public sector. If there is no two way process it is not good, and good governance could not come out of it.
As it is supposed to be in the first place, democracy is a social contract, and therefore it should really be participatory, both in theory and in practice. If the citizens would not participate in a democracy, then it would become a dictatorship by default, because the few people who participate in the process could dominate everything, even if they are only the minority.
Sometimes we hear the term participatory democracy being used, but that is actually an oxymoron because in the first place, democracy is supposed to be participatory. That is like using the term dictatorial communism which is also an oxymoron, because communism is supposed to be dictatorial in the first place. (To be continued/PN)
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