Engaging citizens in local health policymaking. A realist explorative case-study

Esther De Weger, Hanneke W Drewes, Natascha J E Van Vooren, Katrien G Luijkx and Caroline A Baan

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 3, 1-15

Abstract: Background: Municipalities have been trying to involve citizens as citizen participation is thought to improve municipalities’ accountability, the quality of services, and to align policies and services to communities’ needs. This study examined citizens’ participation preferences in policymaking by investigating their health policy priorities, expectations of involvement, and required support. Methods: For this case-study the realist evaluation approach was applied to focus groups with citizens and to a workshop with a local panel consisting of professionals, citizens and citizen representatives. Results: This study showed that citizens want to be involved in (health) policymaking with the aim of improving their communities’ quality of life and living environment and prioritised local services and amenities (e.g. suitable housing, public transport, health and care services). Instead, professionals’ priorities were focussed on singular public health issues related to prevention and lifestyle factors. The results also show that citizens felt responsible for driving citizen participation and representing community needs to the municipality, but needed the municipality to improve their communication and accessibility in order to do so successfully. Furthermore, the professionals on the panel indicated that they needed training on how to reach out to citizens. Such training should highlight how to better align their language to citizens’ lived experiences. They also wanted their organisations to provide more space, flexibility and resources to build relationships with citizens in order to provide improved communication and accessibility to citizens. Conclusion: The difference in priorities between citizens and professionals highlights the importance of involving citizens in policymaking. Moreover, citizens’ involvement can act as a lever for change to bring a wider range of services and policy sectors together and has the potential to better align policies to citizens’ lived experiences and hopefully increase the democratic legitimacy of policymaking. However, to fulfil such potential municipalities will need to invest in improving their accessibility and communication with communities.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0265404 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 65404&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0265404

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265404

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().