A theoretical framework for the assessment of institutions of citizen involvement in public policy, social capital, and human development

Asimina Christoforou and Fikret Adaman

Chapter 12 in A Research Agenda for Social Capital in Economic Development, 2025, pp 262-280 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In this chapter, we aim to construct a theoretical framework to promote citizen involvement in public policy and human development by taking social capital as our reference point. The literature on social capital and human development stresses the critical role of citizen involvement in enhancing public policy, social participation, and human development through civil society actors, dynamics of embeddedness and autonomy, synergistic relations across the private-public divide, and generalized norms and networks of cooperation. However, it has so far offered limited attention to the collective conditions and processes fostering these kinds of relations and networks, mainly due to the ontological individualism adopted in mainstream economics. We try to fill this void by linking social capital to principles and practices of democratic participation and deliberation of all those affected by economic activities and decisions, which are at the heart of the processes of social planning. We appeal to a framework of social planning based on the work of Adaman and Devine (2017, 2022), which relies on institutions of network-based negotiated coordination, and democratic participation and deliberation. We argue that citizens’ active, open and equal participation in decision-making processes in the economy through social planning will enable them to build those synergistic and generalized norms and networks of cooperation that will enhance their capacity to reflect, revise and redefine values and institutions of social and environmental protection, and to promote social transformation and human development.

Keywords: Democratic participation and deliberation; Citizen involvement; Human development; Social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035315819
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