Leadership Challenges in Civic Engagement

This chapter examines the multiple challenges posed to public administration by contemporary approaches to civic engagement. Civic engagement and public participation are relatively ambiguous terms conceptually and politically. This is evident from the proliferation of terms used to describe a practice which includes, among others, public engagement, citizen engagement, civic engagement, public participation, citizen participation, community participation, public deliberation, deliberative democracy, network governance, empowered participatory governance, and collaborative governance (Nabatchi and Amsler 2014). For ease of understanding, engagement and participation can be considered umbrella terms for the numerous methods afforded to the public to engage in governance and to influence decisions of importance to their lives and to wider society and which go beyond traditional forms of political participation. Civic engagement takes institutional and noninstitutional forms….