Having immersed ourselves in the daily participatory practice in which public professionals and citizens encounter one another, we can now step back and recapitulate our illuminated understanding of (the theory of) communicative capacity. This chapter explains how we can understand public encounters in participatory practice in terms of the communicative in-between and the capacity emerging from it. In light of the findings of the preceding four chapters, I argue that participatory democracy often fails to achieve its desirable purposes because public professionals and citizens tend to uphold habitual patterns of communication. They usually do not recognise how they enact these patterns, and those who do seem unable to change much about the habitual ‘ongoing business’, ‘actionable understandings’, and ‘regime of competence’ of their encounters. Therefore, I present the theory of communicative capacity as a means to better understand and improve public encounters in participatory democracy. The chapter ends with a call for more attention to how communicative capacity is exercised, what inhibits it, and how we can aid public professionals and citizens in having more productive conversations.

Public encounters in participatory theory and practice

In essence, this book aims to improve understanding of a notable contemporary phenomenon troubled by significant problems, questions and uncertainties: public encounters in participatory democracy. During the twentieth century, Western societies have developed around the notion that the authority to take and enact binding public decisions was reserved for the system of representative democracy and bureaucratic government. Advocates of participatory democracy challenged this system with a more plural notion of democracy, in which non-elected individuals and agencies affected by public decisions should have actual influence on those decisions and their implementation. Accordingly, Western governments started to reform their institutions and practices to facilitate more equal, inclusive and deliberative decision making, service delivery and problem solving. A key implication of this development was that public encounters, face-to-face contact between (non-elected) public professionals and citizens, became more widespread, frequent and intensive. However, a quantitative increase in contact making does not necessarily imply a qualitative increase in shared sense making. Indeed, conversations between public professionals and citizens tend to be demanding, to say the least, and are often far from productive. The conceptual language and practical tools with which we shape and appraise these participatory encounters is inadequate in several important ways.