Institutional constraints and practical problems in deliberative and participatory policy making

'Participation' has become a mantra and is common practice in governance. Yet only preliminary efforts have been made to examine how participatory and deliberative designs may be constrained in their effectiveness by the impacts of governance context. At the institutional level, this article examines alternative forms of political participation and the persistent barriers to participatory and deliberative approaches that are inherent in representative democracy and network governance. At the level of policy making, it highlights the practical perplexities that arise time and again in the input, throughput and output/outcome phases of running such participatory and deliberative policy projects.