Recognising Community Voice and Dissatisfaction

This report by the Good Governance Learning Network (GGLN) is the network’s third publication providing a civil society perspective on the state of local governance. Recognising Community Voice and Dissatisfaction includes diverse contributions which offer different ways to understand the challenges facing local government. They all, however, reflect an apprehension that technicist and state-centric approaches to democratic participation have become overly dominant and have served to delegitimise other expressions of community voice that fail to fit within these narrow modes of public participation, which ultimately subverts democratic participation. The ability and value of citizens’ utilisation of pre-defined opportunities to voice dissatisfaction as well as the difficulty municipalities (and political parties) face when trying to engage with dissatisfied communities are considered using a number of theoretical approaches, research projects and case studies.