The Effect of Culture and Political Structure on Participatory Policy Analysis

Abstract

In this research, the central objective was to explore how cultural and political factors might affect participatory practices of policy analysis. For this purpose, initially the concept of policy analysis and its evolutionary process from traditional and expert-based approach to participatory style, and role of context in policy analysis in general and participatory policy analysis in particular are studied. Next, the concept of public participation is elaborated through studying the levels and purposes of participation, type of participants, and the methods or techniques of public participation. Afterwards, risk and challenges of participation are enumerated, and a number of "factors of participation (FP)" which are sensitive to politico-cultural context are identified. Thirteen FPs are introduced and classified into four main categories of factors. Next, the cultural and political indicators which steers these FPs are explored. Hofstede's Theory, World Value Survey (WVS) by Inglehart, Schwartz cultural values orientations, cultural study of GLOBE project and Minkov cultural study, are the cross-cultural theories examined in order to extract measurable cultural indicators to explore the identified FPs. Subsequent to the recognition of cultural indicators three globally reputable research projects, namely Freedom in the World Survey, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy and Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), in which governance indexes and democracy indicators are periodically calculated in the national level, are scrutinized in order to identify the most relevant political indicators to this thesis. Exploiting the relation between cultural and political indicators and factors of participation (FP), a framework is developed for each category of FPs. In this framework, each FP is evaluated by national scores of some cultural and/or political indicators, every FP has two poles which are assigned to extreme scores of relevant indicators and are distinguishable by specific attributes. In order to test the applicability of the developed framework, several national cases have been studied utilizing the framework. A comparative case study for a specific participatory method - consensus conference – would be done for some other countries. The case studies show that the framework can effectively explain the influence of contextual factors. Furthermore, the case studies are also helped to revise and improve the framework in a reciprocal process. It is revealed that the framework can provide awareness for policy analysts who want to employ participatory approach. This is in fact the descriptive application of the framework. Moreover, the framework can have the prescriptive application. Although this application should be elaborated in a separate research, the practical application of the framework initiates at the end of thesis. The implication of each FP's attributes is indicated and accordingly can guide the analysts to select and adapt the purpose and method of participation. Some relevant features of known public participation methods are introduced and a tentative example of practical considerations is demonstrated. The research concludes with an indication of the considerations about the research/framework and gives some suggestions for future research.