Citizen participation in public management: activated, empowered, responsibilised, abandoned?

Public management faces complex challenges exacerbated by the uncertain nature of the times. It is in this context that citizen participation in public management has gained legitimacy, and indeed recognition of its necessity in recent years, with growing evidence of experimentation. Yet, critical attention has also been paid to the limits of this participatory ‘turn’. In this chapter, we use the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to examine what the simultaneous retreat or default to traditional expertise in the context of crisis and the shifting forms of citizen voice and influence that emerged during the pandemic mean for how we think about public management. We employ Clarke’s (2005) distinction between activated, empowered, responsibilised and abandoned citizens to illuminate the contested relationship between citizens and public management. The chapter is informed by the authors’ own research at the local level, primarily in England, and international examples from primary and secondary research.