How Public Participation Depends on What Happens ‘In-Between’ Analysing Emotion, Memory and Meaning in Participatory Policies

Public participation often falls short of creating more legitimate and inclusive policies that address local needs. The literature highlights three main legitimacy criteria: agreements on who holds power to decide what and how, inclusivity of the process and its representativeness. These criteria are typically viewed as matters of design and participant selection. This paper contends that the quality and legitimacy of public participation depend not only on design, but on what happens ‘in-between’ strategic decisions. It uses public encounters to study the ‘in-between’ of participation meetings, where relational qualities—emotions, memories and meaning making—shape power dynamics among citizens and public professionals. An ethnographic case study analyses the ‘in-between’ of public encounters in a participatory process in Amsterdam. The study makes three contributions. First, it reveals that the ‘in-between’ not only shapes relational qualities within, but also across subsequent public encounters. This insight suggests that public encounter research should adopt a longitudinal perspective to understand the impact of the ‘in-between’ and advocates for a more cyclical approach to studying emotions in public policy. Second, the paper shows that structural inequality between citizens and public professionals exists not only in the design of participation but also extends through the relational process across ‘in-betweens’. This suggests that research on public participation should be attentive to the first public encounter, as it establishes the relational dynamics that shape the process. Third, critical studies of public encounters and public participation should look beyond public encounters and include encounters that occur among professionals in their behind-the-scenes meetings.