1.0 INTRODUCTION PUBLIC AND CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
A definition of participation: for the purposes of this note a useful definition of public or community participation is that adopted by Stoker (1997) for ‘political participation’ (following Parry et al, 1992): members of the public ‘taking part in any of the processes of formulation, passage and implementation of public policies’. This is a wide-ranging definition, which extends the emphasis of public participation beyond the development of policy, to decision-making and implementation.
‘Public participation’ is not newly addressed; it has exercised politicians and the students and theorists in political science for centuries, but it has only seriously entered the decision making field of urban and regional planning comparatively recently. As society has developed and has become culturally and technologically sophisticated, there has grown insistence that decision-making should become compatibly refined and expert. Practicing democracy at the grassroots level make the common people aware about the decision and policymaking stage, public raises up with a more democratic expressions. Thus with the last decade or two modern society has tended to advocate the simultaneous growth.
“The planner’s current nostrum is public participation, but, within a very short time, It will be shown to be what in truth it is: a mere palliative for the ills of the planning profession” undoubtedly, the subject public participation captured people’s imagination both the planners and commons or at least some of them–and the implementation of diversity of public participation strategies in the planning process has been recorded and added to the growing volume of literature of planning and come up with a new vision of planning process. (Broady, 1969, p216)
Public participation referrers the integration of the common peoples voice in the