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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 03/04
Citizen Participation and Economic Development
Terry F. Buss, Stevens F. Redburn and Marcela Tribble
April 2002
Executive Summary
The past decade witnessed an increased interest among policy-makers, scholars, and advocates in expanding and deepening citizen participation processes, particularly in community and economic development activities. The Bush Administration, early on in its tenure, philosophized about the idea of a "citizen centric" government. The Clinton Administration, under the leadership of Vice-President Al Gore, worked on numerous citizen participation initiatives as part of its "reinventing government" program. Scholars, most notably, Robert Putnam, in books like Bowling Alone (2001), called attention to the decline in civil society. Redburn and Buss, in their monograph, Modernizing Democracy called attention to the power of new information technology, and the Internet to engage citizens in public life in more sophisticated ways, and outlined a program to accomplish this goal. Advocates, like the Orton Family Foundation, have invested heavily in development and marketing of software-CommunityViz-to improve the quality of citizen deliberations on community and economic development policy and programming (www.communityviz.com). Representatives from neighborhood groups, the planning profession foundations, think tanks and universities met in Tampa in January 2002 to form a national association to raise the visibility of and expand opportunities for citizen participation in building communities (www.PlaceMatters.com). Hundreds of websites on citizen participation now dot the Internet landscape (e.g., www.democracyinnovations.org).
