Research On Citizen Participation In Urban Governance

Since1980s and1990s, with the rapid development of economic globalization and information technology, city has changed with something new. As market competition and differentiation of interest groups aggravate, city has encountered multiple challenges such as economic development, social progress and interests demand. Single functions of government cannot satisfy the demand of public products resulting from increasingly extensive city development due to the incompleteness of decision-making information and finiteness of governmental cognitive ability and handling ability. Since the1990’s, western scholars have begun to research the governance theories to replace the traditional "control" theories. Urban governments of all the countries introduce the "governance" idea into urban management; and citizens’participation becomes an inevitable requirement for urban governance. The urban governance means the system arrangement built among urban stakeholders, namely governments, private governments, third sector and citizens; and urban decisions and management functions can then be shared through conversation, cooperation and participation based on this point, thus solving all kinds of public problems in urban development.This paper compares and analyzes the traditional public administration theory, new public management theory, and new public service theory to reflect the evolution of city governance model of plural subject from government-only traditional city management model and that citizen participated model of city management is the effective way of meeting the requirements of city value expectations and improving city management level. After analyzing the status quo, it is turned out that city management in China are still facing such challenges as inadequate citizen participation basis, absent systems, unsymmetrical information and narrow channels, etc.; citizen’s participation is still at a lower level no matter from what perspective of the participation, depth or width; and obvious deficiency and limitation remain in citizen’s awareness of participation, institutional guarantee and implementation, etc. Therefore, city management is in dire need of solving the following problems, namely, establishing effective system for government, promoting the citizen to participate in the city public affairs, and coordinating relations between interest groups of government, private sectors, and shareholders of the third sector and citizen, etc., which has significant practical meaning for studying the citizen’s participation in city management in China. The paper proposes such promoting suggestions as improving democratic basic system, fostering civil society, encouraging the development of the third sectors, and wielding the power of media’s participation, based on analysis of public administration theories, the evolution of city management theories and borrowing experience from foreign citizen participation, and it will have heuristic meanings on citizen participating the city management.