By Dyuti Khulbe/Public Praxis Forum

One of the oldest questions in politics is not who governs.

It is who gets to be involved before the governing begins.

Throughout history, societies have answered that question in different ways. Sometimes decisions were made by monarchs, aristocrats, or religious authorities. Sometimes they were entrusted to elected representatives. In many cases, the people most affected by those decisions had little opportunity to influence them at all.

Although political systems have changed, the question itself has never disappeared. It has simply taken new forms.

Today, governments consult citizens before introducing new policies. Cities invite residents to comment on urban development projects. International organisations organise stakeholder dialogues. Universities seek student feedback. Companies engage communities before launching major infrastructure projects.

These practices are often presented as signs of more open and democratic decision-making. They suggest that institutions no longer make decisions behind closed doors, but instead involve the people who will be affected by them.

Yet beneath this language of engagement lies an important distinction that is often overlooked.

Consultation and participation are not the same thing.

The two words frequently appear together in policy documents, development programmes, and public debates. They are sometimes used interchangeably, as though they describe different ways of achieving the same goal.

They do not.

The difference is more than a matter of terminology. It shapes what institutions promise when they invite people into public decision-making, what communities should reasonably expect from that invitation, and ultimately how legitimacy and accountability are understood.

To understand that difference, we first need to ask a deceptively simple question.

What does it actually mean to have a seat at the table?

Consultation Is About Listening. Participation Is About Influence

Consultation has become a defining feature of modern governance, and for good reason.

For much of history, institutions rarely considered it necessary to seek the views of those who would live with the consequences of their decisions. Expertise was assumed to reside with rulers, officials, technical specialists, or elected representatives. Citizens were expected to comply with decisions rather than contribute to them.

Over time, that assumption began to change.

Governments increasingly recognised that communities possess forms of knowledge that cannot always be captured through technical expertise alone. Farmers understand the realities of changing rainfall patterns in ways that climate models cannot fully explain. Residents often know how neighbourhoods function long before urban planners arrive with detailed proposals. Patients experience healthcare systems in ways that statistics alone can never describe.

Listening to those perspectives can lead to better decisions. It can reveal unintended consequences, identify practical challenges, and strengthen public trust. Even when disagreement remains, people are often more willing to accept difficult decisions if they believe they have been heard fairly.

In this sense, consultation performs an important democratic function.

But listening and sharing influence are not the same thing.

Imagine that a city council announces plans to redesign a public square.

Local residents are invited to attend a public meeting. They raise concerns about accessibility, green spaces, traffic, and children’s play areas. Officials listen carefully, ask questions, and thank everyone for their contributions. Several months later, the final design is unveiled.

It looks almost identical to the original proposal.

Were residents consulted? Almost certainly.

Did they participate? The answer is less straightforward.

The example illustrates a distinction that is easy to miss.

Consultation asks people for their views.

Participation asks what role those views play in shaping the decision itself.

This does not mean that participants always get what they want. Public institutions operate within legal obligations, technical constraints, competing interests, and finite resources. No policymaker, city council, or international organisation can adopt every recommendation it receives.

Influence is not the same as control.

Participation simply creates a genuine possibility that people’s knowledge, experiences, and perspectives may shape the decision.

That is the difference.

Consultation promises that people will be heard.

Participation promises that what people say has a meaningful opportunity to influence what happens next.

That distinction raises a question that has occupied political thinkers, planners, and practitioners for decades.

How much influence does participation actually require before it becomes meaningful?

This Isn’t a New Debate

The distinction between consultation and participation may sound like a contemporary concern, but it has been debated for decades.

One of the most influential answers came in 1969, when the American planner Sherry Arnstein published A Ladder of Citizen Participation.

Arnstein began with a simple but powerful question. When institutions claimed that citizens were participating, what did they actually mean?

Were people genuinely helping to shape decisions? Or were they simply being informed or consulted after the important choices had already been made?

To explore this, Arnstein imagined participation as a ladder. At the lower rungs were processes that offered little real influence, such as informing or consultation. Higher up were arrangements in which citizens became partners in decision-making or exercised greater control over issues affecting their communities.

The enduring value of Arnstein’s framework is not the ladder itself.

It is the question behind it.

Rather than asking whether institutions involved people, she asked how much influence that involvement actually created.

More than fifty years later, that question continues to shape debates across urban planning, environmental governance, international development, public health, and human rights.

Her framework has also been criticised, and rightly so. Participation cannot always be measured on a single scale. Different institutions have different responsibilities, and different decisions require different forms of public involvement. A court cannot negotiate its judgments with litigants. A central bank cannot determine monetary policy through public voting. During a public health emergency, governments may have to act before lengthy consultation is possible.

Yet these criticisms do not weaken Arnstein’s central insight.

Before deciding how much participation is appropriate, we first need to be honest about what kind of participation is actually taking place.

Calling every consultation “participation” does not make institutions more democratic.

It simply makes the language less precise.

The More Interesting Question

Once we recognise that consultation and participation are different, another question begins to emerge.

It is, perhaps, the more difficult one.

Who gets the opportunity to participate in the first place?

Participation is often imagined as an open invitation. An institution announces a consultation. People are invited. Views are collected. A decision is made. The process appears straightforward.

But participation rarely begins with an open room waiting to be filled.

Long before the first invitation is sent, someone has already decided who should receive it. Someone has decided which organisations qualify as stakeholders. Someone has determined the issues that are open for discussion and those that are not. Someone has chosen the language, the format, the timeline, and even the kinds of evidence considered relevant.

In other words, participation begins long before anyone starts participating.

Institutions do not simply invite people into a process.

They design the process itself.

That design shapes who is recognised, whose experiences are considered relevant, and ultimately whose knowledge becomes part of the decision.

This is not simply a theoretical concern.

Even institutions that explicitly champion participation face these questions. The United Nations, for example, has created numerous mechanisms to engage governments, civil society organisations, Indigenous Peoples, experts, and affected communities. Yet participation is inevitably mediated through institutional rules. Meetings are conducted in the UN’s six official languages, documentation follows established procedural requirements, and effective engagement often requires familiarity with complex diplomatic processes. Organisations with permanent representation in Geneva or New York are naturally better positioned to navigate these systems than smaller grassroots groups with limited resources.

The point is not that the United Nations is unique. Rather, it illustrates a broader institutional reality. Participation is never simply about opening the door. It is also about how the door is designed, who knows it exists, and who possesses the resources to walk through it.

This challenge has long been recognised within postcolonial and decolonial scholarship.

Rather than asking whether institutions create opportunities for participation, these perspectives ask a more fundamental question: who has historically been recognised as a legitimate speaker in the first place?

In her influential essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argued that marginalised people are often not simply excluded from decision-making. Their experiences are frequently interpreted, translated, or represented by institutions that claim to speak on their behalf. The problem, she suggested, is not only whether the subaltern can speak, but whether existing structures of power are capable of hearing that voice on its own terms.

Although Spivak was writing within the context of colonialism and postcolonial power, the questions she raises continue to resonate far beyond that context.

If participation depends upon institutional recognition, who decides which voices are credible? Whose experiences are accepted as evidence? Whose knowledge is treated as expertise? And whose perspectives remain visible only when filtered through governments, experts, researchers, or civil society organisations?

These questions do not suggest that institutions deliberately exclude people.

Rather, they remind us that participation is never a neutral process. It is shaped by histories of power, assumptions about expertise, and institutional practices that determine who is invited to the table, and under what conditions.

Recognition, however, is only one part of the story.

Even when institutions intend to include diverse voices, participation is never equally accessible. It requires time, resources, language skills, institutional literacy, and often the confidence to navigate unfamiliar procedures. A consultation held only in English, a meeting scheduled during working hours, or technical documents written for specialists may appear administratively ordinary. Yet together they shape who is realistically able to participate.

These barriers are rarely designed to exclude.

More often, they emerge from the everyday routines through which institutions operate.

Participation, therefore, is not simply about creating opportunities to speak.

It is about creating conditions in which different forms of knowledge can realistically be heard and allowed to influence public decisions.

Perhaps that is the deeper question hidden beneath the language of participation.

Not simply whether institutions invite people to the table, but who designed the table, who decided how many chairs there would be, and whose absence no one noticed.

The Limits of Participation

None of this suggests that participation should become the standard for every public decision.

Institutions exist for different purposes, operate under different legal mandates, and face different practical constraints. A court cannot negotiate its judgments with litigants. A central bank cannot determine monetary policy through public voting. During emergencies, governments may need to act before lengthy consultation is possible.

Participation, therefore, is not a universal solution.

Nor is consultation a democratic failure.

Both serve important functions, and neither is inherently more legitimate than the other. The challenge lies elsewhere.

Problems arise when institutions use the language of participation while offering only consultation. People may reasonably believe they have been invited to shape a decision when, in reality, they have only been asked to respond to one that has already been framed.

This does not necessarily reflect bad faith. More often, it reflects the growing expectation that public institutions should appear participatory, even when the scope for public influence is limited.

The result is not simply disappointment.

It is confusion about what participation is supposed to mean.

Perhaps the question is not whether institutions consult enough or participate enough.

Perhaps the more important question is whether they are clear about what they are actually asking people to do.

Conclusion

The distinction between consultation and participation is not simply about public engagement.

It is about how institutions organise influence.

Who is invited.

Who is recognised.

Whose knowledge is considered credible.

And whose absence goes unnoticed.

These questions extend far beyond any single consultation or participatory process. They shape how institutions define legitimacy, accountability, and public trust.

Perhaps, then, the real challenge is not to maximise participation in every situation, nor to dismiss consultation as insufficient.

It is to be more precise about what institutions are actually offering, more attentive to the conditions that shape who can participate, and more honest about the influence participation is intended to have.

Because, in the end, having a seat at the table is only one part of the story.

The equally important questions are who built the table, who decided where it would be placed, and who continues to stand outside the room.

Featured image: Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash