The Practice Guide

Participation refers to equal power relations in the situation of decision-making. Participatory approaches challenge professionals to view social problems from the perspectives of others, including service users, rather than imposing their own construction of problems on them. Imposing their own perspectives, for example, on how marginalization occurs, denies service users the chance to exercise their own agency.

Instead, professionals can act as allies of service users in identifying, defining, and tackling their problems and concerns. 

Solving social questions is not a technical matter, and the prerogative of "experts" implies controversy, risk-taking and dealing with conflict. Acknowledging ambiguity and mistakes in this process allows for the sharing of responsibilities between different professionals and service users.  

Raising questions in a climate of trust among stakeholders holds the potential to shift taken-for-granted meanings and solutions towards new power constellations and a fairer distribution of responsibilities.

Participation is not a value per se but needs to be related to democratic values and purposes, which need to be agreed with and made explicit to all partners and reflectively applied to the situation. 

A highly prescriptive approach can easily cause misunderstandings and misuse of participation, as widely described in the literature (Beresford, 2010; Roets et al., 2012; Adams, 2017). There is a risk of participation becoming otherwise:

• "tokenistic" (Beresford, 2010) due to "service users functioning as pawns rather than pioneers" (Roets et al., 2012),
• "only ad hoc and inconsistent", thereby denying service users the opportunity of drawing their own conclusions from experience and making this a moment in life-long learning (Schön, 2016),
• "more rhetoric than reality" and therefore not showing any noticeable consequences (Adams, 2017),
• a mere "buzzword" that satisfies only superficial criteria without touching issues of power inequalities (Cornwall & Brock, 2005),
• "reproducing subordination, inferiority, and powerlessness" because the issue of power in helping relationships is not being addressed openly and critically (Boone et al., 2019),
• a "new tyranny" that legitimizes an unjustified exercise of power (Cooke & Kothari, 2001) in social policy-making and social work practice development.