Opening the black box of the municipal government: exploring the lived experiences of local public servants with citizen participation and decentralisation in The Netherlands

Abstract Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.