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While public consultation is a signature process of democratic policy formulation, many governments manoeuvre to refract citizen's opinions or conduct it perfunctorily.Using the case of a medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong, this article unveils the strategies that the state and citizens employ to put their opinion through to the final policy text, during a public consultation process.Recent literature has identified the mechanisms through which individual actors or organisations contribute to broad policy agenda-setting or policy programme development.However, yet to be investigated is how they -sometimes with conflicting interestscollectively negotiate a policy with the state via public consultations.This paper investigates this very phenomenon, building on previous work conducted in the public policy field, analysing 51 government-generated documents through both thematic content analysis and critical discourse analysis.The paper uncovers four strategies adopted by administrations (non-commitment, case closure, disengagement for irrelevance, and placation) to evade citizens' equity-oriented demands and stakeholders' three counter strategies (mobilising other stakeholders into a coalition, reopening the case pointing out a new problem, and appealing by affirming relevance).The state's discrete refusals and stakeholders' conjoint reengagement tactics draw our attention to the complexity and subtlety involved in negotiation via public consultations.
Choi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.