Unveiling barriers and enablers to meaningful digital participation: An empirical inquiry in a Swedish Municipality

Digital citizen participation has been of scholarly interest for decades. Despite significant investment and research, digital citizen participation initiatives still encounter major obstacles and fail. Such failures have various negative consequences, one being the inability to transform the organization to pursue a citizen focus and to nourish an active citizenship, which is one of the reasons why participation initiatives are implemented in the first place. By studying citizen participation in a Swedish municipality, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of how and why it falters from the civil servant's perspective. We present the findings of an interview study visualised as a journey map of a citizen's proposal and how it travels the municipality from start to implementation. With this method, we can visualize and unpack failures and successes that are not static but linked to "moments" of a proposal's journey. We show how triggers for barriers and enablers arise in the process and how, regardless of the civil servants' good intentions and strong commitment, the perceived meaningfulness from the meeting between citizens, officials and politicians cannot travel further, nor transform the organization or enhance the engagement of citizens. We also demonstrate how the digital participation platform lack organizational embeddedness and cannot leverage "active citizenship"; it becomes just a container for proposal gathering.