Agonistic engagement: An architecture for participation

Engagement is widely promoted in public relations as a response to complex and contested social issues, yet it is often operationalized in ways that remain organization-centred, consensus-oriented, and inattentive to power and disagreement. This paper contributes an agonistic co-design architecture for operationalizing engagement through staged participatory tools. Drawing on agonistic democratic theory, design thinking, and participatory co-design, the model conceptualizes engagement as a designed process that accommodates dissensus rather than suppressing it. The architecture maps engagement across four iterative stages—discover, define, develop, and deliver—and offers a typology of participatory tools aligned to each stage. Three evaluative dimensions—participation potential, agonistic capacity, and social value—are introduced to support systematic assessment of how engagement designs enable influence, manage disagreement, and generate outcomes beyond organizational benefit. Positioned as a conceptual design framework, the model provides a theoretically grounded and practically actionable architecture for analyzing, designing, and evaluating participatory engagement in contested contexts.