An exploration of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition as it relates to 'meaningful public participation' in the South African context

Abstract

Public participation is significant as it guarantees citizens an informed say in governmental decision-making. To ensure that participatory processes are effectual within South Africa, the Constitutional Court held that citizens should be afforded a 'meaningful' opportunity to partake in decision-making which affects them. My analysis of the participatory processes established within the legal framework demonstrates a meaningful public participation crisis. An interpretivist framework suggests that this meaningful public participation crisis results from government's failure to properly define the notion of meaningfulness leading to ambiguity. Furthermore, the legal framework’s encouragement of two competing and irreconcilable approaches (i.e. cultivating and humanistic as well as goal-orientated) engenders inconsistent applications of meaningful public participation. Arendt’s views on active citizenship, per The Human Condition (1958), sees community engagement and collective deliberation as crucial for political participation and responsible governance (through meaningful action). I argue that Arendt's perspective of meaningful action, informed by her analysis of labour, work and action, informs a comprehensive theoretical understanding of a meaningful participatory mechanism as well as illuminating the cultivating and humanistic approach. Arendt’s insights allow us to reconceptualise participatory mechanisms by allowing South Africans to take an active stance with regard to such mechanisms, to capacitate citizens to act in such processes via words and deeds, to open a space for the recognition of all voices in a plural society, and to assist government in establishing a safe, inclusive and communal participatory space. In light of the afore-mentioned meaningful public participation crisis, the goal of this study is, by way of a literature review, to provide a comprehensive theoretical understanding of a meaningful participatory mechanism, as well as advance a cultivating and humanistic perspective of meaningfulness in this regard.