Inclusive Management - Distinguishing Inclusion and Participation

Distinguishing Inclusion and Participation

Inclusive management practices are one way to enact public participation and civic engagement, which may be implemented in a variety of ways. Inclusive management practices are not the same as citizen participation or as inclusion as the latter term is typically used in democratic theory to denote the involvement of ethnically or socioeconomically diverse persons or groups in a decision-making process. Instead, inclusive management theories make a distinction between inclusive practices and participatory practices, which are intersecting dimensions of any civic engagement process. Inclusion is not a term for describing participation that has been done particularly well. Indeed, participation may be done well or badly, as may inclusion. Rather, inclusion and participation are two different approaches to public engagement, with different implications for the roles of the parties involved, the kinds of decisions reached, and the kind of community fostered by engagement. A process may be characterized by one, neither, or both, along two intersecting dimensions of low to high inclusion and low to high participation. The following table identifies the features of high participation and high inclusion