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This article builds upon and extends the work of civic engagement, deliberative democracy, and discourse theorists by critically examining the ways in which civic engagement is currently conceptualized and utilized. Through this analysis, critical oversights, assumptions, and biases concerning the potential of public participation, the nature of who is or is not engaged, and the places where authentic engagement is occurring are revealed. To move the field forward and to prevent scholars and practitioners from inadvertently sustaining the very problems they are attempting to rectify, this author posits that a more critical and reflective approach to civic engagement and public participation efforts is needed. The article concludes with suggestions for alternative locations of engagement, future research, and public administration's role in supporting and facilitating publicly engaged citizens.
Keywords: civic engagement; citizen participation; democratic theory; identity; public space; deliberative democracy; social capital
Politics, in our search for authentic public space, must as a concept he widened and deepened. We cannot return simply to a more intense and detailed manipulation of who gets what when how. Politics is depicted, in Heidegger's treatment of the Greeks, as the place where a community gathers to reexamine its most constitutive truths. A search for true public space today must keep in mind this concern for getting in touch with the underlying constitutive assumptions of a political community; it is on the basis of these that any given historical community comes to terms with itself. The most difficult matter regarding public space is this: The test of true openness is that what comes to show itself is as likely to be evil as good, the horrific as well as the welcome. Truly open spaee is no debating society: It reveals and seals individual fates and communal destinies.
-Ralph Hummel (2002, p. 106)
Public administration finds itself in a time when an increasing amount of attention is being given to civic engagement and deliberative, discoursebased democracy and the need to make citizenship more active, the policy process more inclusive, and democracy more democratic. Although there are three streams of literature that investigate and assert the social benefits that accrue through increased participation (DeLeon, 1997; Denhardt & Denhardt, 2003; Fox & Miller, 1995; Gutman & Thompson, 1996; King & Stivers, 1998; Putnam,...