Civil society participation has been used in the countries of the North as a tool to achieve social democracy. However, participation is not a given result to democracy and decentralisation, as despite the shift of many new democracies in the South towards more decentralisation, these have adapted only the minimum of participation models arguing for these to be unrealistic in the process of decision-making. This is, in most of the cases of the countries of the South, is due to the mind-set of the state for being unsure or unwilling to give up the full power over decision-making. Furthermore, the economic realities, resource mobilisation and allocation and the consuming relations within the governance context, and the majority of these are in an informal form in the case of Syria, in the countries of the South are vital to determine the level of influence civil society has over urban development decision-making. Therefore, despite the acknowledgement of Douglass’s argument of the civil society having the competitive power to affect, and sometimes control, urbanisation and further design frameworks for collaboration with other society actors, it is naive to view urban development merely from a normative ‘power-based’ point of view as this fails to fully understand the links between society forces and how these ‘allow’ civil society participation in urban development decision-making.
In this, it is vital to understand that society actors are complex entities, and decentralised decision-making is ideal. Thus, to understand the position of civil society in the urban governance context. This requires an institutional-based analysis of the context where society actors relations and mental models, which have proven to be multi-dimensional and highly complex within a context similar to Syria, and their resulting organisational structures are understood. This is to study the existence and function of civil society participation.
The UN programme for democratic governance and civil society empowerment which is functioning in Syria via UNDP via providing policy advise and technical support on the national level has emphasised civil society participation as a fundamental prerequisite to sustainable development and a key component of good governance. Civil society enabling policies promoted by UNDP has concerned with issues of capacity building for both the state and civil society organisations. This is important yet insufficient to enable civil society participation. The enabling policies have not addressed issues related to the state’s will to enable an institutional space for participation within the urban development legal framework. Furthermore, the enabling policies are providing advice and support only on the national level, while the local level is still trapped in its bureaucratic tradition of rational urban decision-making. This has created a gap in civil society participation understanding between the different levels of the state’s urban development organisations. More importantly, the enabling policies have not acknowledged strategies to deal with the multi-dimensional nature of civil society and its relations with other society actors. This enabling policies shortcomings have kept the policies to be in isolation from the political and institutional aspects of the Syrian urban development context.
In short, it is valid to say that there is a contradiction between the ‘ideal’ civil society participation enabling policies promoted by UN and the reality of the urban development context in the countries of the South. This is because these policies are based on a mere power-based perception of governance, while enabling the space and the function of civil society participation in urban governance is related to the wider political economic and social context and, thus, dependent on the society actors’ mind-set and its resulting organisational relations. This requires the consideration of a more suggestive approach to enable civil society participation in urban development decision-making that considers the institutional context of urban governance in any given context.
