Citizens and Community Governance

Citizens have vital roles to play in community governance, whether they are participating as members of a civic organization, a neighborhood association or other resident group, a religious group, a business group, a student group, any other interest group, or simply as individuals or on behalf of their family. Citizen engagement is effective when citizens have real opportunities to influence the decisions, plans, and actions that affect life in the community.

Anyone Who Participates is a "Community Citizen"

Active citizens are valuable assets to effective community governance. For purposes of effective governance, all people who want to participate in results-based governance of their community are community citizens, regardless of their legal status. This expansive view of who is a citizen expands the assets available for a community to build upon for improvement.

• Go to Who Are a Community’s Citizens? for more on this expansive definition of citizens.

Multiple Citizen Engagement Roles in Effective Governance

Governments and other community-serving organizations make community governance more effective when they encourage and support active engagement by citizens in many roles, not just one or two. While all citizens are customers of public services, citizens also can and do play many more roles in public affairs, such as when they advocate for particular interests, frame issues for public deliberation, or collaborate to help achieve a desired community outcome. A community that provides citizens opportunities to play a variety of roles can gain many ways to take advantage of citizens' ideas, talents, skills, and resources.

• Go to citizen engagement roles for the five main citizen roles in effective community governance, variations on several of those roles, and 14 ways to support citizens in playing these roles.
• Go to The Model in Action for mini-cases that include brief synopses of the roles citizens play in selected community and organizational examples of the four Advanced Governance Practices of the Effective Community Governance Model. More detailed examples and case studies throughout the book Results That Matter describe many different ways that citizens play these roles in communities where each of the Advanced Governance Practices is performed.

Engaging Citizens is a Core Community Skill

Because of the vital roles of citizens as assets in improving communities, “engaging citizens” is considered a “core community skill” of the Effective Community Governance Model.

•  Go to the Overview of Effective Community Governance or read Chapter 1 of Results That Matter for more on the three core community skills and four "advanced governance practices" of the Effective Community Governance Model.