Three strategies of user participation. Interest organisation representatives’ views on how they make an impact on service development

Abstract

This paper explores user participation in interest organizations that represent people in vulnerable life situations and addresses the following research question: How do interest organizations seek to influence public actors, and what are the perceived impacts? Data collection was conducted through qualitative semi-structured interviews. We interviewed 14 representatives from 8 different interest organizations in Norway. Limitations included the fact that there were few informants from each organization and only three with personal service user experience. In the thematic analysis, we developed three themes related to how the informants described their organizations’ dealings with services, municipalities, politicians and other public actors. The cooperative strategy refers to participation as an arena for collaboration and partnership in which they assumedly would share interests and goals. The oppositional strategy shows how the informants would use open conflict and confrontation as tools for influence, often through the media and complaint systems. The third strategy, negotiation, illustrates how organizations would manoeuvre between being critical and constructive while maintaining relationships with public actors. Interest organizations seem to manoeuvre between these strategies, but they may prefer different strategies depending on their goals and relationships with public actors. Even though all could contribute to service development, the informants expressed that it was easiest to identify impacts from cooperative and oppositional strategies. To improve user participation by interest organizations, increased attention should be given to the interaction and power dynamics among the stakeholders. Moreover, increased attention should be given to the impact of these processes.