ABSTRACT
Colonial governance in Hong Kong has often been described as some form of “consultative politics”, which is characterized by its willingness to consult the population to compensate for the fact that those decision-makers were not generated by a democratic election. While there has been much continuity in terms of the institutional setting, the bureaucratic values, and the formal means of political participation in post-colonial Hong Kong, the rise of electoral politics and civic activism has put enormous pressure on the SAR government’s policy-making process. In response, the government has reoriented its consultation strategy by complementing traditional consultation methods with civic engagement mechanisms, so as to confer some degree of legitimacy on politics and policies. Since 2004, preliminary experiments of civic engagement have been done by the government to enlarge its policy deliberation framework, yet these exercises experienced mixed success. By reviewing the evolution of the consultation system and the recent engagement exercises, this chapter argues that although civic engagement has been formally introduced for more than ten years, it is yet to be fully institutionalized in various policy bureaus, and the government’s inclination to engage varies across policy areas. The development of civic engagement in post-colonial Hong Kong is precarious owing its semi-democratic political structure. The emergence of ad hoc groups and opinion leaders further increases uncertainties of engagement, in the sense that they can hardly be identified beforehand. After all, “consultative politics” ceased to be an effective framework in managing state-society relations, since the government’s legitimacy problem is now an integral part of policy debates.
