Citizen-control experiments fail when boards control programs without financial viability or real power.

Evidence

During the 1960s some communities experimented with client participation in governance of schools, neighborhood health centers, public housing, and other public services. From these experiences we should know better than to encourage citizen control without examining the conditions of transfer and the degree of control. More often than not, the experiments of the 1960s inappropriately discredited citizen participation by providing control over programs lacking financial viability or by narrowly circumscribing the scope or powers of client or citizen boards. While avoiding the problems of cooptation of community activists in financially unhealthy public enterprises, or of tokenistic participation, client control over service bureaucracies remains potentially critical in making the bureaucracies more responsive to clients. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1415

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: why 1960s community-control experiments got blamed for failures that were designed into them — token boards over bankrupt programs discredited the very idea of participation.