When an Electronic Citizen Forum Works and When Not: An Organisational Analysis of the Mitaka Master Plan Process

Electronic democracy (e-democracy) is generally understood as the concept that captures those attempts by governments to facilitate, broaden and deepen public participation through the provision of both electronic and conventional communication media (Waller et al. 2001). In their most typical form e-democracy projects are implemented as part of central or local governments' web sites for disseminating policy-related documents and gathering public views of proposed policies.

Among those classic capabilities, the electronic consultation (e-consulta-tion) approach has increasingly been employed by the governments in order to involve the public who cannot attend real meetings due to spatial or physical constraints. There are already well-structured information resources such as publications, portal sites and mailing lists introducing a number of previous and on-going projects (e.g., Publicus.Net by Clift 2002). The objective of this paper is to report on our own experience of a recent e-consultation project in Tokyo and to discuss if and what way such e-consultation projects can have meaningfully positive impacts on policy processes.