On December 13, 2021, Dr. Ceren Ergenc, an Associate Professor from the Department of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, presented her research on public participation mechanisms in China’s local governance during the SGEP workshop. Her presentation is titled Exper Participation in China’s Local Deliberative Mechanisms. In her discussion, Dr. Ergenc compared different institutional designs that allow and encourage participation by trained experts, practitioners, stakeholders (representatives of target populations of public policies), and public interest activists. She pointed out that China does possess various deliberative mechanisms with relatively fair representation but lacks policy efficiency.
According to Dr. Ergenc’s observation, Chinese local governments lean towards including experts in the policy process instead of lay people for improving policy efficiency. Based on her fieldwork data, Dr. Ergenc argued that the shift from representation to expertise in the practices and discourses of participatory governance negatively affects the political efficacy of experts and stakeholder participants alike. In addition, Dr. Ergenc invited the SGEP fellows to focus on expert participation in local governance to understand how ‘expert knowledge’ and the role of the experts are reconceptualized in this shift.
Dr. Ergenc has dedicated herself to the topic of public participation and its impact on individual and collective political efficacy in urban China. Before the pandemic, Dr. Ergenc has been actively engaged with fieldwork in China’s second-tier cities. Recently, she has adopted quantitative methodologies to examine public participation in local governance in China. Dr. Ergenc’s interest in China’s local governance also includes digitalizing public services and political economy of the green transition in regional and global China, such as the Belt and Road Initiative.
Since becoming an SGEP fellow, Dr. Ergenc has joined two more international collaborative projects. One is with the Center for Applied Turkey Studies (CATS- Stiftung Mercator) on a project titled “Turkey, Asia, and the EU in a Changing Global Order”; and another is the China Local/Global Initiative by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Ergenc enjoys reading literary fiction; currently, she has immersed herself in Asian, Asian American, and world literature.