Stakeholder consultations.

Stakeholder consultations are a key mechanism used by bureaucratic and legislative decision-makers to actively engage citizens and interest groups in the design, formulation and evaluation of public policies and legislation. Consultations allow policymakers to gather expertise and policy-relevant information about the feasibility of policy options, to hear stakeholders’ preferences regarding policy outcomes and to evaluate the implementation and socio-economic impact of policy measures. Consultations are a key source of policy input and feedback. They constitute a trademark of better regulation measures and a key component of legitimate, accountable and responsive democratic government. Their rise to prominence in policy practice has been matched by an increase in the levels of attention to consultations from the academic community. This chapter reviews the academic research and identifies the main approaches used to study stakeholder consultations in the literature on lobbying and interest groups, the scholarship on institutions and regulatory governance and that on democratic innovations. The chapter starts with a brief conceptualization and contextualization of consultations in contemporary policymaking, followed by an overview of the key aspects of stakeholder consultations analyzed as part of the aforementioned three strands of academic research.