The City of Oslo aims to strengthen local democracy and uses public consultations as its tool. It is widely recognized that consultations are not a suitable means of involving ordinary citizens, but they remain effective for gathering input from professional stakeholders and organizations. The use of consultations as a means of citizen involvement appears as a form of politician-driven political extremism.
Les også: Bydelsreformen kan svekke medvirkningen i Oslo ytterligere (høringsnotat)
Anyone can search online for documentation of this. The Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management quickly appears when Oagal looks for examples of publicly available guidance on how consultations should be conducted.
Oslo has a representative system of government. However, Oagal considers the involvement of citizens through consultations in a local democracy reform to be substandard. By coincidence, the editor—himself a resident—happened to learn about the matter through acquaintances, without any general invitation from the capital to its citizens.
The consultation also conflicts with the Government’s requirement for early involvement set out in the Instructions for Official Studies and Reports. Although the instructions apply to state-level measures, municipalities—including Oslo—should adhere to the same principles. The guidelines have their flaws, yet the City of Oslo would still have been on firmer ground by following them. The way this consultation has been carried out poses a risk of violating other laws, such as the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Act, which aims to “[…] prevent discrimination on the basis of […] ethnicity, religion, belief, disability, […], age, and other significant characteristics of a person.” When ordinary citizens hardly even learn about the consultation or are unable to contribute through this format, it follows that children, youth, and others with special needs cannot participate—creating a risk of legal violations.
While citizens, businesses, and organizations are required to follow the law, politicians and public authorities once again prove powerful enough to pick the parts of the law that suit them best. Another example is when the Norwegian Coastal Administration violated the Pollution Control Act. Such behavior fuels fear, contempt, and a sense of powerlessness toward the politics industry.
Tellingly, the main link to the Oslo District Reform documents on the city’s website leads to a press package. The press goes before the people, shining light only where politicians wish it. Darkness follows. Citizens are notified when a marathon or similar event takes place in the city streets—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when “strengthened local democracy and increased opportunities for community development in the districts” is on the agenda in the Oslo District Reform, there is neither public notice nor broadly accessible, universally designed processes for citizen participation.
Taken in isolation, this may not seem surprising. The capital lacks organization, attitudes, and tools for citizen participation. As a result, local democracy becomes burdensome, and centralized control tempting—even for city council parties that, in principle, oppose such a form of governance.
The documents for the District Reform consist of one main report, seven appendices, and numerous maps. The goal of strengthening local democracy concerns both the organization of politically governed district councils (representative democracy) and citizen participation/coparticipation (direct democracy). Within this extensive body of material, representative democracy is given a handful of pages, while citizen participation/coparticipation receives less than one—aside from a few scattered mentions in tables here and there.
Read more: Byrådets lokaldemokratiske makkverk
Most of the consultation material for the Oslo District Reform concerns the municipality’s administration and internal organization. This is important in itself, yet the scale illustrates how problematic a continually expanding bureaucracy has become for society. Elected representatives are reduced to rubber-stamping because, in their part-time roles, it is impossible to digest such volumes of documentation—on top of everything else. In this way, the administration takes the helm in a new version of the bureaucratic state.
This makes it possible to wave the noble banner of strengthening local democracy while doing the opposite. The authors of the District Reform propose reducing the number of district councils. That would place citizens even farther from their elected local representatives. District politicians already struggle to be heard—even by party colleagues in the city council who came from the districts themselves; power blinds in Oslo City Hall as well. The reform’s plan to expand the number of full-time local politicians by buying out district council leaders and deputy leaders is an attempt to patch over the limbo-like position of the district representatives.
Oagal has long studied anti-democratic practices and attitudes in Norway’s capital. The editor launched his first democracy-focused initiative as the self-appointed “Coparticipation Ombudsperson,” partly because the City of Oslo disregarded the legally mandated coparticipation process in the area zoning plan for Skøyen—met with little more than a shrug from public watchdogs.
For the Oslo District Reform, there is no legally mandated citizen participation, and under current practice it is unthinkable that the County Governor, the Parliamentary Ombud, or the courts—none of which have a constitutional role in such matters—would intervene when a consultation is neither public nor early, as required by the Government’s study instructions.
However, for all zoning cases in the City of Oslo, citizen coparticipation is required by law—and the municipality is responsible, whether it drafts the plans itself or through others. Even though zoning plans undeniably affect residents in the districts, participation is centrally controlled in a deficient manner by the Planning and Building Agency, over the heads of local district politicians and their administrations.
The documentation behind the District Reform is yet another example of the capital’s poor understanding of democracy. If the reform fails to address the violations of the Planning and Building Act, Oslo must either find other ways to comply with the law—or continue breaking it. The purpose clause of the Planning and Building Act is crystal clear:
The coparticipation clause, Section 5–1, further states:
There is no “if one feels like it” in these provisions. The new Planning and Building Act was established after extensive preparatory work that also addressed coparticipation. Those preparatory documents make clear that participation had not been practiced as intended, and the law was therefore strengthened in this area.
Norway’s public watchdogs—the County Governors, the Parliamentary Ombud, the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, and politicians in their ombuds roles—fail to follow up on this. In a specific case, for example, the Parliamentary Ombud demonstrates that it will likely ignore violations of the Planning and Building Act’s provisions on coparticipation. In these ombuds positions sit almost exclusively former politicians whose solidarity lies not with the people, but with their friends in politics and public administration.
Ettersom norske domstoler neppe forstår sin konstitusjonelle rolle i særlig grad, så er da folket eneste mulighet til å kreve håndhevelse av loven at den går til sak mot kommunen. Det er såpass kostbart, tidkrevende og livsinngripende at det er umulig vei å gå for mannen i gata. Derfor kan store saker som Skøyen områderegulering bli gjennomført uten lovbestemt medvirkning.
The City of Oslo has found its own way to deal with this—by not following the law, including the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development’s own legal guide on coparticipation. In the elaboration of Section 5–1 on coparticipation, it states:
The guide also leaves no doubt about how citizen participation should relate to consultations:
Read also: Rælingen carried out coparticipation before the municipal council had adopted the planning program
The City of Oslo stands far from this today—and is by no means alone in municipal Norway. The design of the District Reform, and much more than the Skøyen case, reveals the capital’s bleak attitude toward local democracy.
In the draft consultation for Oslo’s new municipal master plan (land-use section), it was, for example, difficult to find any trace of Oslo as a model municipality for coparticipation — or any assurance of genuine citizen involvement regarding the content of the land-use plan, which will have major consequences for local communities, as adopted by the Oslo City Council.
An information meeting at Ulsrud—labeled an “information and coparticipation meeting” after the municipality was criticized for holding one-way information sessions—drew only about twelve participants. This falls far short of the Planning and Building Act’s purpose clause, which states that all affected parties shall participate, and of the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development’s guidance to base coparticipation on universal design. The participants were also, as in the District Reform, relegated to the role of rubber-stampers of an already well-digested foundation.
Read more: Oslo’s municipal master plan (land-use section) — consultation input on coparticipation
Stories about democracy are probably most entertaining to the media when they concern its decline abroad. Moreover, Norwegian outlets receive such stories ready for AI translation from partners like Reuters and the Associated Press. With Norway safely holding the top position on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the media sees little reason to maintain a steady, critical gaze on Norwegian democracy itself.
That is why Oagal takes up this issue, briefly but pointedly, including a description of the deeply flawed and dismissive attitudes toward democracy that the nation’s capital has displayed so far in its work on the Oslo District Reform. While such a reform may not be subject to direct participation requirements under the Government’s study instructions, the Planning and Building Act does impose them—affecting the city’s districts far more directly than the Planning and Building Agency itself.
The lack of coparticipation in Oslo, including in connection with the District Reform, is largely due to the municipality’s failure to establish a system that upholds the law’s requirements for inclusive participation.
It would have been natural to address this in the consultation material for the District Reform. The fact that it was not included reveals a profound lack of knowledge and understanding of how local democracy works. It appears that the authors of the subsection on citizen participation and coparticipation simply lack either competence in the subject or the will to treat it adequately.
In the consultation documents (subsection 3.6), it states that “There are several instruments for ensuring good coparticipation, including opinion surveys, focus and reference groups, and consultations.”
However, opinion surveys address prepackaged issues and largely exclude citizens’ own knowledge and free creativity. They are not a genuine form of coparticipation. Consultations without prior participation are far removed from democratic ideals of universally designed citizen dialogue. Focus or reference groups can serve as coparticipation, but only if they have a clear deliberative mandate, are properly facilitated, and have a representative composition reflecting the district’s residents across broad topics.
A healthy democracy, by definition, includes a direct-democratic voice—a deliberative function that ensures citizens’ contributions are genuinely considered or given significant weight. In Norway’s democracy, knowledge of deliberative processes is minimal—or deliberately disregarded. Centralized control and the adoption of closed party lists for parliamentary elections reveal that our foremost trustees, the career politicians, have little confidence in the competence of citizens. Internationally, the development of deliberative processes in East Belgium offers a well-known model for inspiration, and Norway’s Sámi Parliament stands as a national example of an institution with a deliberative function.
The District Reform in Oslo reveals how little interest and understanding there is of this in the capital—and thus in Norway’s largest and often most dominant municipality. The poor local attitudes toward citizen democracy in Norway help grind down the very foundations of democracy in the Economist’s favorite democracy, which is nearly perfect with 9.81 out of 10 possible points.
Read also: Early parliamentary elections held for the first time in modern times
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