Role and Success Factors of Round Tables

Project context

In Germany and abroad, traditional governmental and administrative functions are reaching their limits. On the one hand, the state, working with a modest budget, is overstretched with regulating the increasingly complex and ever changing needs of modern societies. On the other, citizens are increasingly vociferous, calling for their demands to be heard on issues that impact their day-to-day lives. Meanwhile, established forms of participation, namely voting, seem unable to satiate these demands.

As a consequence, new forms of voluntary activities by civil society and public-private cooperation have emerged in Germany over past years, including multistakeholder dialogues and public-private partnerships. Round tables play a significant role in this context. As a dialogue forum, round tables bring together a broad array of stakeholders for a specific purpose. Participants enjoy a great sense of inclusiveness and cooperation, jointly searching for solutions to those challenges that are insufficiently addressed by the state alone. Nonetheless, while round tables and other initiatives make an important contribution to the development of a civil society, they face several challenges. First, there is no consensus in Germany on how to differentiate between diverse types of civil engagement. Second, it is often unclear, which gaps of governmental and administrative action civic engagement reacts to. Finally, to date there is limited knowledge of the success factors of multistakeholder dialogues in Germany, partly because Anglophone research and literature on the subject has not been applied extensively, but also because there is no systematic exchange of lessons learned and good practices between different organisers of round tables in Germany.

Project objectives

GPPi was assigned by the Breuninger Stiftung to conduct a study on the role and success factors of round tables (“Funktionen und Erfolgsfaktoren Runder Tische”). The study analyzes limits of classical governmental and administrative actions and discussed how these gaps can be filled. Moreover, it classified different forms of round tables and defined challenges and success factors.