This Paper departs from the trend towards interactive governance in public policy making and implementation, including governance networks and community engagement. It aims to contribute to the recent, heated debate among governance theorists regarding the democratic implications of these developments. Does interactive governance threat representative democracy, in terms of accountability and equality, or does provide useful additions or innovations in terms of citizen and stakeholder participation and deliberation (Warren, 2009; Sørenson & Torfing, 2009; Sørenson, 2016)?
This Paper focuses on the perspective of public officials engaged in interactive governance. These actors, often overlooked in the governance literature (Lowndes, 2005; Hendriks and Tops, 2005; Van Hulst et al., 2011; Durose, Van Hulst, Jeffares, Escobar & de Graaf, 2016), are positioned at the crossroads of the different systems of democracy, participatory and representative, and are confronted with the challenges and opportunities in their daily work practice. This paper explores, compares and synthesizes the literature on how public officials in various positions and roles in local governance can contribute to democratization of interactive governance. In particular, it focuses on three strands of literature: 1. ‘street level democracy’ (Laws & Forester, 2015) - the democratic side of frontline work (compare Durose 2011), 2. ‘democratic professionalism’ (Dzur, 2008), and 3. ‘meta-governance’ (Sørenson, 2006), engaging in strategies to democratically anchor governance networks in the context representative democracy.
