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While public consultation is a signature process of democratic policy formulation, many governments manoeuvre to refract citizen's opinions or conduct it perfunctorily. Using the case of a medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong, this article unveils the strategies that the state and citizens employ to put their opinion through to the final policy text, during a public consultation process. Recent literature has identified the mechanisms through which individual actors or organisations contribute to broad policy agenda-setting or policy programme development. However, yet to be investigated is how they – sometimes with conflicting interests – collectively negotiate a policy with the state via public consultations. This paper investigates this very phenomenon, building on previous work conducted in the public policy field, analysing 51 government-generated documents through both thematic content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The paper uncovers four strategies adopted by administrations (non-commitment, case closure, disengagement for irrelevance, and placation) to evade citizens' equity-oriented demands and stakeholders' three counter strategies (mobilising other stakeholders into a coalition, reopening the case pointing out a new problem, and appealing by affirming relevance). The state's discrete refusals and stakeholders' conjoint reengagement tactics draw our attention to the complexity and subtlety involved in negotiation via public consultations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probes into the Iranian society through the 'discourse access' that Persian stand-up comedy provides. It is posited that Persian humorous discourse can be an effective and relatively safe communication toolkit to speak truth to power and address cultural deficits. Hence, it may be an insightful 'point of entry' into the below-the-surface construct of various social wrongs (e.g. social class inequality, cultural illiteracy). In particular, Persian stand-up comedy, as a young and burgeoning genre of Persian comedy, seems to be reliably reflecting such concerns in Iran. Within the general framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this article inspected into a corpus of stand-up comedy performances by the Iranian participants of the first and largest televised stand-up comedy contest in Iran. The corpus included 11 stand-up comedians and 14 performances from the three seasons of the contest (2016–2022). The reflexive thematic analysis of the stand-up routines unmasked a wealth of social criticism which is discussed under four major themes of 'economic stress', 'social class inequality', 'more equal decision-makers' and, 'agents of change'. The paper elaborates on Persian stand-up comedy as a potent driving force within the society to effect individual and social changes. It contends that Persian comedy can greatly contribute to discourses of awareness and transformation within the Iranian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]