Citizen participation is of growing interest across several disciplines, albeit with divergent meanings (for example, Healey, 1997; Hickey and Mohan, 2004a; Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Cornwall and Coelho, 2007; Cornwall, 2008a, 2008b). The task of tracking those meanings becomes more difficult when one considers that other concepts (engagement, involvement, collaborative planning and inclusion) are also used to denote something rather similar. Also, “participation” has been used with different attributes: “community”, “civic” and “citizen” participation in “planning”, “development”, “urban development”, “governance”, etc. Beside different geographical trajectories in the conceptualization, development and implementation of participation (revealed through a “genealogical” and “critical historical” perspective, as attempted by Huxley, 2013), there is an additional difficulty inasmuch as the term is used both in vernacular and academic language. Finally, there is always an inherent conflict in the way a concept is used in theory creation and policy design (Jessop, 2002). The above considerations of concepts, attributes, keywords and phrases open a vast semantic field with several possible meanings and connotations. It is not my intention in this paper to present an argument for a “correct” use of the concept of “citizen participation”, but rather to contribute to conceptual clarity through a reading of its different uses while considering what each variation of the term does. Arnstein’s (1969) “Ladder of citizen participation” is often considered a seminal text in the relevant discussion in the USA, as is the Skeffington Report of the same year in the UK (Huxley, 2013). While the latter approaches participation as a planning procedure, Arnstein, who called for a “redistribution of citizen power”, demanded a more radical approach: It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes to be deliberately included in the future. […] Participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It allows […] only some of the sides to benefit. (Arnstein, 1969, p. 216). Arnstein permitted us to expand our reading of participation and extend our consideration beyond purely procedural matters towards more basic concepts of power, its (re)distribution and claims to it. It also begs the question of who benefits from participation and in what ways.