This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the developments which have brought about a new, global wave of inclusiveness and democracy. From Brazil to Bangladesh, a new form of participatory politics is springing up. Featuring contributions detailing how such movements have worked in Latin America, Europe and Africa, the book analyzes the impact they have had on the democratic process. By opening up the political sphere in this way, the authors contend, these grassroots movements truly have created "spaces for change."
In an historically unprecedented way, democracy is now increasingly seen as a universal model of legitimate rule. This work addresses the key question: How can democracy be understood in theory and in practice?.
There is a growing need for public buy-in if democratic processes are to run smoothly. But who exactly is "the public"? What does their engagement in policy-making processes look like? How can our understanding of "the public" be expanded to include – or be led by – diverse voices and experiences, particularly of those who have been historically marginalized? And what does this expansion mean not only for public policies and their development, but for how we teach policy? Drawing upon public engagement case studies, sites of inquiry, and vignettes, this volume raises and responds to these and other questions while advancing policy justice as a framework for public engagement and public policy. Stretching the boundaries of deliberative democracy in theory and practice, Creating Spaces of Engagement offers critical reflections on how diverse publics are engaged in policy processes.
Participatory techniques have established themselves in both project implementation in developing countries and community interventions in industrial countries. Recently, participation has been fashionably dismissed as more rhetoric than substance, and subject to manipulation by agents pursuing their own agendas under cover of community consent. In this important new volume, development and other social policy scholars and practitioners seek to rebut this simplistic conclusion. They show how participation can help produce genuine transformation for marginalized communities. This volume is the first comprehensive attempt to evaluate the state of participatory approaches in the aftermath of the "Tyranny" critique. It captures the recent convergence between participatory development and participatory governance. It revisits the question of popular agency, as well as spanning the range of institutional actors involved--the state, civil society and donor agencies. The volume embeds participation within contemporary advances in development theory.
Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples’ activities. Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.
Changing relations between science and democracy – and controversies over issues such as climate change, energy transitions, genetically modified organisms and smart technologies – have led to a rapid rise in new forms of public participation and citizen engagement. While most existing approaches adopt fixed meanings of ‘participation’ and are consumed by questions of method or critiquing the possible limits of democratic engagement, this book offers new insights that rethink public engagements with science, innovation and environmental issues as diverse, emergent and in the making. Bringing together leading scholars on science and democracy, working between science and technology studies, political theory, geography, sociology and anthropology, the volume develops relational and co-productionist approaches to studying and intervening in spaces of participation. New empirical insights into the making, construction, circulation and effects of participation across cultures are illustrated through examples ranging from climate change and energy to nanotechnology and mundane technologies, from institutionalised deliberative processes to citizen-led innovation and activism, and from the global north to global south. This new way of seeing participation in science and democracy opens up alternative paths for reconfiguring and remaking participation in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways. This ground-breaking book is essential reading for scholars and students of participation across the critical social sciences and beyond, as well as those seeking to build more transformative participatory practices.
Children's and young people’s right to participate has been increasingly acknowledged and taken up internationally, as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet much of this has focused on collecting children’s voices, rather than achieving change, and has met its limits. This book provides an analysis of children’s participation in formal, collective and action research processes in six different international settings. It offers a deeper understanding of what helps and facilitates children's and young people’s participation through research, evaluation and decision-making to go beyond voice and effect change. This analysis is set in the context of historical and current discourses of participation, the sociology of childhood, contemporary anthropology, children’s geography and international development. Themes addressed include time and processes in children’s participation, shifting and multiple identities of children, political and cultural contexts, places and spaces children inhabit, skills and capacities of adults, accountability and power. The analysis promotes an approach to children’s participation as relational and collaborative, and will contribute to answering some of the questions facing practitioners and researchers embarking on participatory enquiry with children and young people. This is an invaluable book for practitioners and for scholars, postgraduates in anthropology, sociology, human geography, childhood studies, development studies, social policy, social work, community work, education, youth work and those with an interest in citizenship, children’s rights and human rights. Researchers and practitioners in UN, government and non-government services will also find it applicable to engaging with children and young people.
Bringing together leading international practitioners and theorists in the field, ranging from the 1960s pioneers of participation to some of the major contemporary figures in the field, Architecture and Participation opens up the social and political aspects of our built environment, and the way that the eventual users may shape it. Divided into three sections, looking at the politics, histories and practices of participation, the book gives both a broad theoretical background and more direct examples of participation in practice. Respectively the book explores participation's broader context, outlining key themes and including work from some seminal European figures and shows examples of how leading practitioners have put their ideas into action. Illustrated throughout, the authors present to students, practitioners and policy makers an exploration of how a participative approach may lead to new spatial conditions, as well as to new types of architectural practices, and investigates the way that the user has been included in the design process.
Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square:. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.
