This article investigates civic-political and cognitive participation as they play out in democratic theory. Its core purpose is to develop a conceptual-normative critique of the presupposition in liberal democratic theory that these logics are mutually reinforcing and complementary. This misunderstanding of a theoretical ambivalence contributes to inhibiting constructive assessment of epistocratic*technocratic frameworks of democratic interpretation and theory. I demonstrate that these logics circulate contrasting views of democratic power and legitimacy and should be disentangled to make sense of liberal democratic theoretical and political spaces. This critique is then fed into a political-epistemological interrogation of post-truth and alt-facts rhetorical registers in contemporary liberal democratic life, concluding that neither logic of participation can harbor this unanticipated and fundamentally nonaligned way of doing liberal democratic democracy.
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Participation, Process and Partnerships
Climate Change and Long-term Stakeholder Engagement
Carrie Furman, Wendy-Lin Bartels, and Jessica Bolson
As awareness of the potential threats posed by climate change increases, researchers and agricultural advisors are being called upon to determine the risks that different stakeholder groups will likely confront and to develop adaptive strategies. Yet, engaging with stakeholders takes time. It also requires a clear and detailed plan to ensure that research and outreach activities yield useful outputs. In this article, we focus on the role of anthropologists as researchers and conveners in stakeholder engagement and provide a generalised overview of a long-term engagement process proceeding in three stages: (1) fact-finding and relationship- building; (2) incubation and collaborative learning; and (3) informed engagement and broad dissemination. We conclude with a discussion of perspectives and challenges that were encountered during two engagement experiences in the south-eastern United States.
Speaking Back, Striking Back
Calls for Local Agency and Good Fieldwork in Development Encounters
Eugenie Reidy
modus operandi deals with people of another sociocultural context. To really ‘raise voice’ ( Brocklesby et al. 2010 ) of local communities in order to secure their participation and agency, ‘the black box of implementation’ in international development
Living Through and Living On?
Participatory Humanitarian Architecture in the Jarahieh Refugee Settlement, Lebanon
Riccardo Luca Conti, Joana Dabaj, and Elisa Pascucci
political legitimacy for this movement. While scholars of development and aid have primarily interrogated participation in its spatial dimensions ( Cornwall 2002 ), in this article we approach it from a temporal perspective. Seen as marked by extreme
Sam Pryke
participation, Aslan and Seker (2016: 169) found that 100 per cent of their students thought that it did, whilst Rae and O'Malley (2017) give a figure of 92.2 per cent. Highly positive ratings have been found for similar questions. In the study by Awedh et
Toward Comprehensive Conceptualizations of Contemporary Public Health
Participation as the Cornerstone of Appropriate Methodologies
Harry Nijhuis
“Positive health,” “comprehensive approaches,” and “participation” have become popular concepts in today’s theoretical public health discourse. Each of these emphasizes a specific component of complex public health issues, which are at stake in
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 60–84
Common Democracy
Political Representation beyond Representative Democracy
Alexandros Kioupkiolis
representation that might serve to inspire political projects for reinvigorating democratic participation today. The examples examined here, however, are limited by time and space. They are used to flesh out an alternative logic of political representation that
What is “Political” Participation
Beyond Explicit Motivations and Oppositional Actions
Sadiya Akram and David Marsh
Wood and Flinders re-center political participation on the idea of “nexus politics.” The effort is laudable because it contributes to other ongoing efforts at broadening our understanding of the nature of ‘political’ participation. Unfortunately, in our view, the authors misspecify new forms of political participation that have emerged by: (1) failing to take Henrik Bang’s work seriously; (2) focusing exclusively on motivation/intention, so that an action is “political,” only if the person acting sees it as “political”; (3) seeing all political participation as necessarily oppositional.
Indigenous participation in primary care services in Brazil
Autonomy or bureaucratization?
Eliana Elisabeth Diehl and Esther Jean Langdon
Brazil’s Unified Health System ( Sistema Único de Saúde [SUS]) was created in 1990, establishing the principles of universal access, equity, integrality and social participation. SUS is based on decentralization, municipal administration of
How Participatory Institutions Deepen Democracy through Broadening Representation
The Case of Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil
Laurence Piper
At the same time as democracy has 'triumphed' in most of the world, it leaves many unsatisfied at the disjuncture between the democratic ideal and its practical expression. Participatory practices and institutions, as exemplified in the participatory budgeting process of the local government of Porto Alegre in Brazil, claim to embody a more substantive version of democracy that can settle this deficit. This article interrogates this promise through examining closely the case of Porto Alegre. In addition to demonstrating clear democratic outcomes, this examination also reveals that the meaning of democratic deepening is not cashed out exclusively in terms of participation but in terms of representation too. More specifically, participatory budgeting serves to broaden representation in the budgeting process as a whole, by better including and amplifying the voice of marginalised groups in aspects of the budgeting process, albeit through participatory practices and events. On reflection this should not be surprising as participatory budgeting introduces new decision-making procedures that supplement rather than replace existing representative institutions, and reform rather than transform expenditure patterns. Thus although termed participatory, at the level of the municipal system as a whole, participatory institutions assist in better representing the interests of marginalised groups in decision-making through participatory means. Deepening democracy, therefore, at least as far as new participatory institutions are concerned, is about new forms of representation and participation, rather than replacing representation with participation.
