“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
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Toward Comprehensive Conceptualizations of Contemporary Public Health
Participation as the Cornerstone of Appropriate Methodologies
Harry Nijhuis
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 60–84
Hinrich Voss
The purpose of this article is to analyze environmental public participation in the UK from the perspective of the polluting organization. Public participation, or an organization's stakeholder management, describes various channels available for the public to engage with and influence decision-making processes. Over the lifetime of an organization, the public seeks to engage with the organization or with specific goods or services offered. Such concerns and requests are made, and the organization responds to them, according to how salient members of the public are as stakeholders at a given time and place. Using case study examples from the UK, I illustrate the channels of engagement, the public interest groups that do engage and how effective these procedures are. It follows from this that early, inclusive and open engagement with the objective of participation in decision-making processes are the most effective public participation models and have the greatest social quality potential.
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 26–40
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
Home or Away?
Widening Participation and the Challenge for Anthropology
Paul Hawkins and David Mills
Drawing on recent ethnographic research with 'non-traditional' humanities and social science students at a 'new' university in the North West of England, this paper explores their contradictory experiences of alienation and engagement, and their attitudes to institutional 'Widening Participation' initiatives. It argues that these students' institutional survival depends on negotiating the conflicting expectations of their academic relationships and their day-to-day social responsibilities beyond the university.
What might these findings mean for anthropology's own pedagogic strategies? The paper ends by suggesting that a subject that asks its students fundamentally to question their established senses of self and 'home' may pose a further challenge for students for whom strained personal and domestic relationships, ambivalence and self-doubt are dominant motifs of their whole university experience.
Lain Dare
Alternative forms of political participation that place little emphasis on traditional representative forms of democracy are becoming more prevalent. Typifying the shift from government to governance, forest certification provides important opportunities for political participation with local, national, and global influence. Using Pippa Norris's three dimensions of political participation—agencies, repertoires, and targets—this article explores political participation within the practice of forest certification. The article highlights how traditional and alternative forms of political participation do not act as a dualism and instead occur simultaneously in practice due to historical, spatial, and practical influences.
From proclamation to denial
Indigenous rights and political participation in Venezuela
Catherine Alès
participation for legal provisions that benefitted indigenous communities, this article discusses political changes and forms of mobilization that indigenous communities’ organizations have been forced to develop in response to the recent invasion of their
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.
Kjetil Børhaug
Declining adolescent political participation means that political education has become a pressing public and political issue. In response, much attention is being paid to the way in which political education offers meaningful reasons for individual political participation. Critical textbook analysis may help us understand how political education affects participation. To what extent do textbooks explicitly present justifications for political participation? What kinds of justification are offered? This article analyzes Norwegian social studies textbooks, and concludes that justifications of adolescent political participation are central. Justifications include the individual pursuit of preferences, individual duty in a "contract" with the state, and identities. However, these justifications are also questionable, for they are generally either individualistic or avoid real political movements.
In Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 23–41
Crisis of Democracy?
Recognizing the Democratic Potential of Alternative Forms of Political Participation
Brendan McCaffrie and Sadiya Akram
According to the mainstream literature on political participation, declining rates of voting and party and interest group membership reflect a crisis of democracy in Western democracies. In this article, we challenge this view by highlighting the rise of alternative forms of political participation that operate outside formal arenas. We suggest that the mainstream approach ignores such forms of political participation for two reasons: First, it operates with a narrow arena definition of politics; second, it is based on the assumption that non-participation in arena politics results from political apathy. We suggest that there is not a crisis of political participation, but there is a growing crisis in engagement resulting from an uncoupling between citizens and the state. Halting this form of democratic decline through a recoupling process will require changes on the part of governments and citizens.
Peter Standbrink
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.