Citizen Participation,Process, and Transparency in Local Government: An Exploratory Study

This study had two purposes. First, it empirically examined the relationship between citizens' participation in administrative policymaking phases and their perception of government transparency. Second, it investigated how citizens' use of both offline and online participation channels and their involvement in different phases of policymaking (i.e., agenda setting, implementation, and evaluation) were related to their assessment of transparency in government. A 2009 survey of residents of Seoul, South Korea, was used to test the study hypotheses. Using two‐stage least squares estimate techniques, the study found that citizens involved in any citizen participation programs are more likely than those not involved to positively assess transparency in government. With regard to the relationship between participation channels and transparency, citizens who used offline participation channels were more likely than nonusers to perceive enhanced transparency in local government. However, their use of online participation channels had limited effect on perceptions of transparency. Finally, participation in two phases of the policy process, agenda setting and evaluation, positively affected citizens' assessment of transparency in government.     

Government's Unequal Attentiveness to Citizens' Political Priorities

An accumulation of evidence suggests citizens with low incomes have relatively little influence over the policy decisions made by lawmakers in the United States. However, long before elected officials are asked to cast a final vote on a bill's passage, an equally important decision has already been made: the decision for government to focus its limited attention and agenda space on the issue at all. Therefore, it is possible that political inequality is infused earlier in the policymaking process at the agenda‐setting stage if the issues held important by some citizens are given attention while the issues held important by others are not. To investigate this question, we develop novel state‐level measures of citizens' issue priorities and find sizable differences in which issues poor and rich citizens think are most important and deserving of government attention. We then use bill introduction data from state legislatures to measure government attention and uncover evidence that state legislators are less likely to act on an issue when it is prioritized by low‐income citizens as compared to affluent citizens. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political equality and the functioning of American democracy.     

Leveraging city officials’ professional and social Identities to facilitate affordable housing

Housing affordability is an acute problem in many developed economies. It is rooted, inter alia, in a conflict of interests across levels of government. Policies that seek to increase the supply of housing and lower their purchase price are popular among the general electorate, yet local governments deploy urban planning regulations to restrict densification and development of affordable housing within their jurisdictions. Moves to address this conflict would benefit from unpacking city officials' policy preferences and their variation. This paper compares the positions of local-government politicians vs. those of unelected bureaucrats in Israeli cities, drawing on survey and interview data. Our findings confirm the conflicts of interest between levels of government even within Israel's unitary, centralized context. However, we show that career bureaucrats, given their relative freedom from electoral pressures and commitment to professional values, are more amenable to citizens' and central government's shared interest in densification and affordable housing. We also highlight city officials' place of residence—within vs. outside the city—and their social identification with citizens and residents as antecedents of their urban-planning preferences. We draw on these findings to delineate directions for more effective central–local government collaboration in seeking affordable housing solutions.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

The post‐politics of transport: establishing a new meeting ground for transport politics

This paper brings together two disparate but critical bodies of literature about contemporary citizen participation in the Australian city: transport politics and post‐politics. The argument is advanced that state and citizen actor relations—as they exist in the governance and management of Australian urban transport—have taken on characteristics of post‐politics. By conceiving of citizen participation in this manner, new ways of understanding it are generated and it is possible to appreciate how such participation is shaped by state actors both across time and in response to the politicisation of transport proposals. The paper illustrates the extent to which citizen engagement has become a new focal point in transport politics, particularly given citizens' capacities to politicise proposals and transport trajectories. It achieves such ends by drawing upon key‐informant interviews conducted between 2013 and 2016 with public transport advocates, select resident groups, and local and state level planning officials from Melbourne, Australia.     

Introduction: The state and historic buildings: preserving ‘the national past’

Historic buildings are important in nationalism through their roles in building and reinforcing national identity. As part of the expanding ‘heritage industry’, they are also of growing economic and political importance. Despite their physical existence, historic buildings are ‘created’ – they must be constructed as ‘historic’ through processes of choice and the attachment of significance. The state can perform these functions through policies that define and select buildings for protection, by ownership and funding, and by its uses of buildings for nationalistic purposes. Yet state actors can have good reasons – nationalistic and economic – to destroy or fail to preserve historic buildings. The paper examines why, when and how state actors pursue policies to protect historic buildings. It offers arguments about patterns of state action that part of state strategies to promote national identity and cultural nationalism.     

Protocol,politics and popular culture: the independence jubilee in Gabon

National days are powerful moments of commemoration that aim at renewing the citizens' bonds to the nation and the state. In order to be successful, public rituals need to draw large audiences, and their ceremonial design therefore has to be adapted to suit the masses, employing elements of popular culture and everyday forms of nationhood. Despite drawing its significance from the declaration of independence in 1960, however, Gabon's independence jubilee was less concerned with history and commemoration than with celebrating the state and the nation in the present. The ceremonial design of Gabon's jubilee featured intensive preparations, official ceremonies, popular festivities and symbolic politics. In this article, I look at why history and commemoration played such an unimportant role during the celebrations and how Gabon's jubilee organisers included official as well as popular forms of nationhood to assure the population's participation.     

Direct Taxation and State–Society Relations in Lagos,Nigeria

Existing research suggests that external sources of finance, such as foreign aid and natural resource rents, allow states to generate revenue independently of their societies, disincentivizing them from forming close links with their citizens and severely problematizing the notion of a social contract. In Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, a series of personal income tax reforms have seen an increase in taxpayer compliance. Considering Lagosians’ perceptions of their relation with the state government, this study examines whether the state had to ‘earn’ its revenue by developing a closer relationship with its citizens, and whether citizens responded through a greater willingness to pay tax. It explores how citizens understand this relationship, what role they perceive themselves to fulfil, and what their expectations are for the future of state–society relations. The study shows how, through efforts to visibly link tax to service delivery, a social contract is emerging between Lagos State and its citizens — but that this relationship differs among groups, in that it is shaped by pre‐existing concepts of public organization and modes of political engagement.     

Tracing resident antagonisms in urban development: agonistic pluralism and participatory planning

This article draws on research with resident action groups and other alliances in Sydney. It investigates the ways in which citizens work beyond the formal planning system to approach and achieve their urban development goals. The post‐political treatment of community voices in planning relies on the centrality of consensus politics in current participatory planning regimes. By providing a democratic outlet that is far removed from the actual development outcome, powerful urban actors can silence through inclusion. Planning theorists have posited that one pathway beyond this post‐political moment in urban planning is provided by Chantal Mouffe's critique of Habermasian communicative theory and consensus politics, which she bases on her theory of agonistic pluralism. Following Mouffe, to achieve a productive agonistic politics, any rigid antagonisms between “enemies” need to be moderated to more mutable “adversarial” positions. However, we have little knowledge of the conditions that might precipitate such a change in praxis. To address this gap between theory and praxis, we use focus group data to show how local resident action groups and urban alliances work through three modalities of antagonism to achieve their urban development goals. We add empirical weight to the idea that citizens can shift from rigid and fundamental antagonisms to the potentially more productive adversarial politics of agonistic pluralism but therein expose some limitations with how Mouffe's ideas are being applied to urban planning.     

The Government Has Long Hands: Institutionalized Arbitrariness and Local Security Initiatives in Northern Uganda

This article examines the relationship between the state security apparatus and local security initiatives in Gulu District, northern Uganda. It draws from more than 200 interviews and seven months of qualitative field research from February 2014 to December 2015. Although the central Ugandan state is believed to be weak or absent in the post‐conflict north, the article finds that in the area of security, the state is ever‐present in citizens' imaginations. This study makes two interrelated arguments. First, perceived state presence is a result of seemingly arbitrary and harsh interventions on the part of central government, which the author terms institutionalized arbitrariness. Second, in Gulu District, institutionalized arbitrariness is an effective and efficient mode of governance. This is due to civilian imaginations of state violence, shaped by the two‐decade long conflict, as well as the power of the central state, reinforced administratively and through an elaborate intelligence network. Thus, institutionalized arbitrariness allows the central state to fragment political and social resistance to its rule and undermine the ability of citizens to make meaningful claims on the state.     

Globalisation and Singaporean transmigration: re-imagining and negotiating national identity

Within the context of globalisation that confronts the world today, I aim in this paper to illustrate one particular state's attempts at constructing a `nation' amidst efforts to encourage its citizens to globalise, actions which are ostensibly, or at least, potentially, contradictory; and to analyse how these citizens who became transmigrants construct and negotiate their sense of `nation' and national identity. Specifically, my empirical questions centre on Singaporean transmigrants working in China. I ask the following questions. What happens to the sense of national identity among Singaporeans and their relationship with the `nation' when confronted with transnational conditions? What are the forces that impinge on the on-going construction of community and (re)construction of national identity amongst Singaporeans? What are the implications for a young state in its attempts at nation-building? This paper examines how the Singapore state continually attempts to establish the boundaries of the nation-state through hegemonic, policy and strategic actions. From the perspective of individuals, transnational location enhances their sense of national identity rather than its demise, leading to assertions of `Singaporeaness' and rootedness. I present empirical evidence that physical presence in a territory is not a necessary condition for a feeling of nationhood, and examine how Singaporeans maintain this sense of national identity through their everyday actions.     

Stateless and Citizenship Rights in the Middle East: the Case of Kuwait

This article examines Kuwaiti citizens' views towards expanding citizenship rights to disenfranchised groups. Using survey data from 1581 Kuwaiti citizens in 1998, the author focused on the influence of Kuwaitis' social statuses, cultural affiliations, social networks and religious beliefs. Are attitudes toward inclusion specific to the national origin of the excluded? It was found that variables connoting status decrease support for the stateless. Cultural adherence to Islamic nationalism and Pan‐Arabism and those who follow the media regularly positively influence support for the stateless. These findings suggest that citizens' attitudes about inclusion/exclusion are specific to the national origin of the dis‐enfranchised.     

Remembering and Forgetting Sites of Terrorism in New York, 1900–2001

Abstract

This article assesses the manner in which terrorist attacks have been remembered and forgotten within New York during the twentieth century. As a 'global city', New York has frequently been the focus of individuals and groups seeking to promote their cause by attacking targets in the city, its businesses, its infrastructure, its organizations, and its citizens. By examining how these events were reported and subsequently incorporated or dismissed within both the urban fabric and the city's 'collective memory', this article addresses how violent terrorism is engaged with by society. Building upon the advances made within the study of modern conflict archaeology, this article examines the possibility of an archaeology of terrorism.     

Bureaucracies of Blood and Belonging: Documents,HIV‐positive Youth and the State in South Africa

In response to its constitutional commitments and social welfare provisions in the era of democracy, the post‐apartheid South African state is increasingly called upon to provide for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. These demands have intensified amid escalating joblessness and the highest numbers of people living with HIV worldwide. Over the past decade, antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been incorporated into an ever‐expanding welfare bureaucracy, in which access to state assistance is mediated by the collection and monitoring of biometric, bureaucratic data. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape, this article explores how state documents bring young people on ART into an ambiguous relationship with the state — one that is at once subordinating and enabling. While social research on ART addresses both the empowering and coercive aspects of treatment taking, less attention has been given to how these modes of participation might be mutually constitutive. In this article, the authors examine how the same technologies that discipline youth on ART might also support and protect them; how welfare dependencies entail paradoxical forms of agency; and how the state's ability to control and to ‘care for’ citizens might be reciprocally dependent.     

Popular perceptions of Europe and the Nation: the case of Italy

ABSTRACT. To date, European identity has not mobilised a feeling of belonging or solidarity that would be comparable to the ways in which national identities stir people's passions and make them ready ‘to die for’ their nations. However, much of the related political debate and scholarly analysis has paid little attention to citizens' understanding of European identity and the way this relates to national identity. This paper aims to contribute towards filling this gap. It explores qualitatively the relationship between national and European identity among Italian citizens with a view to answering the following research questions: How do Italian citizens define Europe? Who is a European? How does feeling European relate to feeling Italian? How do citizens perceive the European integration process? The article is based on 24 qualitative interviews with Italian citizens of varying age, gender, locality of residence and socio‐economic status, conducted in spring and summer 2003. The methodology adopted follows the discourse analytical tradition.     

Alienated and politicized? Young planners’ confrontation with entrepreneurial and authoritarian state intervention in urban development in Turkey

Planning in Turkey is dominated by powerful market interests and authoritarian state regulation, resulting in a conflictual socio-political environment. Caught in the crossfire between interventionist urban policies and a planning education system that is oriented towards the public good, planners have come to feel alienated from their work. This paper considers how young planners respond to these challenges, drawing upon questionnaires and semi-structured in-depth interviews with planners with fewer than 10 years of experience. Their confrontation with entrepreneurial and authoritarian state interventions in urban development alienates them from their ideals, leading them to explore new ways of dealing with increasing political authority and economic neoliberalism. The participants of the study came up with a number of diverse responses related to this process. Disappointed with the practice of their profession ‘lost planners' begin searching for alternative pathways outside their practice towards a more meaningful society. In contrast, ‘profiteer planners' focus on getting more business and play a conformist and opportunistic role in the existing planning practice; while ‘struggling planners' develop alternative ways to pursue the public good by participating in urban movements. In short, they cope with alienation through politicization, solidarity and the identification of new means of engaging with society.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

State functioning and state failure in the South Pacific

The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.     

World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.     

Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners,Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.