The effectiveness of public participation in the environmental impact assessment process – a case study of the projected Sierilä hydropower station at Oikarainen,northern Finland

One of the most difficult challenges in environmental impact assessment (EIA) is the effectiveness of public participation. This article addresses this question by looking at evaluation criteria applied during the EIA process for a northern Finnish hydropower project. The problematics of public participation is discussed in connection with the EIA process and social impact assessment for the projected Sierilä hydropower station in the village of Oikarainen, near Rovaniemi, in northern Finland, during which the local population has been viewed as not being sufficiently competent as the project developer, Kemijoki Ltd. Nevertheless, carrying out an EIA seems to be a starting point in the long‐term process of increasing the effectiveness of public participation and the influence of local communities on hydropower planning processes in Finland.     

Participation in Multiple Decision Making Water Governance Forums in Brazil Enhances Actors’ Perceived Level of Influence

The Ecology of Games Framework (EGF) draws attention to the intertwined nature of different forums in a given policy setting and how this affects governance outcomes. In this article, we associate the EGF with the literature on power asymmetries, in order to investigate hypotheses of actors’ perceived level of influence in a forum. Focusing on the Paraíba do Sul river basin committee in Brazil, we specifically explore actors’ participation in multiple forums, time spent participating in the basin committee, and actors’ degree of involvement in the committee as factors that might explain actors’ level of perceived influence in the forum. The findings suggest participation in multiple forums is a key driver of perceived influence and thus highlight a way to challenge traditional power asymmetries. More research, however, is needed to determine to what extent perceived influence is affecting decision‐making processes and governance outcomes in the Paraíba do Sul river basin committee.     

Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

Precarious Lives in the Global South: On Being Disabled in Guyana

Most of what is known about disabled women's and men's lives is based on research conducted in the global North despite the fact that 80% of the world's one billion disabled people live in countries of the global South. This article addresses this gap in our understanding of disabled people's lives by examining impairment and disability as outcomes of processes of social embodiment that unfold in an unequal global capitalist order. Drawing on 87 interviews conducted with disabled women and men in Guyana, the article illustrates how colonial and neo‐colonial relations of power and processes of development give rise to material conditions of life such as extreme poverty and male violence that contribute to impairment and disability. The article concludes by discussing the article's contributions, challenges in developing southern perspectives on impairment and disability, and the need to address socio‐spatial injustices experienced by disabled people in the global South.     

“This is an Indigenous city; why don't we see it?” Indigenous urbanism and spatial production in Winnipeg

This paper examines indigeneity and spatial production in the city of Winnipeg, home to the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada. Using data from semi‐structured interviews with Indigenous inhabitants, municipal officials, and Indigenous leaders, this paper argues that the right to the city and to difference are deradicalized for urban Indigenous communities. Indigenous engagement in processes of everyday urbanism occurs through broadly participatory public consultation and through mechanisms designed by City Hall to communicate with Indigenous communities about municipal initiatives. To arrive at a more robust and meaningful Indigenous urban visibility in Canadian cities, spatial production and programming mechanisms will need to be reconstituted. Guided by the perspectives of Indigenous participants, this paper considers some of what Indigenous urbanism might yet entail. Fulfilling coexistence and reconciliation is dependent on enabling Indigenous urbanism to guide the course taken in urban governance, spatial planning, and the built environment of Canadian cities.     

Organizing for British national strategy

In December 1968 Ernest May asked how the US government could gain access to ‘long‐headed’ staffers to provide greater strategic depth to foreign policy. The challenge of long‐term strategy persists: how should government be organized to support it, how can the right people be found to staff it and how can political leaders make time for longer‐term policy‐making given the challenge of the immediate? The policy planning staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have traditionally had the task of supporting longer‐range, broader foreign policy. A small group of diplomats—later leavened by externals from the media, non‐profit and private sectors—was meant to generate an improved approach to British interests and policy. As Robert Wade‐Gery recalls of its role in the 1960s, there was a push to forge fresh links with outside thinking. Did it work? Former policy planners can be circumspect about its achievements. One former British planner said he felt like ‘a spare part rattling around in a tin’, while former American planners have written about the challenge of injecting fresh thinking when detached from decision‐making. Other planners were dragged into operational work or speechwriting. Many planners nonetheless enjoyed the opportunity to think more broadly. Policy planning can be intellectually rich without being the source of actionable strategic thinking about the long‐term national interest. This article suggests that a greater focus on people rather than systems might help to foster more strategic, anticipatory and innovative thinking about the national interest.     

Photography,public pedagogy and the politics of place-making in post-industrial areas

This paper discusses the way in which public photographic depictions of places and place-based communities contribute to the construction of local identity and community building. Being public and visualised statements about what a place and the people living there are and what they are not, photographs incite public debate about place and community. The paper discusses two interventions, one in Ghent, Belgium, involving professional photographers from outside the neighbourhood, and one in Bonnybridge, Scotland, involving amateur photography by local residents. Both are attempts by community workers to encourage citizens to discuss alternative realities of themselves, their neighbours and their neighbourhood. Starting from theories of place-making and public pedagogy, we reveal how both nonetheless exemplify very different strategies to democratise community-building processes.     

Theoretical reflections

The article starts with a discussion about the frequent statement that culture is a marginal area in politics. It proceeds with an analysis of the phenomenon and concept of “the cultural turn” and its possible consequences for cultural democracy. Then there follows a reflection on the potential power of religion and culture in political developments. After these introductory sections I present and discuss what I call five “democracy dimensions” of cultural policy: norms and ideologies; distribution of economic resources; institutional structures and decision‐making procedures; agents and interests in the policy‐making process; and access to and participation in cultural life. The conclusion is that under certain circumstances culture may mobilise huge masses of people in political actions but this is unlikely to happen in Western European democracies where culture in a long historical process has been privatised and isolated from big politics by the establishment of a specific sphere with its own structures, norms, logics and discourses. It is questionable if cultural policies will be more democratic under the reign of global capitalism and new liberalism. “The cultural turn” is an ambivalent phenomenon which cannot by itself bring about more cultural democracy. The future of cultural democracy cannot be decided for by cultural life or the cultural policy system themselves, it is dependent on what will happen to democracy as a total political system, of which cultural policy is only a small part.     

PARKOUR: CREATING LOOSE SPACES?

Parkour is a spectacular and highly mediatized new way of movement that challenges conceptions of acceptable or appropriate behaviour in urban public space. This article will examine the potential of parkour to “loosen” urban spatial texture by applying recent thinking on loose and tight space by Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens to data gathered through in‐depth interviews with parkour practitioners (traceurs) in two Finnish cities. When practising in urban public spaces, the traceurs we interviewed often caused confusion among other people. We explore how they negotiate their right to public space in the face of these reactions, either by evasion or with a combination of legal and moral arguments. We argue that parkour is not only a playful and confrontational practice with a potentially subversive character, but that the process of loosening space constitutes a complex dialectic, which may also involve a certain degree of tightening in the public space for other unexpected or unintended activities.     

Making Banks Fit for the People: Confidence,Democracy, and the Rise of Banking Alternatives in America, 1880–1914

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Americans lacked confidence in the nation's banks. In various ways, privately owned or operated banking institutions were viewed to be adverse to the interests of “the people.” Still, beginning in the late nineteenth century, deposit banking came to be accepted as a vital “public service.” This article explains how that happened and illustrates how multiple people-oriented alternatives gradually emerged. While these have been explored previously, this article demonstrates how new ideas about the importance of banking facilitated the emergence of a broad movement aimed at popular participation and control. To reveal this history and to gauge popular ideas, it favors materials that appeared within the public sphere. This approach demonstrates how underlying confidence issues motivated a broad movement that aimed to democratize banking institutions.     

Doing democracy and governance in the fast lane? Towards a ‘politics of time’ in an accelerated polity

This article examines the relationship between time, governance and political participation through a critical engagement with the ‘acceleration thesis’. Whilst the acceleration thesis argues that the ‘shrinking of the present’ is a condition of contemporary governance, others have viewed it as dysfunctional to the democratic process and effective policymaking. By drawing on a wide range of literature and through the use of illustrative examples, this article argues that slow and fast politics have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the practice of governance and democratic participation. In turn, questions are raised about how public organisations and others might manage temporality and change in an ‘accelerated polity’. The article concludes by calling for further research into the ‘politics of time’ and its effects on public policymaking and political participation.     

Scaling up Participatory Watershed Development in India

‘Participation’ is widely accepted as a prerequisite to successful watershed development in India, but there is no shared understanding of its meaning, nor of how to make it operational. Meaningful participation, in which communities work collectively, help make decisions and share costs, is limited primarily to projects implemented by non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). Participation in government projects is more superficial because staff lack the skills and incentive to engage in meaningful participation. Strategies to scale up meaningful participation require a large number of NGOs. However, the number of NGOs with the necessary skills and values is limited, so a realistic strategy must seek to improve the capabilities and incentives of government agencies. Their performance may improve by making them accountable through transparent processes and participatory monitoring and evaluation. NGO‐facilitated access to information for communities can potentially change power relations and initiate political processes that make both community leaders and government agencies more accountable to communities.     

Raising the question: articulating the Dutch identity crisis through public debate

In place of a ‘tolerant no more’ narrative, this article proposes a different conception of nationalism's re‐articulation in the Dutch context. The salience of nationhood in public and political life, particularly concerning issues of immigration, religion and diversity, is not reconstructed as a backlash against a purported multiculturalism. Instead, attention is given to a re‐articulation of the very notion of nationhood. A long‐term historical move away from characterology is assessed and applied in understanding the emergence of a national‐identity discourse. This discourse not merely embellishes talk of Dutchness with new terms, but indicates – so the articles aim to demonstrate – a different conception of nationhood all together. Apart from what the nation is – about which very little disagreement took place – discussions formed about how Dutchness was imagined and to what extent people themselves were able to form a national image. The emergence of national‐identity discourse is empirically reconstructed. Not only is it made clear how a logic of popularity begins to be reiterated across a variety of positionings, but public debate and dissensus acquire a new significance and performativity in the process.     

Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy

This paper pushes forward political research from across disciplines seeking to understand the linkages between public opinion and social policy in democracies. It considers the thermostatic and the increasing returns perspectives as pointing toward a potentially stable set of effects running between opinion and policy. Both theoretical perspectives argue that opinion and policy are reciprocally causal, feeding back on one another. This is a general argument found in opinion‐policy literatures. However, much empirical research claims to model “feedback” effects when actually using separate unidirectional models of opinion and policy. Only a small body of research addresses opinion‐policy endogeneity directly. In this paper I consider an opinion‐policy system with simultaneous feedback and without lags. I argue that there is a theoretical equilibrium in the relationship of opinion and policy underlying the otherwise cyclical processes that link them. Given that available cross‐national data are cross‐sectional and provide limited degrees of freedom, an ideal theoretical model must be somewhat constrained in order to arrive at empirically meaningful results. In this challenging and exploratory undertaking I hope to open up the possibility of a general system of effects between public opinion and social policy and how to model them in future research. I focus on social welfare policy as it is highly salient to public interests and a costly area of government budgets, making it an area of contentious policymaking. Social policy is also a major part of the thermostatic model of opinion and policy, which was recently extended to the cross‐national comparative context (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012) providing a critical predecessor to this paper because identification of equilibrium between public opinion and social policy in any given society is greatly enhanced through comparison with other societies. This counterfactual approach helps to identify opinion‐policy patterns that may not change much within societies, but can be seen as taking on discrete trajectories between societies.     

Speech,Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

This article aims to unsettle some taken‐for‐granted ideas about speech and power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication, and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.     

Rethinking public participation in the smart city

In efforts to become “smart cities,” local governments are adopting various technologies that promise opportunities for increasing participation by expanding access to public comment and deliberation. Scholars and practitioners encounter the problem, however, of defining publics—demarcating who might participate through technology-enhanced public engagement. We explore two case studies in the city of Calgary that employ technologies to enhance public engagement. We analyzed the cases considering both the definition of publics and the level of citizen participation in areas of participatory budgeting and secondary suites. Our findings suggest that engaging the public is not a straightforward process, and that technology-enhanced public engagement can often reduce participation towards tokenism. City councillors and planners need to critically confront claims that smart cities necessarily enhance participation. Moving beyond tokenism requires understanding “public” as a plural category. Municipal governments should seek to proactively engage citizens and communities utilizing helpful resources including, but not limited to, digital tools and smart technologies. This would allow planners to keep a “finger on the pulse” of publics' concerns, better identifying and addressing issues of equity and social justice. It is also important to consider how marginalized publics can best be recognized in order to bring their concerns to the fore in decision-making processes.     

The co-creation (of) culture? The case of Umeå, European Capital of Culture 2014

Culture is often promoted as crucial in efforts to achieve economic growth and social cohesion. In recent debates, greater attention has been directed at the importance of culture in creating democratic and just cities. Drawing on theories concerning participation, we study the processes of citizen participation in the creation of culture in relation to the European Capital of Culture in Umeå in Northern Sweden. The city has been praised for its focus on participation and the ‘co-creation’ of culture. We scrutinize the idea of co-creation, how it is filled with meaning by different actors, the way it is operationalized by city officials and cultural actors/practitioners and the possibilities for public participation and the power relationships at play in the city. We conclude that culture tends to be depoliticized and turned into an arena available for all on supposedly equal terms and ignores the very unequal terms on which different actors participate. It ignores how power relations affect and construct who gets to speak and be heard; that there are conflicting meanings of culture and co-creation and how power influences whose definition of culture is accepted.     

The Impact of Microfinance on Decision‐Making Agency: Evidence from South India

Evaluations of the effects of microfinance programmes on women's empowerment generate mixed results. While some are supportive of microfinance's ability to induce a process of economic, social and political empowerment, others are more sceptical and even point to a deterioration of women's overall well‐being. Against this background, development scholars and practitioners have sought to distil some of the ingredients that might increase the likelihood of empowerment or at least reduce adverse effects. This article formally tests the impact of some of the suggested changes in programme features on one particular dimension of empowerment: decision‐making agency. Using household survey data from South India, the author explores the importance of the borrower's gender and the lending technology for intra‐household decision‐making processes. It is shown that direct bank–borrower credit delivery does not challenge the existing decision‐making patterns, regardless of whether men or women receive the credit. These findings change when credit is combined with financial and social group intermediation. Women's group membership seriously shifts overall decision‐making patterns from norm‐guided behaviour and male decision‐making to more joint and female decision‐making. Longer‐term group membership and more intensive training and group meetings strengthen these patterns.     

Legitimacy and Public Policy: Seeing Beyond Effectiveness,Efficiency, and Performance

Studies of failure typically assess public policies through the lenses of effectiveness, efficiency, and performance. Here I wish to propose a further dimension to the evaluation and assessment of policy failure—legitimacy. The substantive elements of public policies and the procedural steps taken by authoritative decision makers during the policy cycle affect the perception of policy legitimacy held by both stakeholders and the public. In substantive terms, policy content should align with the dominant attitudes of the affected policy community and, ideally, the broader public. Procedurally, factors such as policy incubation, the emotive appeals deployed to gain support for an initiative, and the processes of stakeholder engagement shape the legitimacy of public policies and the governments who promote them. This argument is based on a comparison of education reform in two Canadian provinces during the 1990s. Governments in Alberta and Ontario pursued common agendas of education reform, but while Alberta achieved success, the Ontario government experienced a series of setbacks and lost the support of education stakeholders and the public. The root of Ontario's failures lies in the realm of legitimacy. These findings highlight the fact that the strategies used for enacting policy change may fail to bring about the necessary consensus among societal actors to sustain a new policy direction and calls attention to our need to better understand how governments can achieve meaningful public participation while still achieving legislative success in an efficient fashion.