Communities In Decision-making Processes Research Articles

Personal determinants of change agents’ decision-making behavior in community health promotion: a qualitative study

BackgroundImplementing environmental changes to promote healthier communities requires initial positive decisions by change agents from local politics and government. However, there is little research on what influences the change agents' decisions. This explorative, qualitative study aims to identify the personal determinants of the decision-making behavior of local change agents.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured interviews to assess the personal determinants of decision-making behavior among 22 change agents from local politics and government. Relevant determinants were identified through a structured content analysis of the interview transcripts using the software MAXQDA 2020.ResultsWe found the following seven essential clusters of personal determinants of the decision-making behavior of change agents from local politics and government: Imprinting, socialization, and biography; experiences and involvement; attitudes and outcome expectations towards important issues and aspects; knowledge; emotions; personal benefits; and the perceived influences of others.ConclusionsThe identified personal determinants might serve as a source of understanding the decision-making behavior of change agents in community decision-making processes. Our findings can contribute to the effective planning and implementation of evidence-based multilevel interventions related to changing environmental conditions in communities and provide important information on which personal determinants should be considered when derive strategies for community health promotion within a systematic approach of developing an intervention program theory.

The COVID-19 Crisis and the Case for Online GeoParticipation in Spatial Planning

This Special Issue, titled “GIS for Spatial/Political Participation in the Decision-Making Processes of Local Administrations”, in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information is aimed at analysing state-of-the-art geoparticipatory tools for citizen participation in community decision-making processes, and suggesting the effective implementation of the geoparticipatory tools available for local administrations [...]

From Hell to High Water: The Life of Rohingya Refugee Women in Bangladesh

Abstract Bangladesh is currently hosting nearly a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and more than half of the refugee population comprises women. In Myanmar, due to the government-imposed securitization and relatively conservative culture, Rohingya women were not able to enjoy their rights and freedom and were mainly confined to their homes. Upon arriving in Bangladesh, they are facing additional challenges. This article aims to find the underlying causes that alienated women from enjoying their rights and whether the life of the Rohingya women has improved or not in Bangladesh. This article shows that, due to the lack of a women-friendly environment inside camps, gender norms and malpractices, breakdown of family ties, and increased number of gender-based violence against women, they are more vulnerable than ever. This paper argued that humanitarian organization and the government should promote gender mainstreaming towards bringing refugee women into the community decision-making process along with raising awareness among the Rohingya community.

The effect of community mediations in the practice through an analysis of two municipal case studies

This study presents the continuously spreading municipal mediation in Hungary through two community mediations as good practice. It analyses theoretical and practical course of proceedings in community decision-making processes. It presents each practical phase of community mediations, analysing the practical effects of them. It compares them with other forms of decision-making, highlighting clear advantages of community mediation both for the leadership and the given community. Through presenting the process of two case studies, two model projects are analysed in details from the perspective of the municipal decision-making organs, civil organisations and the local population. In both presented cases different problems of the community are solved through the same process protocol.

Early alert and community involvement: approach for disaster risk reduction in Rwanda

Natural disasters’ socioeconomic and environmental losses are predicted to rise, unless early warning, full stakeholders and community involvement in the mitigation, adaptation and risk reduction are squarely engaged. The objective of this study is to assess the impact of early alert and community involvement in disaster risk reduction in Nyabihu District, Western Rwanda. A quota sampling method was employed to obtain a sample of 240 households from 12 sectors of Nyabihu District in 2015. A structured questionnaire was used, and the field data collected were computed by using SPSS16.0 for Windows. The results indicated that, as stated by respondents, the frequently experienced disasters are floods (51.25%) and landslides (42.08%). However, as asserted by 68% of informants, disaster-related information is communicated through radio channels after the occurrence, while 29% of them declared that disaster information is disseminated before occurrence, which implies the rising level of risk vulnerability and incidences to the community due to lack of early warning. A lower community participation in disaster risk preparedness and mitigation was noticed (6.2%) while 31.6% mentioned taking part in activities aimed at coping with the aftermath (adaptation). Moreover, disaster risk reduction government policies are preferentially implemented (42.9%) other than considering the community’s knowledge (14.1%). To halt the gradual increase in disasters’ associated risks and losses, it is suggested to introduce disaster-related training across the community, introduce disaster courses from elementary schools and integrate the community in decision-making process.

Localism and decision-making in regional Australia: The power of people like us

A number of conceptual issues problematize the idea that community adaptability in rural communities is simply a matter of community-based problem solving. In particular, this perspective takes for granted an inclusive, participative community decision-making process and in doing so ignores theoretical and practical research that has focused on issues of connectivity, and the exercise of power within decision-making processes. In this paper we bring to bear insights from Granovetter (the importance of loose social ties in decision making) and Foucault (that power can be exercised in unison by seemingly competing parties) on community decision-making processes utilising quantitative data from a large community-based Australian sample (n = 2000). The survey utilised existing, validated research tools for assessing wellbeing, adaptive capacity, community connectivity and satisfaction with decision-making. Our research found that one group in particular (the good lifers representing 45% of the sample) strongly believed that they were able to influence the policy decision-making process, even to control it, and that they were very satisfied with the outcomes of the decision-making process. Through these data we were able to demonstrate that these people, despite representing different interests and views in the community, did have loose and frequent social connections and were able to influence decision-making. By contrast, the remaining 55% of the community saw themselves as doing poorly in terms of both policy-relevant decision-making and subsequent social (and other) outcomes. This study brings out the insight that it is important therefore to understand ‘who’ is involved in community decision-making rather than simply focusing on the ‘how’ consultation occurred or ‘how many’ people participated.

Cultural Rights in the Case Law of the International Court of Justice

AbstractOne of the most remarkable developments of the new millennium has been the expansion of debates on culture at the highest levels of the international community's decision-making processes. This has, out of necessity, had an impact on the empowerment of cultural rights, enhancing their justiciability. Substantial progress has been made both at a regional and international level. Yet not all thresholds have been reached. The International Court of Justice (‘ICJ’) has never explicitly addressed cultural rights in its case law. Despite its multicultural composition, it is only with great difficulty that the Court examines questions related to culture. However, a thorough examination of the jurisprudence of the ICJ reveals that opportunities to take cultural rights seriously have arisen more than once. Recent judgments of the Court reveal the emergence of a certain trend calling for a culturally sensitive understanding of legal issues brought to the Hague. This article submits that this trend is beneficial not only for the protection of cultural rights, but also for the maintenance of human and cultural diversity, as well as for the survival and livelihood of indigenous peoples. In light of the urgent worldwide need for peace, addressing culture as a legal issue before the ICJ, in accordance with Articles 36 and 60 of its Statute, may be a fruitful pathway for the Court to follow in order to resolve international disputes.

Do community-based rehabilitation programmes promote the participation of persons with disabilities? A case control study from Mandya District, in India

Purpose: In this paper, we measure the effectiveness of Community-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) programmes in promoting the well-being of people with disabilities and removing the barriers to their participation in family and community decision-making processes. Method: To evaluate the impact of the CBR programme, we use data from a large-scale control study in Karnataka, India. Propensity score matching is used to evaluate the impacts on disabled persons after 2, 4 and 7 years of entering the CBR. The theoretical framework for the analysis is based on the CBR guidelines, which are combined with the International Classification of Functionings (ICF), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UN CRPD) and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Results: CBR has a positive impact on the well-being of persons with disabilities participating in the programme and particularly on their participation within the family and the society at large. Conclusions: CBR programmes have a multidimensional and positive impact on individual and collective capabilities; on individual, agency and social empowerment.Implications for RehabilitationCommunity-Based Rehabilitation (CBR) can make a lasting difference in the life of persons with disabilities.CBR improves participation and inclusion of persons with disabilities in the family and in the community.

Women’s Participation in Communal Activities in Rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to examine the extent of women’s participation in communal activities in rural Bangladesh, based on an analysis of a development programme, namely REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques). This article evaluates the REFLECT programme with regard to its stated goal of enhancing female participation in local community affairs. Using Michael Mann’s classification of sources of power, the study emphasises the importance of participation as a contribution to political as well as ideological power in the community of Monsurabad Island in rural Bangladesh. To that end, this article aims at analysing women’s participation in community decision-making processes through voting behaviour, traditional village court (Salish) involvement and other civic activities. This study also reviews the views of village elders (matabars) on women’s participation at the communal level and the resulting empowerment. Based on the views of participant women themselves, the study concludes that the implementation of the REFLECT project in the local community under investigation has indeed resulted in empowering women, but this effect remains confined to their families and the handling of women’s issues. As the effect of the REFLECT project has not reached out to the realm of community politics, its impact on women’s participation in the community has been limited. This study argues that without any change in the existing social fabric of Monsurabad, women’s ideological power in that community could not be transformed into political power in accordance with Michael Mann’s theory.

Active Living by Design Sustainability Strategies

Despite substantial increases in improving the translation of health promotion research into practice, community initiatives still struggle with maintaining changes once grant funding has ended. Researchers, funders, and community practitioners are interested in practices that maintain and sustain their efforts. This qualitative study conducted a content analysis of evaluation findings from Active Living by Design (ALbD) to identify activities that community coalitions implemented to maintain their initiative and secure ongoing influence in communities. Investigators analyzed data from interviews, focus groups, and the Progress Reporting System to identify sustainability approaches clustering into five areas: partnership expansion, sustainable funding, permanent advisory committees, policy change, and institution/organization change. Partnership expansion occurred across sectors and disciplines and into broader geographic areas. Additional funding extended beyond grants to earned income streams and dedicated tax revenues. Permanent advisory committees were established to inform decision makers about a range of active living impacts. Policy changes in zoning and comprehensive plans ensured maintenance of health-promoting built environments. Sustainability through institution/organization changes led to allocation of dedicated staff and incorporation of active living values into agency missions. Active Living by Design partnerships defined and messaged their projects to align with policymakers' interests and broad partnership audiences. They found innovative supporters and adapted their original vision to include quality of life, nonmotorized transport, and other complementary efforts that expanded their reach and influence. These sustainability strategies altered awareness within communities, changed community decision-making processes, and created policy changes that have the potential to maintain environments that promote physical activity for years to come.

Gender Justice and Rights in Climate Change Adaptation: Opportunities and Pitfalls

We present three rights-based approaches to research and policies on gender justice and equity in the context of climate change adaptation. After a short introduction, we describe the dominant discourse that frames climate change and provide an overview of the literature that has depicted women both as vulnerable victims of climatic change and as active agents in adaptive responses. Discussion follows on the shift from gendered impacts to gendered adaptive capacities and embodied experiences, highlighting the continuing impact of social biases and institutional practices that shape unequal access to and control over household and community decision-making processes undermining timely, fair, and successful adaptive responses. Assessment of rights-based frameworks considers the space they provide in addressing persistent gender and other inequalities, at different political and operational scales. We argue that a human security framework is useful to fill the gap in current gender and climate justice work, particularly when implemented through the entry point of adaptive social protection. Gender justice in climate change adaptation is an obligation for transformational social change, not just rights. The time is ripe to replace narrow-minded vulnerability studies with a contextualized understanding of our mutual fragility and a commitment to enhanced livelihood resilience, worldwide.

Creating Space for Marginalized Voices: Re-focusing Service Learning on Community Change and Social Justice

Although service learning was established as a method for combining relevant student learning opportunities with community engagement, recent critiques highlight the shift from achieving community-defined goals towards a predominate focus on assessing student learning. Focusing on a community's decision-making process regarding a homeless shelter, this article describes a cross-curricular project that combines critical service learning with participatory action research. Using community and participant defined goals and interactions to steer the research process enabled achievement of both student learning and attempts at community transformation.

Understanding the role of contextual influences on local health-care decision making: case study results from Ontario, Canada

Approaches to involving the public in local health care decision making processes (and analyses of these approaches) have tended to treat participation and publics uniformly in search of the ideal method of involving the public or providing the same opportunities for public participation regardless of differing socio-economic, cultural, insitutional or political contexts within which decisions are made. Less attention has been given to the potential for various contextual factors to influence both the methods employed and the outcomes of such community decision-making processes. The paper explores the role that context (three sets of contextual influences more specifically) plays in shaping community decision-making processes. Results from case studies of public participation in local health-care decision making in four geographic communities in Ontario are presented. During the study period, two of these communities were actively involved in health services restructuring processes while one had recently completed its process and the fourth had not yet engaged in one. Several themes emerge from the case studies regarding the identification and role of contextual influences in differentially shaping participation in local health care decision-making. These include the propensity for communities with different social and structural attributes to engage in different “styles” of participation; the importance attached to “community values” in shaping both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of participation; the role of health councils, local government and inter-organizational collaboration as participation “enablers”; and the politicization of participation that occurs around contentious issues such as hospital closures.

Sustainable Agriculture and Migrant Farmworkers

Agriculture has industrialized to the point that commodities such as fresh fruits and vegetables are grown seasonally in large quantities as monocultures across certain regions of the United States. Production methods require short term, intensive labor. This pattern creates streams of migrant farmworkers who suffer disrupted, unstable lifestyles and many inequities in spite of their contributions as a vital labor force. A process of sustainable community development (CSCD) is needed to create the opportunity for migrant farmworkers to integrate into local communities, participate in a community decision-making process, and identify a means to create a desirable quality of life. This paper describes the migrant farmworker lifestyle and the CSCD process for improved opportunities for better quality of life.

Empowering Rural People: Strategic Planning and Training for Community Survival

Community Quest is a problem-solving model for rural communities which connects leadership development with local issues. Leadership is a lifelong pursuit, developed through practical experiences in our own communities. By building on community strengths, a region can clarify its collective mission to direct power and resources toward a shared vision. The goal is to link communities in a shared agenda for the region. Innovative techniques are used to involve more people in the community's decision-making process. A three-stage process which combines research and problem-solving methods brings decision makers and stakeholders together for strategic planning.

Analytical Institutional Economics and Rural Development Research: Opportunities for a New Synergism

During the past five years, the popularity of the rural development movement has waned considerably. The reasons for diminished rural development support among both public officials and researchers are numerous and complex, but the failure to adequately incorporate institutional change into research on community resource allocation must be regarded as one of the movement's major disappointments. The economist's traditional inclination to study community decision-making processes, given a particular institutional setting, has resulted in a wide variety of powerful, marketoriented economic tools being applied in rural development research without much demonstrable evidence of success. Any researcher who has attended a public forum on rural development research results understands local citizens' frustrations with applied economic analyses where few, if any, parameters can be manipulated in support of community objectives. A reorientation of perspectives is needed to bridge the gap between the market-oriented approach to rural development by most economists and the emphasis on the economic basis of collective action by analytical institutional economists. Both groups can make valuable contributions to rural development by synergizing their respective competencies in the development of a more precise theory of institutional change.

Communication in Community Decisions on the Problems of the Poor

The poor are often unable to solve their collective problems because they make little input into the community decision-making process. This study examined communication within an upper income suburban community in regard to one important problem of the poor—low-cost housing. Organizations were found to communicate mostly with those who perceive the problem in the same way and believe the same alternative solutions to the problem are feasible. Much of this communication was dysfunctional, forestalling a community decision and leading to a “non-decision.” Organizations were also found to better understand middle class groups opposed to low-cost housing than the poor who would benefit from it. As a result the opposition was allowed more influence than the poor. The news media were found to contribute little to community understanding of social problems.

Economic Role and Community Involvement of Business Executives

mining their degree of involvement in local community affairs? Studies of social class and social participation, of community decision-making processes, and more general analyses of the economic institution in modem society all have suggested that as one ascends the pyramid he becomes more involved in the organizational life of the local community.' Explanations for this association between economic position and community involvement have been of two general kinds. The first emphasizes the structural position of local economic dominants in community affairs and the second focuses upon the concept of corporate social responsibility2 and the attendant role conceptions of business executives. While there are many claims as to the primacy of the economic role in community involvement of executives, there have been few empirical attempts to ascertain the degree of local involvement actually explained by the economic role. Certainly businessmen are active in the local community. But how important is their economic role as compared to their other sociodemographic characteristics in accounting for variations in their activity? It is the purpose of this paper to discover the degree of local community participation explained by both the structural dimensions of the economic role and the executive-community role conception based on a national sample of business executives.

Community in Conflict: Family Planning in Metroville

ville community's decision-making process on the operation of the city's health system, or, more specifically, the operation of family-planning services. The analysis undertaken has two major aims. First, it examines how religious and social-political values and behavior within the community have produced action patterns that have limited the provision of voluntary family-planning services to low-income groups.4 Second, it examines the role of general social values in circumscribing particular action commitments. According to Talcott Parsons, values relating to health service present a problem of morality [which] concerns the state of the individual person . . . not with respect to his capacities as these are in-

National Economic Interest Groups and Policy Formation in the EEC

z One of the most fascinating aspects of the decision-making process in the European Economic Community is what Leon Lindberg has called the constant and complex interaction and interpenetration between Community and national institutions, policies, and processes.' To comprehend fully the background, evolution, and implications of major Community decisions, they must be analyzed in terms of interaction and interpenetration between the pursuit of goals by internal political forces within the member countries, the domestic politics of each member state, the interstate politics within the Community, and pressures exerted by third countries both on the national and Community level. This article will focus on a small but significant segment of this complex Community decision-making process, namely, the general strategies and techniques that influential national economic interest groups in the member states employ for the eliciting of favorable decisions and policies by the Community institutions. This discussion will concentrate on national interest groups and not on the European-level umbrella organizations such as COPA, UNICE, or