Participatory Reforms Research Articles

Land Access and Corruption Practices in the Peri-Urban Areas of Tanzania: A Review of Democratic Governance Theory

The level of corruption practices in the process of accessing land in peri-urban areas is agreeably enormous in Tanzania. The Democratic Governance Theory (DGT) anticipated curbing corruption in land related issues through advocating equality, equity, transparency and rule of law among others. This study aims to find out the extent at which the Democratic Governance Theory is upheld in Tanzania in a bid to fight corruption in the entire process of accessing land among the peri-urban dwellers. The study was conducted in Dar es Salaam City and deployed a case study methodology approach. Primary data employed household survey using questionnaire and in-depth interview with key informants where as secondary data collected includes government reports, research reports, books and articles. Findings from the study reveal that, despite emphasis of DGT’s by the Government of Tanzania corruption is still serious problem in land accessibility. Land accessibility procedure was seen to be complicated, non-transparent and too bureaucratic. Lastly, anti-corruption agencies were ineffective and inefficient, thus fail to check corrupt practices in the land circles. The study concluded that DGT has not adequately helped the country in the fight against corruption. The Government of Tanzania should therefore, consider comprehensive and participatory reforms in land tenure regime, land accessibility procedure and anti-corruption agencies. It is imperative to integrate modern information technology in the process of accessing land, so as to reduce frequent contact between land seekers and government officers.

The Politics of Conservation: Sonaha, Riverscape in the Bardia National Park and Buffer Zone, Nepal

This paper problematises the recent participatory turn in nature conservation policy and practices through an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of the marginalised Sonaha (indigenous people of the region of Bardia where the national park is located) in relation to the conservation discourses, policies and practices of the Bardia National Park authorities in the Nepalese lowland. Since the mid-1990s, the country's conservation thinking and policy paradigms have shifted away from an earlier protectionist and fortress conservation focus towards more participatory approaches. However, for the Sonaha who are historically and culturally embedded in and derive their livelihoods from the riverscape in and around the Park, the pre-existing discourses and practices of strict nature conservation still impact adversely on their everyday lives. The paper argues that participatory reform, despite its strengths, has nevertheless reinforced the old conservation paradigm and hegemonic conservation discourses that normalised conservation violence and the marginalisation of the Sonaha. Based on critical ethnographic work with the Sonaha, we present a political ecology critique of conservation approaches. A case for rethinking contestations between indigenous peoples and national park managements is postulated.

Reforming governance under authoritarianism: motivations and pathways of local participatory reform in the People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACTMany authoritarian regimes use participatory political reform to maintain control over the societies under their rule and survive global waves of democratization. Recent studies of transitional governance have underscored the importance and intricacy of institutional reform; however, no consensus has been reached on an explanation of the dynamism that shapes institutional reforms under non-democratic systems. Why do authoritarian apparatchiks reform their institutions of governance? How can the varied pathways of these reforms be explained? Post-Deng China provides an ideal laboratory in which to study these issues. Since the 1990s, growing tensions between the Leninist polity and a gradually opened society have compelled local governments in China to test a vast set of participatory reforms. In an examination of three major local participatory budgeting reforms in China, this article maps the main pathways – representation, consultation, and transparency – of these recent sub-national participatory reforms implemented by the incumbent regime, and explores the driving forces that sculpt a reformist model over the alternatives. By introducing an “incentive-contingent framework”, this article sketches out the “repertoire” of participatory reforms in the authoritarian governance of China and suggests an explanatory framework for the variation in the strategies and forms of such institutional innovations.

How “Participatory Governance” Strengthens Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Electoral Authoritarian Oaxaca, Mexico

Research on the impact of participatory institutions in Latin America has not yet examined how they work in authoritarian settings. National autocrats in Mexico implemented participatory reforms during that country's national electoral authoritarian regime. Building on research on political decentralization in authoritarian regimes, I argue that participatory institutions can be used to channel citizen demands and to incorporate citizens into authoritarian systems, thereby strengthening authoritarian rule. However, following research on democratic participatory governance, I also argue that participatory institutions will work better in this regard when designed from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Statistical analysis of patterns of municipal-level electoral authoritarian support in Mexico shows that bottom-up-designed participatory institutions implemented during electoral authoritarian rule strengthened local political control to a greater extent than top-down-designed political systems. The study supports research revealing the anti-democratic effects of participatory institutions in democratic Latin American nations.

Social capital and community representation: How multiform networks promote local democracy in Los Angeles

This paper examines the variant roles that specific forms of networked-based social capital play in supporting the democratic functions of a neighbourhood governance network in Los Angeles. A significant body of empirical work has demonstrated the positive role that social capital plays in the functioning of civil society, but there has been less attention to the manner in which different types of network-based social capital promote support efficacy of multifaceted civic organisations. This paper utilises network measures from a survey of the members of a neighbourhood governance network in Los Angeles to explore the associations between types of network ties – within group; among groups; to different external stakeholders – and perceived self-efficacy of the member associations. We find that internal cohesion, or bonding social capital, promotes both advisement of city officials and promotion of local participation, suggesting that this network-based resource is fungible. Other network structures appear to have value in different contexts, in that stakeholder connections promote participation, while bridging social capital is associated with perceived success in advising city officials. The findings suggest that architects of participatory reform should be attentive to system goals in establishing supports for varying forms of system relationships.

Participatory policy making under authoritarianism: the pathways of local budgetary reform in the People’s Republic of China

Citizen participation in policy making is essential in democracies, but there is much less understanding of the process and substance of it in non-democratic states. Taking local budgetary process as an example, this article compares three pathways of participatory reform undertaken by the communist regime in China, namely the representative pathway, the consultative pathway and the transparency pathway. All three are initiated and administered by the local governments, but differ in a number of crucial aspects from the level of institutionalisation to the form of state–citizenry interaction. These three pathways provide directions the Party-state might consider for nationwide policy reform.

Participatory Practices in Organizations

AbstractThe literature on participatory practices in organizations has been less coherent and more limited to subspecialties than the literature on bureaucracy in organizations – despite a number of celebrated studies of participation in 20th century American sociology. Due to the practical nature of participatory reforms and the ambiguity of participation as a concept, attempts to review participatory knowledge have a tendency to focus on refining definitions and clarifying frameworks within subfields. This article instead provides a broad thematic overview of three different types of research on participation in organizations, all critical to an understanding of today's dramatic expansion of participatory practices across a variety of organizations. Classic research studied participation as dynamic and central to organizational legitimacy. Institutional design research has focused on participation as a stand‐alone governance reform with promising empowerment potential, but mixed results in domains such as health care, environmental politics, and urban planning. Finally, recent research seeks to place participatory practices in the context of shifting relationships between authority, voice, and inequality in the contemporary era. The article concludes with suggestions for building on all three categories of research by exploring what is old and new in the 21st century's changing participatory landscape.

The contribution of Stuart Hall to analyzing educational policy and reform

This article focuses on the contribution of Stuart Hall to the study of educational policy and reform, using the experience of the Citizen School initiative in Porto Alegre, Brazil as a concrete example. This experience was a participatory educational reform implemented during the 16 years of the Workers' Party tenure in Porto Alegre's municipal administration. Hall's concept of articulation and his particular use of concepts such as ideology, discourse, common sense, and hegemony lay the foundation for the theoretical framework that provides a potent lens to analyze the complexity of educational policy and reform. In particular, this assemblage of concepts offers a vantage point to understand a counter-hegemonic initiative such as the Citizen School, because it helps to situate this experience as a particular historical articulation of discursive practices both connected to the recreation of common sense and anchored in a particular material context. First, the article will briefly contextualize the Citizen School experience. It will then show how Hall's concepts develop a complex theory to analyze complex phenomena such as educational policy and reform, in particular the Porto Alegre experience.

From Participatory Reform to Social Capital: Micro‐Motives and the Macro‐Structure of Civil Society Networks

AbstractAlthough a wide‐ranging literature explores the favorable effects of social capital, it is only relatively recently that systematic attention has been directed to the manner in which social networks emerge and the consequent implications for civic engagement and collaborative governance. This article employs advanced social network statistical models to examine civic network emergence following a participatory reform in Los Angeles. Findings suggest that the reform fostered a number of favorable network attributes supportive of democratic participation. At the same time, subtle but ubiquitous effects of socioeconomic sorting had the unintended and undesirable effect of elevating higher‐status actors within the emergent civic network. These findings suggest that macro‐level policy interventions are required to foster the development of ties that promote cross‐talk among socioeconomically distinct community groups.

Civil Society from the Inside Out Community, Organization and the Challenge of Political Influence

Civil Society from the Inside Out Community, Organization and the Challenge of Political Influence

Participatory Approaches to Socio-Economic Rights Adjudication: Tentative Lessons from South African Evictions Law

This article explores the potential of participatory modes of adjudicating socio-economic rights to mitigate the democratic and distributive deficits of adjudication, particularly in the context of the structural reforms required to fulfil the positive duties imposed by these rights. It traces a particular application of a participatory model of adjudication through the doctrine and remedy of meaningful engagement which has emerged in the context of South African evictions law. The benefits of meaningful engagement in advancing direct participation by communities and organisations in the processes of socio-economic rights realisation are considered. However, attention is also drawn to the ways in which engagement orders can limit participatory systemic reforms that advance the normative goals of these rights. The article is intended as a contribution to the broader global debate on models of participatory adjudication in the context of socio-economic rights.

The Crooked Line: From Populist Mobilization to Participatory Democracy in Chávez-Era Venezuela

This article challenges the widely held view that populist mobilization and participatory democracy are incompatible. Ethnographic data from Chavez-era Venezuela show that while populist mobilization cannot directly generate participatory democracy, it can set in motion a process that indirectly leads to this result: By creating but failing to fulfill expectations for participatory democracy and falling short in other ways, a poorly performing local populist regime can precipitate a grassroots backlash that, under certain circumstances, can lead to the election of a post-populist regime with the interest and ability to successfully implement participatory reform. My data show that this can occur in municipalities led by the Left or Center-Right, complicating the idea that successful participatory democracy requires a Left party.

Oligarchy or Elite Democracy? Aristotle and Modern Representative Government

Theories of elite democracy claim to show how representative institutions can govern in the common interest and maintain the confidence of the citizenry. Critics have brought attention to the problem of inequality in representative systems, but usually in terms of a participatory concept of democracy. Instead, this article turns to Aristotle to evaluate representative government in terms of moderation and stability that should be favorable to the claims of elite democracy. Even allowing for a moderate degree of inequality, representative government should be considered a form of oligarchy. From this perspective, a wide range of audiences (not just participatory democrats) can recognize a crisis of political inequality and the need for participatory reforms.

Outsiders inside

The article examines how court professionals interact with and manage victims in the wake of victim participatory reforms instituted within an adversarial legal model. Analysis is based on an examination of interviews with legal and allied professionals ( n = 36) and victims-turned-activists ( n = 7) from four jurisdictions in a US state about their experiences following implementation of legislation that expanded victims’ participatory rights in legal proceedings. An examination of the strategies described in the interviews reveals that legal and allied professionals actively manage victims’ participation throughout the legal process by using creative means to protect them from the sometimes onerous effects of participation while also meeting institutional needs, albeit with varying levels of success. Four strategies—demystification, management of emotions, victim-shielding and strategic exclusion—are discussed and the limits to their efficacy are considered. Future theoretical and policy implications for the practice of victim participation in adversarial legal systems are also addressed.

Counteracting hegemonic powers in the policy process: critical action research on Nepal’s forest governance

Confronting hegemonic power in the policy process remains a formidable challenge. Critical inquiry and civic resistance have been seen as two possible solutions to address this challenge. However, how and to what extent critical inquiry tackles this challenge is rarely explored. This article outlines a Critical Action Research (CAR) approach and then discusses how this approach was put into practice in Nepal’s forest policy processes during 2000–11. It demonstrates the potential and limitations of a civil-society-based critical inquiry in the context of a centralized system of forest governance facing pressures for participatory reform. This use of a CAR approach aimed to tackle three forms of power – that exercised by the state forest authority; that of the international development agencies; and that of the national political decision-makers – in Nepal’s forest policy processes. Finally, the article identifies theoretical and methodological issues that were demonstrated in this engagement with the policy process.

Exploring the impact of mass cultural changes on the patterns of democratic reform

In this article, a typology of reforms most suitable for Western democracies is built using two dimensions. These are the aggregative–integrative dimension and the indirect–direct dimension. Using a data set of reforms, consisting of 21 democracies, reforms in the last two decades are categorized as either pendulum, consensus, voter or participatory reforms. In the second part of this article, it is explored whether patterns of reforms follow mass-level cultural changes in four egalitarian societies. Following grid-group cultural typologies some of the patterns of democratic change anticipated are: that pendulum reforms are accompanied by changes towards a more atomistic culture, consensus reforms are associated with hierarchical societies, voter reforms are guided by accelerated individualism, and finally, that participatory reforms match increasingly egalitarian societies. This article concludes that these expectations have not been met. Elites are trying to restore the slump of the hierarchical culture and with it the consensus democratic model despite the resulting mismatch with mass cultures.

The Political Economy of Participatory Democracy in Brazil: A Case Study of Lages, 1977–1982

J. Ricardo Tranjan’s “The Political Economy of Participatory Democracy in Brazil: A Case Study of Lages, 1977–1982” presents a historical, political-economic analysis of one of the precursory participatory municipal administrations in Brazil in the city of Lages, Santa Catarina. Tranjan considers how capitalist development may spur democratization processes by altering the balance of class power in favour of subordinate classes. This study of the Lages case demonstrates that including popular participation in local government was, at one point, a deliberate political move against one sector of the local ruling class, and was made possible by shifts in interclass power that resulted from changes in structural conditions. Tranjan’s political-economic analyses help us better understand the motivations of those pushing participatory reforms, the challenges they face, and the format of participatory initiatives.

Providing Undergraduate Science Partners for Elementary Teachers: Benefits and Challenges

Undergraduate college "science partners" provided content knowledge and a supportive atmosphere for K-5 teachers in a university-school professional development partnership program in science instruction. The Elementary Science Education Partners program, a Local Systemic Change initiative supported by the National Science Foundation, was composed of four major elements: 1) a cadre of mentor teachers trained to provide district-wide teacher professional development; 2) a recruitment and training effort to place college students in classrooms as science partners in semester-long partnerships with teachers; 3) a teacher empowerment effort termed "participatory reform"; and 4) an inquiry-based curriculum with a kit distribution and refurbishment center. The main goals of the program were to provide college science students with an intensive teaching experience and to enhance teachers' skills in inquiry-based science instruction. Here, we describe some of the program's successes and challenges, focusing primarily on the impact on the classroom teachers and their science partners. Qualitative analyses of data collected from participants indicate that 1) teachers expressed greater self-confidence about teaching science than before the program and they spent more class time on the subject; and 2) the college students modified deficit-model negative assumptions about the children's science learning abilities to express more mature, positive views.

Deliberative Innovation to Different Effect: Consensus Conferences in Denmark, France, and the United States

Democratic reformers are attracted by the role that advisory forums composed of lay citizens can play in public consultation on complex policy issues (such as participatory technology assessment). Using a comparative study of consensus conferences on the issue of genetically modified food in Denmark, France, and the United States, the authors show that the potential of such deliberative “mini‐publics” is quite different in different sorts of political system. They attend to the mode of establishment, perceived legitimacy, policy impact, and influence on public debate of the forum in each case. In actively inclusive Denmark,mini‐publics are deployed in integrative fashion; in exclusive France, in managerial fashion; and in the passively inclusive United States, in advocacy fashion. Proponents and practitioners of deliberative participatory reforms should take into account the constraints and opportunities revealed by this analysis and attend to the different roles that mini‐publics might play in different political systems.

Path-dependency in plant breeding: Challenges facing participatory reforms in the Ethiopian Sorghum Improvement Program

Participatory plant breeding (PPB) seeks to involve farmers more closely in crop improvement in order to improve breeding impact. While PPB aims to reform breeding practice, there has been little analysis of the current practice breeding institutions. Such an analysis is necessary, both to understand why a breeding programme works the way it does, and to assess the possibilities of for reforms. This paper develops theories of path-dependency, social construction of technology, and actor-networks to analyse the historical development of the Ethiopian Sorghum Improvement Program (ESIP), a long-running and sophisticated public-sector effort whose outputs have had limited adoption. This analysis explores choices in technology development, the social networks influencing them, and the possibility that established choices become stabilized in a pathway that resists changes to different lines of research and technology development. Applying this analysis to ESIP helps to understand the path-dependency of sorghum breeding, showing how early choices around agroecological classifications, germplasm use, and F 1 hybrid development became ‘locked-in’, consequently resisting change. Technical constraints, breeding routines, and actor networks all reinforce particular choices from the past, as does the centralized organization of the ESIP team. Most PPB efforts assume that poor breeder awareness of the traits farmers desire is the main reason for low impact, and thus concentrate on addressing this gap. This study points to more fundamental reasons for poor impact, and indicates that institutional change in breeding is unlikely to emerge from a PPB intervention focusing on selection criteria alone. In order to be lasting, reforms need to recognise technical pathways, strengthen the voice of farmers or other beneficiary groups, and engage with dominant policy narratives. This highlights the value of analysing breeding institutions before designing breeding reforms, and the utility of path-dependency for such an analysis.