This article argues that democracy requires citizens to have confidence that their interests and concerns will be seriously considered by their elected representatives. Drawing on a case study of one municipality, the ability of citizens in small communities to have local issues considered by Council was examined. The nature of the municipality, the Council structure, and the ethos that required Councilors to take a “corporate” view of representation—representing the municipality as a whole rather than any particular community—were all factors limiting citizens' confidence that their concerns would be taken seriously by Council. This shortcoming in democracy at the local level is only partially offset by the municipality's Community Consultative Bodies. These aim to allow local communities to bring their issues before Council, however they operate unevenly and in parts of this municipality and in many other municipalities do not exist at all.

Throughout Latin America, the relationship between government and civil society organizations (CSOs) has been characterized by opposition, substitution, and submission; and, the incipient path to cooperation is barely noticeable. For their part, participatory public policies make sense within a theory of democratic governance. Democratic governance seeks two propositions: (a) participation from other social actors will give rise to more efficient government action; and (b) citizen support will emerge from the said government action. This paper criticizes the current relationships between the governments and CSOs in this region. In addition, it explores the potential strategies that could be adopted were there a cooperation between these two entities. The paper is supported by theoretical literature as well as by a revision of some cases of participatory public policies that are currently active in the region. The paper proposes that the strategies of opposition to government and government substitution have to be abandoned in this region. The paper focuses on civil organizations (CSOs). It is true that they do not constitute the entirety of civil society; however, they are frequently the most organized compared with other civic actors, such as social movements, families, and individual initiatives. CSOs form only a part of the diversity known as civil society; however, they significantly contribute to the discussion about the public good, and very often they participate in providing such goods. The future of participatory democracy in Latin America is related to our ability to achieve a more complete participation of CSOs in the entire process of participatory public policies—from the formation of public agendas to their design, implementation, and evaluation.

Recently, a focus on democratic innovations emphasising an increasing and deepening citizen participation in political decision-making has been evident. Deliberative Walks offer a participatory–deliberative process in which the participants, by deliberating in small groups and joining facilitated walks, tackle a complex policy issue that has highly intertwined social and physical dimensions. Deliberative Walks builds on the principle that two participatory methods, citizens’ juries and development walks, are combined. Deliberative Walks are influenced by place-based learning. And like in outdoor pedagogy, learning by moving between the abstract and concrete, as well as transforming experience into knowledge through reflection and communication, is encouraged. We analyse an implemented education-oriented version, Studentlab Deliberative Walks, with nineteen university students. The results, based on questionnaires, interviews and essays, indicate that it is fruitful to experience an issue with all senses. The development walk was seen as more important than the citizens’ jury. Participating in Deliberative Walks promoted inclusion in the decision-making process, enhanced learning, boosted self-confidence and developed feelings of empowerment.

Aim of this article is to address the issue of citizen participation and democratic engagement within a specific area—slum upgrading—presenting and theoretically discussing the approach of an international network called Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), which represents member federations of urban poor and homeless groups from about 30 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The article addresses the model of intervention embraced by the network, the activities carried out, its philosophy, etc., mainly focusing on the way it envisions and pursues the engagement of local governments in upgrading slum dwellers living conditions. The basic idea within SDI is that the lack of participation by the urban poor has historically been one of the major obstacles to achieve real development: either the government or the donors’ agencies, in fact, usually treat the poor as beneficiaries of someone else’s actions, thus undervaluing their knowledge and skills. Radically opposing this view, SDI interprets its role not as an intermediary agency of slum dwellers in the engagement/negotiation with local governments but rather as an “enabling tool” of direct negotiation between the urban poor and the public institutions. SDI’s most relevant feature, in fact, is surely the genuine leading role assigned to the slum dwellers grassroots organizations.

This article presents the findings of a research project on the internal and external governance of associations of immigrants in Andalucía, Spain. It is divided into three descriptive, interpretative parts. The first lists and analyzes the sociocultural motives behind initiatives for the formation of associations of immigrants, including initiatives related with the transnational context, initiatives stemming from a sense of solidarity and altruism, and initiatives arising from the need to coexist with and become integrated into the host society. The second part of the article focuses on the types of activities such associations organize, their resources and their strategic management practices. The third part looks at the ways in which associations are connected with the third sector in Andalucía, with particular reference to two dimensions of the issue, inter-association relationships and community participation. The findings throw some light on the accountability, institutional support, and networking needs of associations of immigrants. A series of suggestions is also presented concerning points generally linked with the concept of associative governance, such as good management practices and the concept of participatory governance as mechanisms for including civil society in policy and program design.

Each year thousands of immigrants and refugees begin their lives in new places, speaking new languages, and facing new challenges. Challenges include access to health/mental care, education, transportation, and employment. Researchers and practitioners frequently focus on challenges of newcomers and their deficits in meeting needs for self-sufficiency. This study explores newcomers’ giving back and emphasizes an untapped reservoir of strength and capacity. Based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 54 immigrants and refugees, themes identified include (1) a desire to maintain ethnic identity and connection; (2) ethnic community as an extension of family; (3) a sense of duty and obligation; and (4) measure of achieved success. Researchers and practitioners should shift their view to recognize the strengths and capacities of newcomers who give back to their communities.

Since the late 2000s, activists involved in conflicts over urban space and municipal budgets in a number of Czech cities have had an increasing tendency to enter the formal political realm in order to disrupt non-transparent ties between politicians and private business, and to narrow the gap between public administration and citizens. According to critical urban theorists, similar reformist strategies tend to end up co-opted by the status quo and are ineffective in ending neoliberal urbanization. This paper shows that in a context affected by the communist past and a long tradition of non-participatory political culture, the transformative potential of radical approaches may be diminished, whereas reformist strategies, such as increasing government transparency and institutionalizing participatory practices, can be more productive in terms of taming haphazard development and the extraction of municipal assets, and even the potential to reduce the democratic deficit within their cities.

There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations. It involves (1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors’ possibilities; (2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value bases; and (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation.

In Latin America, the emergence of a series of civil society initiatives aimed at citizen engagement for social accountability and democratization in local governance has been a novelty since the 2000s. One of these initiatives is the Latin American Network for Fair, Democratic and Sustainable Cities and Territories, which congregates over 70 initiatives in 10 countries. This article describes and analyzes the nature of civil society initiatives, their repertoires of actions, and their incidence in processes of transparency and accountability, citizen participation, public policies, and local governance. The research was conducted between 2012 and 2016, including a questionnaire with 23 initiatives in 8 countries, interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. The results show the emergence of cross-sectional and systemic accountability, counting on collaboration and co-production of information and control between citizens and government agencies.

This article presents the results of a two-year nationwide study presenting the structure and methodology utilized for the National Survey on Solidarity and Volunteer (ENSAV), one of the first national volunteer surveys ever undertaken in Mexico. This study is designed in two distinct segments to be able to engage all formal and informal volunteering in Mexico. The first segment is the analysis of a nationwide survey which presents the main data and findings plus the analysis of these numbers. The second segment reveals some of the main motivations that individuals have for giving and for participating both within and outside of group settings. The national nature of this research project reveals interesting patterns of volunteerism and citizen action by gender, location, and motivation, plus various forms of solidary participation that may be useful guides in the prevailing need to build and strengthen civil society organizations in Mexico and in this region of the world. These results provide an informed basis for decision making in the government public policy arena and reveal distinct and diverse ways for established CSOs to promote and enable citizens for more effective participation in community issues (Butcher, Springer, 2010).

In this case study, we aimed to investigate residents’ agency through their participation in the development of their residential area in the city of Espoo, Finland. With the aid of seven themes, we identified by thematic analysis five types of residents in terms of agency: free floaters, home troops and helpers, representative information brokers, informed reviewers, and change agents. Relational agency, rooted from the cultural-historical activity theory, necessitated recognizing the available resources, understanding the motives of others, and collaborating in joint activities. The results of 30 interviews showed that residents are willing to participate, and they need space and structure to exploit their relational agency in order to build common interests in their neighbourhood. The findings are discussed with reference to the potential of residents’ agency while participating in neighbourhood governance and volunteering. Our study contributes to the understanding of residents’ relational agency in community development and in volunteering.

In the last decades deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) have gained significant attention as tools to reform and complement representative democracies, with many governments adopting them. Political representatives, though cautious about power dynamics, seem moderately supportive of extending these procedures. However, little is known about how this predisposition is affected by the institutional design of these procedures and how this might affect their adoption. This paper addresses this gap by presenting results from a conjoint experiment in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The study, involving 716 representatives, examines how different attributes of deliberative procedures influence decisions to fund their adoption at the local and European levels. Findings show that the binding nature of DMPs is less important than composition characteristics, such as involving representatives in deliberations with citizens and organized civil society. Differences in preferences between local and European levels suggest awareness of challenges in scaling up DMPs.

Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.

How should a democratic assembly be designed to attract large and diverse groups of citizens? We addressed this question by conducting a population survey in three communities with institutionalized participatory deliberative democracy in Switzerland. To examine participatory disposition in light of both individual characteristics and design features of the assembly that citizens contemplate joining, the survey comprised a conjoint experiment in which each respondent was asked to indicate his or her likelihood of participating in democratic assemblies with varying design features. The main result is that design features emphasizing the communitarian character of the assembly increase citizens’ willingness to participate, especially among disengaged citizens. Moreover, citizens were found to be less attracted by both very consensual and very adversarial meeting styles. Rather, we found meeting styles combining both controversy and consensus to be most favorable to assembly turnout. The implication is that practitioners of participatory or deliberative democracy must engage in community-building to foster turnout and inclusiveness in democratic assemblies.

Deliberative minipublics—participatory processes combining civic lottery with structured deliberation—are increasingly presented as a solution to address a series of problems. Whereas political theory has been prolific in conceiving their contributions, it remains unclear how the people organizing minipublics in practice view their purposes, and how these conceptions align with the theory. This paper conducts a thematic analysis of the reports of all the minipublics convened in Belgium between 2001 and 2021 (n = 51) to map whether and how justifications coincide with the theory. The analysis reveals an important gap: minipublics are in practice predominantly presented as contributions to policymaking, while more deliberative functions remain peripheral. Some common practical purposes also remain under-theorized, in particular their capacity to bridge the gap between citizens and politics. This desynchronization, combined with a plethora of desired outcomes associated with minipublics, indicates the creation of a minipublic bubble which inflates their capacity to solve problems.