Much of the literature on citizen participation in the budget process links the council-manager form of government with higher levels of citizen participation, assuming the council-manager form represents professional administration. This is contradictory to the reality that different forms of government have “borrowed” features from each other and many now have mixed forms of government (i.e.,...

Using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993, this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural South Africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in South Africa about poverty and its alleviation. Pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment, this pap...

We present our efforts of applying information visualization techniques to the domain of microseismic monitoring. Microseismic monitoring is a crucial process for a number of tasks related to oil and gas reservoir development, e.g., optimizing hydraulic fracturing operations and heavy-oil stimulation. Microseismic data has many challenging features including high dimensionality and uncertainty....

BACKGROUND Since 2012, the International Workshop on Participatory Surveillance (IWOPS) has served as an informal network to share best practices, consult on analytic methods, and catalyze innovation to advance the burgeoning method of direct engagement of populations in voluntary monitoring of disease. OBJECTIVE This landscape provides an overview of participatory disease surveillance system...

Research strategies which emphasize participation are increasingly used in health research. Breaking the linear mould of conventional research, participatory research focuses on a process of sequential reflection and action, carried out with and by local people rather than on them. Local knowledge and perspectives are not only acknowledged but form the basis for research and planning. Many of t...

Emerging forms of empowered participatory governance have generated considerable scholarly excitement, but critics continue to ask if such initiatives are “for real”: Are participatory governance processes sufficiently independent? Do citizen participants make good policy choices? An in-depth look at the case of the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform suggests that real citi...

Participatory budgeting has become a popular application of e-participation in Germany. About one hundred local governments have executed participatory budgets in the last year. Citizen participation in public budget planning is not formally requested by law in Germany. Also, the legal procedures to settle the budget of a local governments are not defined in detail. In consequence, different pr...

Issues associated with involvement of social program participants in program evaluation are analyzed. Although there seems to be a broad consensus of the need for participatory evaluation, the proposed rationales and concomitant benefits to evaluation practice appear to be quite diverse. Key issues include the rationale for "stakeholder" participation, definition of the "stakeholder," definitio...

Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning of applications of GIS which grant legitimacy to indigenous geographical knowledge as well as to ‘offi cial’ spatial data. By incorporating various forms of community participation these newer framings of Geographical Information Systems as ‘Participatory GIS’ (PGIS) offer a response to the critiques of GIS which were prevalent in the 1990s. This paper r...

INFLUENCE OF PARTICIPATORY MONITORING AND EVALUATION APPROACHES ON THE PRACTICE OF QUALITY ASSURANCE IN KENYA SECONDARY SCHOOLS ONDIEKI, MORARA GEORGE and MATONDA, NYABIAGE EMMAH Graduate students University of Nairobi P.O. Box 902 Kisii40200 Abstract This study sought to establish whether quality assurance as currently practiced in learning institutions in Kenya is a form of participatory moni...