In this paper, we examine the role of time in shaping decision-making processes in a town meeting, a type of legislative body common in many New England towns. Town meetings are one of the oldest and most democratic institutions of local governance in the United States, and they provide a rich arena in which to investigate how large groups of people convene and make decisions together. A mixed-...

UrbanSim is a large-scale simulation system that models the development of urban areas over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to help citizens and local governments make more informed decisions about major transportation and land use issues, by projecting the long-term consequences of the different alternatives. Citizens often bring strongly held values to such decisions, for example ...

Forum Theatre (FT), a participatory improvised theatre form, raises consciousness, enables debate and critical reflection, and encourages a democratic form of knowledge production that engages the audience in their own learning and unlearning. I used FT as a platform to understand how 15to 18-year-old learners, in a co-educational school in the Free State, experience and respond to heterosexism...

Quantitative evaluations might be insufficient for measuring the impact of interventions promoting the right to health, particularly in their ability to contribute to a greater understanding of processes at the individual, community, and larger population level through which certain results are obtained. This paper discusses the application of a qualitative approach, the "most significant chang...

In most parts of the world, political systems which utilize authoritative rule and mostly employ top-down decision-making processes are slowly transcending towards democratic norms. Information Technology Systems have been identified and adopted as one of the most efficient vehicles for appropriate, transparent and inclusive / participatory decision making. Zambia has shown a higher propensity ...

Social animals routinely are challenged to make consensus decisions about movement directions and routes. However, the underlying mechanisms facilitating such decision-making processes are still poorly known. A prominent question is how group members participate in group decisions. We addressed this question by examining how flocks of homing pigeons (Columba livia) decide their homing direction...

This article discusses the idea of city as a platform. The analysis focuses on the forms and implications of citizen involvement in publicly-supported participatory innovation platforms that facilitate urban economic development in the welfare society context. The discussion opens with a review of the smart city discourse, which in the context of economic development policy translates into citi...

BACKGROUND In a participatory approach to health and development interventions, defining and measuring community mobilisation is important, but it is challenging to do this effectively, especially at scale. METHODS A cross-sectional, participatory monitoring tool was administered in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 across a representative sample of 25 community-based groups (CBGs) formed under the Ava...

In this article, I introduce the Dewey-Lippmann democracy debate of the 1920s as a vehicle for considering how social theory can enhance the empirical viability of participatory democratic theory within the current context of advanced capitalism. I situate within this broad theoretical framework the theories of Habermas and Dewey. In the process, I argue (a) that while Dewey largely failed to r...

Scholars have recognized that a recent increase in the ways citizens participate beyond the electoral arena may be a promising avenue of renewal for citizen participation. In this article we test the theory that different kinds of citizenship norms motivate some citizens to specialize in electoral-oriented activities (e.g. voting), while others specialize in non-institutionalized activities (e....