The history of community psychology in Italy is briefly reviewed. The field has developed extensively in universities and applied settings over the past 30 years. This issue presents 5 recent examples from different regions of Italy of preventive and other community psychological intervention studies. They include an evaluation of a program to increase the independent mobility of children walki...

The present paper focuses on the development of an integrated assessment model that embeds the web dimension and aims at increasing awareness in society, especially on environmental issues. The model incorporates features that make it capable of promoting participatory planning procedures in dealing with environmental problems. The first part of the paper presents the notion of both Integrated ...

This paper is based on recent experience gained from working on the Huascaran National Park Tourism Management Plan, the first tourism plan in a Peruvian protected area. This experience suggested that ecotourism can be an effective conservation mechanism when designed within a participatory framework. This paper presents the context of the planning process including important contextual informa...

Information technology offers new potentials of citizen participation in urban planning. The essential tasks to achieve with the use of new media are: providing a communication platform which suppresses a barrier of non-professionalism, allowing for distant contacts and enabling participatory process management. The paper contains a review of experiments and prototypes of different IT applicati...

Our research group “Participatory local community” (Palco) presented three years ago, at the Prato conference, our first paper on CI and urban planning. Since then, we have continued to conduct research on, with and by communities in which CI is being applied. As our research has produced a set of varying results and concepts around the use of CI, we wished to conduct a meta-analysis of our wor...

Many forest planning situations are complex; multiple criteria of different natures have to be considered and several stakeholders or social groups may be involved. An approach that is increasingly used in these complex situations is the combination of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and participatory planning. A crucial part of MCDA processes involving more than one decision maker i...

— This paper examines the linkage between mobilization and elite capture in participatory institutions using a randomized experiment in Kenya. In the treatment group, an environmental organization mobilized individuals to attend a participatory local government planning meeting. Mobilization had a large and significant effect on citizen participation. Despite this effect, mobilization did not l...

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of online games to encourage public participation in urban planning. Its theoretical foundations are based on previous work in public participatory geographical information systems (PP GISs), play and games, with a special focus on serious games. Serious games aim to support learning processes in a new, more playful way. We developed the conc...