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This article reviews longstanding debates about the relationship between power over and power to – often posed as the tension between domination and emancipation. It then turns to several frameworks which integrate these approaches to inform strategies for social action. In particular, it focuses on recent empirical studies which apply one such framework, the ‘powercube’, to glean insights into how social actors navigate across multiple forms, spaces and levels of power. In so doing, we gain...

The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.

International Public Participation Models 1969 – 2020 provides an essential resource of 60 different models to better map public participation in practice and theory.

There is a growing hunger for more, and more meaningful, citizen participation in decisions that affect our lives. Across the world, calls for open government, workplace democracy, community empowerment are gaining support, as are innovative developments in deliberative democracy. The current COVID-19 pandemic makes these calls more pressing than ever, given the deepening inequalities it has caused and the complex challenges of building a progressive road out of the crisis. So, now more...

Democratic innovations are proliferating in politics, governance, policy, and public administration. These new processes of public participation are reimagining the relationship between citizens and institutions. This Handbook advances understanding of democratic innovations, in theory and practice, by critically reviewing their importance throughout the world. The overarching themes are a focus on citizens and their relationship to these innovations, and the resulting effects on political...

In a complex, globalised and rapidly changing world, power dynamics are multidimensional, constantly evolving, and full of complexity. The ‘powercube’ (Gaventa, 2006) is an approach to power analysis which can be used to examine the multiple forms, levels and spaces of power, and their interactions. Building on earlier work on power, and elaborated and popularised in collaboration with other colleagues through the web site powercube.net and numerous other resources, the powercube has been...

This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics. Rather than looking...

Research on the Information Society, the Digital Divide and Information and Communication Technologies for development

How and to what degree is the World Bank putting its new institutional citizen engagement (CE) commitments into practice? This question guides an independent assessment that the Accountability Research Center (ARC) at American University has undertaken as part of the Institute of Development Studies-led Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA) research programme’s investigation into how external actors can best support local processes of and conditions for empowerment and...

How digital technologies are shaping democratic information flow in Sub-Saharan Africa

What are the features, values, and practices of effective learning organizations? How do learning practices contribute to more effective programming? And, how can collaborations between academics, researchers and practitioners better support learning organizations in the global South?  These are just a few of the questions that a new global learning collaborative seeks to explore. In …

Local peacebuilding and global accountability -- The country context--Burundi from 1999 to 2014 -- Ingos in peacebuilding--globally unaccountable, locally adaptive -- International organizations in peacebuilding--globally accountable, locally constrained -- Bilateral development donors--accountable for global targets, not local change

Van Deth’s comprehensive ‘conceptual map of political participation’ has reinstated a lively debate about the concept of political participation, and provides some compelling solutions to it. However, an important question that has been raised is whether van Deth’s map actually achieves its main goal of unambiguously identifying and classifying emerging, complex types of participation, like online political activism – or lifestyle politics. To contribute to this debate, this article aims to...

This paper shares lessons from Nesta’s research into some of the pioneering innovations in digital democracy which are taking place across Europe and beyond

The article explores the moments wherein participatory approaches in climate change adaptation (CCA) policies contribute to reinforcing, rather than transforming, the underlying causes of vulnerability. Using the case of food insecure households in the district of Humla in northwestern Nepal, the study demonstrates that the same social and power relations that are driving local vulnerability dynamics, such as caste, gender, and access to social and political networks, also play important...

Research on the Information Society, the Digital Divide and Information and Communication Technologies for development

The aim of participatory development (PD) in the context of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development (ICT4D) is to empower underprivileged communities and disadvantaged segments of the stakeholders. The literature on ICT4D is replete with empirical evidence showing that ICT interventions often fail since they are often externally initiated, with very limited involvement from the affected (Heeks, 2002). Clearly, the principles and concepts of PD are relevant to...

Lessons from policy in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania

Learning how to communicate and work with different groups builds constituencies to support conservation aims. An analysis by USAID's research partner the American Museum of Natural History evaluated 148 references, selected through a rigorous systematic review process, to identify key lessons for stakeholder engagement. This briefer describes the analysis, which will soon be published in full.