Democracy as a transitional compass: women’s participation in South Africa and Kerala,India

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the attempts by the states in South Africa and Kerala to create spaces for public participation by specifically focusing on women’s involvement in local spaces. Democracy is a crucial part of any emancipatory future that seeks to challenge and overcome inequality. I show that both states have ‘invited’ participation by women in various ways, but that the transformative potential of this participation is limited by national political economy, bureaucratization, and the lack of political will. In South Africa, the invited spaces eventually transformed into avenues for delivery and in response the women in this study shifted to inventing ways to engage in development in their personal lives. By using a double comparison – South Africa over time and South Africa compared to India – I argue that transformative politics requires a combination of invented and invited spaces.     

The politics of global youth participation

This article critically examines increased opportunities for youth participation in global political affairs created by the United Nations and its member states in the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at three global youth conferences, this study demonstrates the operationalization of participatory governance, a current mode of global politics, that seeks to engage multi-stakeholders in a seemingly more democratic and egalitarian process. It investigates how the structure and culture of participation mechanisms found in international political processes limited youth engagement. Young people expressed both dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be their inability to participate meaningfully and their desire to fulfill their human right to participation. The author argues that this reflects the construction an ideal global youth-citizen today as marked by an individual’s exercise of compulsory participation as a self-governing and responsible subject. Participation is employed as a mode of governance so that young people may instrumentally advance thier life chances against the insecurities of social risks imposed on them in the retreat of state provisions. The study underscores the need to critically examine the institutionalization of political youth agency.     

Making sense of the politics of sanitation in Cape Town

Abstract

The paper examines the history and politics of sanitation and urban belonging and citizenship in Cape Town. It traces the cultural histories of waste and odour in order to reveal the embedding of liberal citizenship, as well as technology, in the body. We do this to make sense of why and how toilets and waste have become recent objects and instruments of struggle in Cape Town, and elsewhere. The paper shows that these political struggles did not arise from nowhere; their emergence is the outcome of historically and materially sustained contradictions that are fundamental to liberal governance.     

Public participation in infrastructure and construction projects in China: From an EIA-based to a whole-cycle process

Many governments world-wide are increasingly encouraging the involvement of interested individuals, groups and organisations in their public infrastructure and construction (PIC) projects as a means of improving the openness, transparency and accountability of the decision-making process and help improve the projects’ long-term viability and benefits to the community. In China, however, the current participatory mechanism at the project level exists only as part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process. With an increasing demand for PIC projects and social equality in China, this suggests a need to bring the participatory process into line with international practice.The aim of this paper, therefore, is to identify the weaknesses of EIA-based public participation in China and the means by which it may be improved for the whole lifecycle of PIC schemes. To do this, the results of a series of interviews with a diverse group of experts is reported which analyse the nature and extent of existing problems of public participation in EIA and suggestions for improvement. These indicate that the current level of participation in PIC projects is quite limited, particularly in the crucial earlier stages, primarily due to traditional culture and values, uneven progress in the adoption of participatory mechanisms, the risk of not meeting targets and lack of confidence in public competence. Finally, a process flowchart is proposed to guide construction practitioners and the community in general.     

Outsourcing public relations pedagogy: Lessons from innovation, management futures, and stakeholder participation

In this article, we advocate for innovation in public relations pedagogy by importing ideas and practices from four areas. The first area involves work on disruptive technology and education that applies lessons from Silicon Valley innovations to high school education. The second area considers how knowledge management and project management findings confirm the value of teaching as the cocreation of knowledge. The third draws parallels between the challenges of moving from traditional to future management and moving from traditional to future education. All three areas offer models for innovation by adopting a more improvisational, experimental, and risk-taking ethos in education. In the fourth area, we shift from theoretical advocacy to look at how these innovations feed into an example of public relations pedagogy as co-created stakeholder participation.     

Managing politics and storytelling: Meeting the challenge of upgrading informal housing in South Africa

Many in situ upgrade projects in developing countries fail. I tell the story of how one in South Africa (Oukasie) succeeded, both in the eyes of residents as well as the wider development community. I noticed that the residents of Oukasie managed to accomplish far more than other similar upgrades within the same timespan. Within just three years, from being ‘illegal’ and on the bucket sewage system, all households had their own water connection and toilet as well as access to a range of community facilities. The leadership of the community were getting job offers from the private-sector, and the former ‘whites-only’ town of Brits was beginning to play an integral part in Oukasie's development. I wanted to understand how this was all possible. My paper addresses this question and shows how, through using politics (e.g. political tactics and links to politicians) and storytelling, the community built a much more successful project than otherwise would have been the case. Throughout this paper I use Oukasie as a ‘model’ to demonstrate that successful in-situ upgrading is both feasible and desirable in the South African context, given the scarcity of government resources relative to the housing backlog. Oukasie, thus, becomes a vehicle for discussing a broader range of issues which are relevant to development projects in general and in situ upgrade projects in particular.     

Feminist praxis,citizenship and informal politics: Reflections on South Africa's anti-eviction campaign

This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also sheds light on the gender dynamics of the Campaign and how its patriarchal order is being destabilized. The AEC case study engages the pioneering feminist scholarship on citizenship that has embraced both formal and informal arenas of politics. The study points out the risk in constructing yet another binary relation between grassroots coping strategies (in invited spaces) and resistance strategies (in invented spaces). The article calls for a refinement of feminists' extended notion of politics, recognizing the oppositional practices of the poor in order to construct an inclusive citizenship. It argues that doing so better reflects the practices of the grassroots and furthers a progressive feminist praxis.     

Public Perceptions,Beliefs and Experiences of Fostering and Adoption: A National Qualitative Study in South Africa

In South Africa, rates of adoption remain low while the number of fostered children continually rises. Little is known about the public perceptions, beliefs and experiences that inform decisions to either foster or adopt in South Africa. This qualitative research explored these issues among a national sample of childless adults, biological parents, kin and non‐kin fostering parents and prospective and successful adopters. Fostering is driven predominantly by access to subsidies but is also informed by socio‐cultural beliefs. Low adoption rates are influenced by an absence of subsidies, poor access to quality adoptive services and a lack of information about adoption.     

Democracy and participation in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

Democracy is again under attack. Only a small minority, i.e. 19 out of 167 countries can be regarded as full democracies. This themed section with its six contributions is addressing the challenges from different angles: it starts with ‘Deliberative Democracy in the Real World. The contribution of the capability approach’ by Jean-Michel Bonvin, and is followed by György Széll’s ‘The Future of Cooperatives and Trade Unions: The Relevance for the Question of Democratization of Society’. ‘Public Participation and the Politics of Humiliation’ by Dasarath Chetty is the next one. Gloria Ostos conducts a case study of the application of the first international standard ISO 18091:2014 on Quality Management Systems in Local Government. Finally, Jo Morris-Ellis and Heinz Sünker address the issue of children politics, definitely the main issue for the future of democracy.     

Fostering global dialogue: Conceptualisations of children's rights to participation and protection

The children's rights and child protection sectors are at a critical juncture: will they evolve to reflect and respond to changing conceptualisations in the 21st century or will they continue to reproduce 19th- and 20th-century preoccupations with saving child victims? Informed by systematic reviews of the English- and Latin American academic literature in Spanish and Portuguese and key informant interviews with international stakeholders, this paper fosters global dialogue with some Global South and Global North perspectives about the interconnections of children's rights. It explores current conceptualisations of child participation and protection, and concludes that children's rights will only progress after recognition of limitations inherent to current conceptualisations.     

Room for manoeuvre: User participation in water resources management in Burkina Faso

Participation in natural resources management is widely promoted in sub‐Saharan Africa, but faces mounting criticism from social science scholars who rarely engage with it in practice. We use the notion of room for manoeuvre to reflect on a multi‐level participatory approach designed to support the Burkinabè Integrated Water Resources Management policy and propose ways of engaging constructively with local users and policy‐makers. Within an “invited space” of participation, water users’ room for manoeuvre was enhanced through the acquisition of new knowledge on the legal Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) framework. This allowed them to interact with decision‐makers and to extend their networks. Power imbalances were discussed, but this did not lead to modifying existing power structures that hinge on broader societal dynamics.     

Public Debt Sustainability in Africa: Building Resilience and Challenges Ahead

The increased access of African countries to international capital markets has put public debt sustainability at the forefront of the continent's policy agenda. Utilising the ‘stabilising primary‐balance’ approach, this article finds that the actual primary balances exceeded those required to keep public debt at the 2007 level in about half the countries studied, and in several cases, those needed to reduce public debt‐to‐GDP to sustainable thresholds. The interest rate‐growth differential (IRGD) drove sustainability, underscoring the importance of growth and borrowing for growth‐enhancing outlays. As the IRGDs are likely to narrow over the longer term, fiscal policies will need to play a greater role.     

Determinants of female labor force participation: A study of Seoul,South Korea, 1970–1980

This paper investigates the determinants of labor force participation of women living in male-headed households in Seoul, South Korea, at two points in time, 1970 and 1980. Analysis of data from the 1970 and 1980 Korean Population Censuses suggests that both women's educational level and the family economic status determine women's labor force participation in Seoul. Women with middle school education or above are more economically active than those with no education. Women from lower economic backgrounds are almost two to three times more likely to be employed than those in high-status families, controlling for age, number of children under 6, and marital status. However, this pattern is not found among women from the blue-collar wage-working families.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 meetings of the Population Association of America.     

Cultural intermediaries and the circuit of culture: The Digital Ambassadors project in Johannesburg,South Africa

The question raised by Cheney and Christensen (2001) as to “what a non-Western, non-managerial and non-rationalist form of public relations will look like” (p.182), together with the call made by Gregory (2014) for public relations practitioners (PRPs) to be active social change agents, motivated this paper. The aim of this research is to follow a culture-centred approach and apply the circuit of culture (Curtin & Gaither, 2005) to investigate the meanings that young people (aged 18 to 34), as cultural intermediaries, ascribe to their participation in a digital empowerment project implemented by the City of Johannesburg, South Africa. This research forms part of a larger, ongoing multi-disciplinary research project.The research highlights the complexity of projects of this nature, the wide variety of stakeholders involved, the significance of structure, the importance of training of cultural intermediaries, and the benefits such intermediaries gain from their involvement. A key finding is that self-development and financial benefit contribute significantly to the success of cultural intermediaries. This paper contributes to the field of public relations by providing an analysis of cultural intermediaries’ contribution to the circuit of culture as influenced not only by production and consumption but also by identity and regulation as seen in the way they represented the meaning created during their experience.     

Agency policy and the participation of children and young people in the child protection process

This article explores agency policy in relation to children's participation in the child protection process. This was done by examining policy documents and conference minutes and by interviewing social workers and conference chairs working in child protection in Wales. Issues and dilemmas surrounding the participation of children and young people in the child protection process are identified and examined. The lack of children's more direct participation was noted, but many agencies were taking action to inform themselves of children's views indirectly. Advocacy was being more frequently used, and highly valued where it was available, but did raise some role dilemmas. The essentially child‐unfriendly nature of child protection processes (particularly the conferences) was identified as a significant barrier to promoting children's voices. The contradiction of trying to promote children's direct participation in a process that is inherently not geared towards their direct involvement was noted. The total lack of children's input into service planning for child protection services was seen as significant. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disabling Africa: the power of depiction and the benefits of discomfort

Despite the fact that the vast majority of disabled people live in low and middle-income countries, the field of disability studies is dominated by research on disability in wealthy contexts. Although there are encouraging signs of this pattern changing, there are challenges to researchers about how to represent and think about disability in African contexts, and it is difficult not to reproduce unhelpful stereotypes. We use the example of an encounter we had with an expatriate Deaf South African to reflect on the complexities of representation facing people working on disability issues in Africa and what has been termed the Global South. We suggest that an appreciation of the productive value of discomfort about issues of representation may help move the field forward.     

Family participation in child protection

The paper summarizes a Department of Health funded research study of the extent to which parents and children were involved in the child protection work of seven English social services departments. The child protection process and the social work practice with a cohort of 220 consecutive cases is described for the period before the initial conference and the 6 months following it. The authors draw on interview data from parents, young people and social workers and on social work records to assess whether the process and practice were participatory and the extent to which family members were actually involved in the decisions and the work. They concluded that there was benefit for parents and children in attempts to involve them, even thought only 3% of 378 family members were rated as partners in the protection process and a further 13% were rated as participating to a considerable extent. There was a statistically significant association between the participation of family members and the interim outcomes for the parents and children being rated by the researchers as good or moderately good.     

Policy impact on Tibetan market participation

Since the Chinese government began implementing economic reforms in the late 1970s, China has undergone profound economic change and growth. Since then, associated policies have provided many business opportunities in Tibetan areas of China, but Tibetans are poorly equipped to respond to and take advantage of these opportunities. The factors restricting effective market participation are complex and difficult to assess. There are no easy answers. Many political, social, cultural and environmental factors explain the difficulties encountered by Tibetan communities. However, this paper argues that relevant economic development policy is among crucial factors explaining the inability of Tibetans to compete with non-Tibetan migrants.