Institutionalising Public Deliberation in Public Policy Agenda Setting: The Case of the Sustainable Communities Act (2007)

The thesis argues that responsive governance can be achieved through institutions that increase civic influence upon policy agendas. Participatory-deliberative processes (PDPs) are understood to offer mechanisms for democratic responsiveness. However, the ways in the outcomes of (PDPs) can be linked to policy making has received little attention, especially at higher governance tiers. The thesis analyses a PDP set up to influence central government policy agendas in the UK; the Sustainable Communities Act (SCA) (2007).The SCA was selected for its analytically relevant features. It differs from other PDPs for a combination of three reasons: (a) it was specifically designed to allow citizens to identify policy problems, develop policy proposals and influence agendas; (b) it operated across governance levels, connecting local participation to national policy development; and (c) it institutionalised a link to the policy process. The thesis aims to evaluate the processes through which proposals were developed and integrated within policy development, with a view to assessing impacts upon ambitions for more responsive governance. The analysis finds achievements such as the importance of reflexive agenda setting processes that allow participants to explore and (re)define problems, as well as the realisation of a form of responsiveness characterised by a deliberative, rather than a causal, relation between input and output. However, modest achievements are marred by important problems. First, proposal development processes were prone to ‘capture’ by the political priorities of local authorities and interest group representatives. In this respect, the analysis concludes that the SCA often resembled a ‘lobbying tool’ for local elites. Second, when it came to integrating proposals within policy development, SCA proposals were subsumed by the policy development, electoral and legislative cycles of representative institutions. Such constraints are real, but not absolute, and can be mitigated through institutional design. The thesis ends by making recommendations to this end

Book review: popular democracy: the paradox of participation by Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza

In Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza examine contemporary forms of participatory governance by tracing the origins and development of participatory budgeting (PB) from its roots in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to its adoption in two cases, Cordoba, Spain and Chicago, USA. While acknowledging that PB has been seen as being too easily co-opted by neoliberalism, the book's ..

Why is Austerity Governable? A Gramscian Urban Regime Analysis of Leicester, UK

open access articleAusterity has been delivered in the UK, without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between Urban Regime Theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the paper considers how austerity was normalised and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring and austerity, positioning itself as a multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The paper explores historical influences on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity, while disorganising and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past-struggles, this process of organised-disorganisation produced a functional hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of “austerian realism”. The paper elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to inform further research

Understanding developments in Participatory Governance: a report on findings from a scoping review of the literature and expert interviews

The following report presents findings from a scoping review of the literature and a series of expert interviews carried out between April and December 2021. The purpose of both the scoping review and the interviews was to gain an overview of recent practice in participatory governance, looking at initiatives across Europe over the past decade. By participatory governance, we refer to participatory forms of political decision-making used to improve the quality of democracy (Geißel 2009, cited in Heinelt 2019). More specifically, we were interested in understanding whether and how efforts at institutionalisation and rapid digitalisation are facilitating deeper embedding of participatory governance within politics and policymaking, by identifying and analysing innovations, new insights, and persistent barriers. Furthermore, we examined what efforts are being made to include disempowered people within analogue and digital spaces, how certain groups continue to be excluded, and which strategies are being adopted to deepen inclusion.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

‘TaxTrack’: Introducing a Democratic Innovation for Taxation

Abstract: In this article we introduce an input-oriented democratic innovation – that we term ‘TaxTrack’ – which offers individual taxpayers the means to engage with their political economies in three ways. After joining the TaxTrack program, an individual can: (1) see and understand how much, and what types, of taxes they have contributed, (2) see and understand how their tax contributions are, or have been, used, and (3) control what their tax contributions can, or cannot, be spent on. We explain this democratic innovation in two ways. The first is through evocation to prefigure what the innovation could look like in future practise which raises the prospects for both good and problematic outcomes. The second is through formal theory to produce a detailed model of the innovation to assist theory building. We conclude by discussing three interactive outcomes of ‘TaxTrack’ through the democratic innovations literature to establish the beginnings of a theory for the model. This theory tells us that ‘TaxTrack’ can return benefits to its users and the democratic regimes in which they are located but it may also place restrictions on output-oriented innovations like Participatory Budgeting

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Agenda Setting and Democratic Innovation: The Case of the Sustainable Communities Act (2007)

This article suggests that a common feature among democratic innovations is the lack of an agenda setting function. First, it argues that a lack of control over their own agendas opens democratic innovations to manipulation by elites. Second, it argues that democratic innovations focused on setting the policy agendas of public authorities can serve to democratise the policy process by providing citizens with a tool to place issues on the public agenda. The article analyses a series of actual and potential institutional designs that divert from the dominant ‘direct-democratic’ nature of agenda setting innovations. It finishes with a discussion of the UK Sustainable Communities Act (2007), a process designed to allow communities to propose policy to government through their councils

Democratic innovations and the policy process

This chapter situates democratic innovation within broader processes of institutional change in public administration and develops the argument that they have vulnerable potential to act as a democratising force, through purposive institutional design. However, democratic innovations are a complement, rather than a substitute, for existing institutions, with which they interact in complex ways. The chapter focuses on the mechanisms through which the outputs of democratic innovation are transmitted to the policy process. The chapter argues that democratic innovations face two, competing, pressures. The first is technical and regards ensuring policy-making ‘reflexivity’ necessary for the efficient governance. The second is normative, and has to do with increasing levels of responsiveness necessary to ensure legitimacy. Different institutional designs for transmission mechanisms ‘fix’ the tension between reflexivity and responsiveness in different, and imperfect, ways. The chapter differentiates between three broad categories and illustrates how they operate using paradigmatic cases of democratic innovation