Beware the Context - Deliberation for Development II
Earlier this month, CommGAP hosted a conference on "Deliberation for Development: New Directions." The meeting was headed by the World Bank's Vijayendra Rao and Patrick Heller from Brown University and provided a vast and rich overview over the issue of deliberation as it concerns our work on the ground. Here's a little summary of the day, which by no means captures even a fraction of the wealth of information and knowledge that was presented, but may be an appetizer for our forthcoming book gathering all those contributions.
The first speaker, Arjun Appadurai of New York University, spoke about the importance of context: success of deliberation depends on factors outside the deliberative frame, mostly social and political power structures. Individual deliberation events may fail more often than not, especially if it's about allocating resources for the poor. However, while isolated deliberative occasions may be a failure in their own narrow context, in aggregation over time even those failures can alter those very contexts that made them fail at the outset.
- Tags:
- WTO
- voice
- Vijayendra Rao
- Varun Gauri
- unesco
- Susan Watkins
- rule of law
- Public Deliberation
- Poverty Alleviation
- Poverty
- Porto Alegre
- Policy Making
- Peter Evans
- Patrick Heller
- Participatory Budgeting
- Michael Woolcock
- Malawi
- JP Singh
- Jane Mansbridge
- Gram Sabhas
- Gianpaolo Baiocchi
- Ghazala Mansuri
- Gerry Mackie
- Female Circumcision
- equality
- empowerment
- Deliberation
- Consensus
- Arjun Appadurai
- Archon Fung
- Ann Swidler
- Agency
Citizen participation, access to information and action usher in much needed reforms. The process to engage citizens is easy to describe but hard to achieve. So how do you grab and keep the attention of community stakeholders and keep them informed? This week’s answer is “Participedia.”