Browsing Research Articles (Political Studies) by Subject "Participation"
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Piper, Laurence; von Lieres, Bettina (Institute of Development Studies, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: Summary: The paper argues that the practice of democratic mediation is an increasingly common, yet under-researched, component of engagements between citizens and public authorities across the globe. While the actors who mediate (and their tactics) are diverse and are not necessarily of the marginalised group, they share a commitment to overcoming representational, knowledge or ideological deficits in decision-making for the marginalised group. While the ‘speaking for’ nature of democratic mediation clearly opens up critical legitimacy problems, the practice of democratic mediation appears to be remarkably common, and even effective. The paper demonstrates this by surveying at least three kinds of democratic mediation observed across a large number of cases. First is ‘mediation as professional advocacy’. The mediator in these cases is more an ‘interested intermediary’ in contentious policy politics. In a context of skewed powerrelations where certain groups remain systematically marginalised, not least through knowledge and representational deficits, a degree of advocacy is required to get more egalitarian policy dialogue. Second is ‘mediation as representational entrepreneurship’. This refers to engagements between citizens and forms of public authority that stretch from the local to the global level. In more ‘global-local’ mobilisations, mediators are often experts, professionals, and international NGOs. In more ‘local – global’ movements, the mediators are ‘hybrid activists’ deeply rooted in the local identities and associations. However, in either case the actor is distinguished by the taking of initiative to include the voices of the marginalised in a domain of power-relations which is multi-level. Lastly, ‘mediation as citizenship development’ refers to forms of activism typically associated with community and capacity development, and usually involves limited advocacy by civil society organisations (CSOs). Hence there 04 IDS WORKING PAPER 364 may be little by way of explicit mediation in local governance decision-making in these cases, although the empowerment of communities has a demonstrable and mostly positive impact on local governance. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/480 Files in this item: 1
PiperDemocraticMediation2011.pdf (1.662Mb) -
Nleya, Ndodana; Tapscott, Chris; Thompson, Lisa; Piper, Laurence; Esau, Esau (Unisa Press, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: Protest politics in South Africa has a long history and has been deployed differentially in different historical moments. Whereas protests formed an important vehicle during the fight against apartheid, their rebirth and propulsion to the centre of the struggles in the post-apartheid dispensation have come as a surprise to many. A majority of these protests, so-called ‘service delivery protests’, are reported as emanating from communities’ dissatisfaction with municipal service delivery as well as problems relating to lack of communication between council and councillors on the one hand and citizens on the other. In this article, we interrogate data from five study sites located in Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. While we found support for the importance of service delivery, our data contradicts many widely held assertions as regards what causes these protests. We were able to show, for example, that these so-called ‘service delivery protests’ may actually emanate from reasons that extend beyond service delivery. Since our data indicates that levels of participation in Cape Town are higher than in Pietermaritzburg on the one hand, illustrating perhaps the different provincial contexts, there is also variation between the relatively high participation rates of the ‘black African’ sites of Langa and Khayelitsha, on the one hand, and the lower rates of the ‘coloured’ site of Bonteheuwel, on the other, which we ascribe to the disengagement of the community in Cape Town, from both local and national politics. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/555 Files in this item: 1
NleyaProtestPolitics2011.pdf (2.491Mb)
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