Conor Farrington

ABSTRACT

Widely adopted decentralisation policies have increased the significance of local citizen participation in Latin America, especially with regard to ‘new political spaces’, or spaces for citizen–government engagement distinct from both electoral democracy and non-electoral political activism. Since new political spaces tend to employ ‘deliberative democratic’ methods of decision making, their prospects depend to a considerable extent on the extent to which surrounding ‘public spheres’ enable or constrain deliberation. This paper focuses on the specific case of Ecuador, drawing upon theories of deliberative democracy and the public sphere to assess the likely prospects for new political spaces in Ecuador through an examination of the key aspects of Ecuadorian politics and society since independence from Spain in 1822. [DOWNLOAD]

Bruce Christopher Glavovic

[Abstract] Coastal sustainability is elusive in South Africa and the Mississippi delta. These case studies and convergent literatures demonstrate the merits of reconceptualising coastal management as a transformative practice of deliberative governance. A normative framework is presented that focuses attention on underpinning deliberative out comes to enable governance actors and networks to build cognitive, democratic, sociopolitical and institutional capacity to transform unsustainable and maladaptive coastal practices. But operationalising such intentions is complex and contested and requires a volte-face in thinking and practice. The South African and Mississippi delta experiences provide insights about how to develop a deliberative praxis of coastal governance based on consideration of the choice of process, timeliness, quality of process, equity and representation, connections to the policy cycle, impact, implementation and institutionalisation. [Download Complete]

Keywords: Coastal governance, Integrated coastal management, Deliberation, Mississippi delta, South Africa

Alice Katharina Pieper and Michael Pieper

[Abstract] If social media are to reinforce sustainability of political decisions, their design has conceptually to take into account the implications of deliberative democracy, which stresses the active cooperation of virtually all citizens of a democracy for the purposes of participatory involvement. Essential to deliberative e-democracy is therefore a technologically supported comprehensive discourse about political subjects which is also called deliberation. Theoretical implications of deliberation are discussed from the angle of political science and social psychology. Finally, the practical implications of deliberation rooted in social media are exemplified by an online citizen involvement for the public budgeting purposes of the city of Frankfurt/Main (Germany). 

Keywords: Sustainable systems design, Deliberation, Social media, Social capital, Collective intelligence, e-Democracy. [Download Journal Complete]