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It is often non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that promote empowered participation processes, and assume active roles in leading them. However, the ability of NGOs to take on such processes is under-theorized. In many cases empowered participation involving NGOs takes place without political support from above (or with limited or conditional support). Our goal in this article is to use a case study of participatory planning in East Jerusalem to theorize processes of empowerment in an oppositional political environment. We argue that it is useful to analyze such processes of empowered participation through the concept of power. We describe the process of empowerment as a speculative process in which the NGO has to hedge two mediums of power: it has to build the power of the community to discuss its own goals; and it has to simultaneously manage the transfer of decision-making power from government bodies to the community. bs_bs_banner

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Both advocates and critics of deliberative planning often study deliberative planning processes as if they are real-life approximations of an ideal situation where the only force is the force of the better argument. However, in the course of the last decade democratic theorists came to develop a complex systemic understanding of the role of deliberation in policy making. In this view, legitimate decision making is not a one-time process but an ongoing pattern of interaction between organized institutions and the public sphere. This paper builds on recent work on political representation to develop a framework for studying deliberative planning as a type of representative claim made within a complex ecology of representative institutions and applies this framework to the case of a deliberative planning initiative in East Jerusalem. We examine the weaknesses and strengths of deliberative planning processes in a political environment that is not hospitable to public participation in planning.

ABSTRACT:In his 2018 presidential address to the Society of Business Ethics, Jeffery Smith claimed that political approaches to business ethics must be attentive to both the distinctive nature of commercial activity and, at the same time, the degree to which such commercial activity is structured by political decisions and choices. In what we take to be a friendly extension of the argument, we claim that Smith does not go far enough with this insight. Smith’s political approach to business ethics focuses solely on the outcomes of political choices. But if we think of politics in terms of processes—as in, ongoing disagreement and contest—and not merely a series of legal, administrative, or institutional outcomes, a different view of business ethics emerges. In particular, we argue that such an emphasis points us toward seeing business actors as having a normative duty to preserve the integrity and functioning of democracy.