The tree of participation: a new model for inclusive decision-making

Abstract

Community development often involves organizing participatory decision-making processes. The challenge is for this to be meaningful. Participatory decision-making has the potential to increase the transparency, accountability, equity and efficiency with which public administration serves the least privileged in society. However, in practice, it often fails to bring about these outcomes. A number of academics and practitioners have, therefore, theorized how participatory decision-making processes can better empower marginalized groups. By critically reviewing this body of work and empirically grounding the debate in recent practice, we aimed to develop a theoretically rigorous, easily applicable and holistic model of an inclusive participatory decision-making process that can work across a range of contexts. The empirical strand included surveying public engagement practitioners and participants about the participatory events they had organized or attended. These empirical findings were combined with insights from the theoretical literature to devise a new conceptual model of emancipatory, inclusive and empowering participatory decision-making – the ‘Tree of Participation’. The model can be useful to both organizers of participatory processes, as a check for empowering and inclusive practice, and to disadvantaged groups, as a set of expectations and demands when engaging in public decision-making.

Re-thinking research impact: voice, context and power at the interface of science, policy and practice

“…Zimmermann et al (2007) defined five types of context that need to be considered, each of which interact: individuality; activity; location; time; and relations. Building on this, Bell and Reed (2021) identified seven contextual factors influencing the outcomes of engagement processes: time; space; power; process design; history; politics; and culture. Focusing on the temporal dimension of context, Bell and Reed (2021) identified a range of contextual factors that can empower or disempower interested/affected groups and non-academic partners before (e.g., historical and structural factors that could marginalise or exclude different groups), during [e.g., agency, including freedom (from fear), and access to the resources and other means necessary to actively participate] and after an engagement process (e.g., social connectivity to feedback loops that keep people informed about how their knowledge is being used).…”

“…Building on this, Bell and Reed (2021) identified seven contextual factors influencing the outcomes of engagement processes: time; space; power; process design; history; politics; and culture. Focusing on the temporal dimension of context, Bell and Reed (2021) identified a range of contextual factors that can empower or disempower interested/affected groups and non-academic partners before (e.g., historical and structural factors that could marginalise or exclude different groups), during [e.g., agency, including freedom (from fear), and access to the resources and other means necessary to actively participate] and after an engagement process (e.g., social connectivity to feedback loops that keep people informed about how their knowledge is being used). By working to understand context, and how context affects our ability to deliver impact, it may be possible to improve the capacity of research, actions, and pathways to provide context-specific, and therefore more relevant, impact.…”

Enhancing self-perceived employability via a curriculum intervention: a case of “The global marketing professional” module

“…The compulsory module offers an opportunity for lecturers to provide formal careers support within the curriculum rather than providing informal ad-hoc support to individual students who might seek them out on their own accord. Support from lecturers is crucial since university careers services continue to struggle to provide career guidance to their students from an engagement perspective and a resource perspective (Donald et al, 2018; provided by students into how to improve the module also acknowledges the value that students can offer in influencing the curriculum design (Bell and Reed, 2021;Bowman et al, 2021).…”

Impact Culture: Transforming How Universities Tackle Twenty First Century Challenges

“…A healthy impact culture is underpinned by social norms that seek to actively empower the voiceless and marginalized, and enable active participation from across all members of the groups and networks researchers participate in. This requires deliberate work and effort to understand the causes of marginalization and how these root causes might be addressed, in order to empower active engagement, rather than just doing better outreach (Bell and Reed, 2021). It also involves looking hard at the reasons why research and researchers are so inaccessible to most stakeholders, beyond just addressing issues of open access to research findings.…”