The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an opaque and arcane process. Participatory budgeting is making inroads in municipalities, but is usually limited to a small fraction of the total budget as its methods do not scale: They cannot handle quantitative budget items nor hierarchical budget construction. Here we apply the Condorcet princ...

This paper describes WeDD (Web Site Design Day), a project which brought university staff, parent helpers and school children together to design a school web site. The design process, which was modelled on participatory design, is described with reference to other work that has used a similar approach. The methods that were used to evaluate the process are described, and some general conclusion...

A lack of concerted action on the part of local authorities and their citizens to respond to climate change is argued to arise partly from a poor relationship between the two. Meanwhile, local authorities could have a significant impact on community-wide levels of greenhouse gas emissions because of their influence over many other actors, but have had limited success with orthodox voluntary beh...

This article explores participatory governance in the context of participatory mechanisms of accountability for urban services. In the past few years, accountability has become a buzzword internationally and, as is the case with many such terms, there is confusion as to what exactly is meant. The people and organizations promoting accountability view it as critical to solving problems with urba...

Background & objectives: Today, the world is facing with increase of population and shortage of foods. Organic products are produced without the intervention of any chemicals or artificial methods. In spite of general teaching to increase nutritional knowledge, there still is a deep gap between recommendations and what is seen in nutritional performance, so choosing the right teaching methods i...

Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. We observ...