Hi everyone, Hope you are having a good monday. I’m sitting in Tinto, surprised not to find any of you here. We should set up a time to meet before the holidays, if possible.
I wanted to contribute some things I found while searching the term pseudo-participation. One of the key elements of our discussions I’ve enjoyed is the way in which we have been framing the issue we are researching – group based decision-making – as a means to address a multitude of issues, and more importantly as a key process to engage stakeholders. With the strike on I’ve been paying attention to the media a little bit more. The recent Wind Farm meeting in Scarborough and the government debacle have exemplified, to me, the need for better group decision making techniques, albeit on different scales. I wanted to post a link to this article. It’s an inspiring read and resonates, I think, with the purpose of why we are researching methods for authentic participation. Be advised that it rambles philosophically a bit. In addition, I found an article that deals with pseudo-participation in the discourse of communications and decision making. I’ve attached it to this post, at the bottom. It presents a good definition of pseudo-participation, among other things:
“Verba (1961: 220–221) points to the existence of ‘pseudo-participation’, in which the emphasis is not on creating situations in which participation is possible, but on creating the feeling that participation is possible….an alternative name is manipulated participation”
In essence, I am beginning to look at the methods we are exploring in terms of their viability for large scale projects. That is, how easy would it be to teach facilitators each method. And how easy i would expect each method to be understood. This line of questioning leads me to the obvious conclusion: everyone learns differently, and thus each method has it’s own positives and negatives. In terms of the presentation, I think it would be great if we could present as many methods as possible that appeal to different methods of learning, the visual, physical and auditory. That brings me to the ground-truthing exercise. I love it! I realize I knew about, and have practiced community mapping, but did not connect it to this project. Victoria, British Columbia has a vibrant community mapping project, called the Common Ground Community Mapping Project. This project has been wildly successful on the island, and has been engaging stakeholders of all ages for a long time now. Empowering people and creating pride-of-place is an aspect of behavior change I’m deeply interested in. I would be happy to work this activity into our presentation; a community green map of York would be sweet! Talk soon, Cheers!
pseudoparticipation_intellectbooks3
