Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Real Utopias Project)

Description

Volume IV of the Real Utopias Project. Contributions by Rebecca Abers, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Joshua Cohen, Patrick Heller, T.M. Thomas Isaac, Bradley Karkkainen, Rebecca Krantz, Jane Mansbridge, Joel Rogers, Craig W. Thomas.The institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century seem increasingly ill-suited to the problems we face in the twenty-first. This dilemma has given rise in some places to a new, deliberative democracy, and this volume explores four contemporary empirical cases in which the principles of such a democracy have been at least partially instituted: the participatory budget in Porto Alegre; the school decentralization councils and community policing councils in Chicago; stakeholder councils in environmental protection and habitat management; and new decentralised governance structures in Kerala. In keeping with the other Real Utopias Project volumes, these case studies are framed by an editors' introduction, a set of commentaries, and concluding notes.