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The Tree of Participation A New Model for Inclusive Decision
Making
Bell, Karen & Reed, Mark. (2021). Community Development Journal.
Abstract
The tree of participation: a new model for inclusive decision-making Karen Bell*
and Mark Reed 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.
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of Community
Development Journal. This is an Open
Access article distributed under the terms
of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted reuse,
distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is
properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/
bsab018