In early 2011 there were over 1782 community garden sites officially registered with the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. In addition to promoting healthy food and healthy eating, many of these sites contain a number of sustainable design features and associated activities. They also claim to deal with value-laden ethical and social issues relating to human wellbeing. In this way they aim to be ecologically sustainable. Using a normative framework for evaluating wellbeing - the Capability Approach - this research reports on the multiple impacts that the design of such spaces may have on the subjective wellbeing of site users. Qualitative research methods of data collection and analysis in five community garden sites in the UK and Ireland were carried out for adult, youth and child users. Results show that although producing a food yield was found to have most impact on wellbeing for all user groups, the overall wellbeing impacts of site activities go beyond physical health and healthy eating, impacting most on capabilities of stimulation, psychological wellbeing and purpose. Two key aspects of site design and associated valued activities - agency and dynamic balance - were found to enhance both the sustainability of the community garden sites and the wellbeing of site users. These are the essence of enhancing wellbeing in the sustainably designed community garden sites. The thesis concludes that not only is there a requirement for new conceptualizations of sustainable design and wellbeing for the urban environment but we also require new methodological approaches to better capture the multi-layered and multidimensional complexities of such spaces within our everyday lives.

This research engages with bottom up accounts of community participation and nonparticipation, and identifies some of the ways in which participation is constrained, enabled or provoked. The project is set against a background of UK policy relating to participation since 1997, and includes a critical engagement with the policies of New Labour and the new coalition government, providing a comparison between official 'top down' accounts and the perspectives of the research participants. I focus on understanding participation as a situated practice, and identify how different ways of participating - both formally and informally - can be understood to reflect broader socioeconomic conditions. I argue that both people's capacity and inclination to participate is strongly affected by factors such as patterns of work, education, housing tenure and leisure. Consequently attempts to promote the self-empowerment of disadvantaged groups through increased participation require more than simply attitudinal change, and need to take into account the particular modes of disempowerment experienced by such groups. Further, I suggest that the concept of geographical community can become less relevant in particular contexts whereby neighbourhoods are' emptied out' over time, in terms of the disappearance of local workplaces, shops and spaces of leisure, and where increasing social divisions undermine . relationships and solidarities between local residents. Hence, the idea that participation can necessarily be engendered on a local level is problematized.

This research sets out to compare the values in British and German political discourse, especially the discourse of social policy, and to analyse their relationship to political culture through an analysis of the values of health care reform. The work proceeds from the hypothesis that the known differences in political culture between the two countries will be reflected in the values of political discourse, and takes a comparison of two major recent legislative debates on health care reform as a case study. The starting point in the first chapter is a brief comparative survey of the post-war political cultures of the two countries, including a brief account of the historical background to their development and an overview of explanatory theoretical models. From this are developed the expected contrasts in values in accordance with the hypothesis. The second chapter explains the basis for selecting the corpus texts and the contextual information which needs to be recorded to make a comparative analysis, including the context and content of the reform proposals which comprise the case study. It examines any contextual factors which may need to be taken into account in the analysis. The third and fourth chapters explain the analytical method, which is centred on the use of definition-based taxonomies of value items and value appeal methods to identify, on a sen-tence-by-sentence basis, the value items in the corpus texts and the methods used to make appeals to those value items. The third chapter is concerned with the classification and analysis of values, the fourth with the classification and analysis of value appeal methods. The fifth chapter will present and explain the results of the analysis, and the sixth will summarize the conclusions and make suggestions for further research.

The model of the citizens' jury is used here to examine whether the promise that deliberative democracy can enable transformations of preference among citizens is valid. Supporters of the citizens' jury go so far as to claim that it can encourage the habit of active citizenship. Deliberation has become central to academic work on the future of democracy and much of this work alludes to a relationship between deliberation and learning. So far however, the learning processes that are seen as central to it have not been fully investigated. This thesis explores the impact of participation in a deliberative process by presenting a predominantly qualitative analysis ofthe way the citizens' jury experience changes participants' preferences. The changes experienced by the jurors are presented as a juror journey but not all jurors embark on this journey in the same way, nor do they all travel at the same pace. Some of those interviewed for this study claim that their journey only ended some time after the jury itself came to an end and for some it is clearly ongoing. Addressing the juror journey as a learning process highlights the changes in the discursive strategies employed by the jurors as they come to understand the ethical components of discourse. By dividing the process into its constituent parts of thinking, willing and judging the procedural requirements of deliberation are highlighted. The results of the fieldwork show that the majority of respondents in this study of former citizens' jurors develop a heightened sense of efficacy that enables them to assert a sense of themselves as citizens. Most describe a new awareness that their actions affect others on whose behalf they are deliberating. This now occurs for many of them alongside a new sense of trust in others to make decisions on their behalf. The research concludes that if practitioners of deliberation want to continue to make claims about transformation of preference they need to use the principles of discourse ethics to examine the legitimacy of deliberative forums that are in use and to make recommendations about how to improve their validity in the eyes of the public.

Bibliography: leaves 494-519. / ix, 519 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Examines the influence of the medical profession on health policy in Australia. Case studies of policy struggles under Federal Labor governments since 1983 illustrate both the nature and scope of that influence. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics and Dept. of Community Medicine, 1994