Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1978.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1984.

Communications scholars recognize two related trends in twenty-first century politics: the rise of information and communications technologies promising major changes in civic participation and a growing disconnection between citizens and their governments. The coexistence of these trends raises some interesting questions about the role of ICTs for enabling new forms of civic participation. How can new technologies better enable civic participation? This report proposes a typology for evaluating online civic participation projects that allows researchers to analyze the goals, designs, and outcomes of particular projects. The typology also incorporates Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation in order to enumerate the relationships between the project’s goals and its outcomes and to provide a flexible model for understanding the democratic conceptualizations manifested in particular projects. The report analyzes three online civic participation projects, highlighting their innovations and discussion their levels of citizen participation. The analyses suggest that a project’s goals, designs and outcomes are related to, and inform, its desired and realized levels of citizen participation. The review also suggests clarifications to Arnstein’s ladder for future use in understanding online civic participation. The report’s evaluative typology can aid in the interpretation of past online civic participation projects and guide the conceptualization and implementation of future projects in order to facilitate the development of more direct connections between citizens and governments and more open and transparent democratic governance structures. / text

Ce mémoire s'intéresse à l'expérience de participation citoyenne à l'adolescence. Plus précisément, il vise à documenter les effets de ce type de participation sur le processus de devenir Sujet des adolescents. Tenant compte du contexte social actuel, marqué par différents incitatifs à cet engagement citoyen et par la mouvance des repères intégrateurs, il étudie la manière dont ils vivent cette expérience et comment elle s'inscrit dans la période de construction identitaire et d'expérimentations que les adolescents traversent. Régulièrement dépeints comme des individus aux prises avec différents problèmes, cette recherche qualitative dévoile plutôt leur visage d'acteurs dans la communauté. Recueillant le point de vue de huit adolescents et adolescentes impliqués au sein de comités où ils prennent part à des processus de débats et de décisions, elle permet de mieux comprendre la nature de leur participation citoyenne, la perception qu'ils ont de leur rôle, les motifs les ayant menés à cette expérience, les conditions dans lesquelles elle se déroule ainsi que ses retombées personnelles et sociales. À la lumière de leur point de vue, les résultats interrogent les pratiques d'intervention favorisant un plein accès à la citoyenneté pour ce groupe social. Les propos recueillis auprès des répondants révèlent que leur expérience au sein des comités, notamment par l'exercice du débat, contribue à ce qu'ils développent un regard réflexif sur eux-mêmes et sur la société qui les entoure. Elle semble leur fournir des repères en regard de la construction de leur identité de citoyen et de leur entrée dans la vie adulte. Au plan collectif, nous avons constaté que la participation citoyenne des adolescents génère des retombées positives en regard de ce groupe social, du vivre ensemble et de la démocratie. L'expérience de nos répondants nous permet par ailleurs de saisir l'importance des enjeux de reconnaissance, de réciprocité et de pouvoir pour une expérience de participation émancipatrice. À ce sujet, nous avons observé une variabilité du pouvoir effectif des jeunes en fonction des normes en place et des acteurs adultes qu'ils côtoient. Nous remarquons que dans les situations de partage inéquitable du pouvoir, l'accès aux instances décisionnelles et le regroupement entre jeunes constituent deux conditions favorables à la subjectivation. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Adolescence, participation citoyenne, retombées personnelles, retombées sociales, subjectivation.

This thesis explores Parental involvement in children's education in selected / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

In this exploration, participatory planning workshops are used to implement the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) initiative in a grade six class in Winnipeg. The approach is an effective student-centered strategy that meets the needs of children with a range of learning abilities. The benefits of participatory planning workshops for students with special needs emerged as a key success of the process. Grounded in the principles of community engagement, this document connects children’s rights to citizenship with the need to engage children in planning for sustainable development. Semi-structured interviews were integral to understanding the unique needs of the participant class. Challenges that emerged during the parental consent and student assent process are examined and strategies for future interdisciplinary collaborations are identified. An extensive literature review explores the emergence of youth participation in planning and a range of best practices for engaging children in participatory student-led processes. This research investigates international strategies for implementing the ESD initiative and considers emergent best practices at student, institutional and government levels. Schools are examined as components of community infrastructure that influence neighbourhood design and shape development. As school infrastructure ages and school facilities are challenged to become more sustainable, engaging with school communities in planning, design, renovation or building will be an important skill for planning professionals. Developing the necessary knowledge, skills and values to engage children in planning processes is illustrated as an integral component of this process.

The overall aim of this doctoral thesis was to explore an assessment of participation according to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) in people with a mild intellectual disability. Study I used secondary data and explored how participation can be assessed. Study II-IV explored participation empirically regarding 68 everyday activities from all nine life domains according to the ICF. Study II explored assessment of self-rated participation by investigating to what extent perceived ability, actual performance and perceived importance correlated. Study III-IV explored the contribution of perceived importance to an assessment of participation; study III by investigating frequencies of everyday activities regarding performance and importance separately as well as regarding combined measures of performance and perceived importance, and study IV by comparing proxy ratings with self-rated measures regarding ability and measures of participation. Study III also correlated measures of participation with a single-item measure of subjective general well-being and study II and IV investigated internal consistency in terms of Cronbach’s alpha. Study II and III included 55 and 69 individuals with intellectual disability respectively. Study IV included 40 individuals with intellectual disability and 40 proxy persons. The informants from the target group were partly the same. Study II and IV supported the suggestions from study I that participation should be assessed by self-ratings and study II found that this is an appropriate method also to people with a mild intellectual disability. Study III showed that participation is related to subjective well-being. Study III-IV found somewhat different results if measuring participation as performance solely or as a combination of performance and perceived importance. Overall, the results of the thesis suggest that performance solely might be sufficient to assess participation at a group level but in a clinical context, when the knowledge of a certain individual is of interest, the perceived aspect of involvement is necessary to include in an assessment of participation.

This research paper looked at a war room as a decentralized space for change through which public participation is to be enhanced and service delivery accelerated at a ward level. The Lunerburg community demarcated as ward one under eDumbe Local Municipality was used as a case study. The eDumbe Local Municipality falls under Zululand District Municipality located in the northern part of KwaZulu-Natal. Since the take-off of democracy in South Africa, national government has put programmes in place to fight the acceleration of poverty and attend to the backlogs of service delivery. Provincial government are always mandated to implement national programmes or improvised according to the needs of their provinces. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal, the former Premier Zweli Mkhize launched war rooms as a provincial strategy derived from the national war on poverty campaign (announced by former president Thabo Mbeki during the State of the Nation Address, 2008) in the attempt to create decentralized spaces for change through which public participation is to be enhanced to achieve accelerated service delivery at a ward level. The other significance of the strategy is that it takes provincial government to local municipality wards in a collaborative manner. It is also important to note that the use of war rooms in the attempt to enhance public participation and service delivery is not understood and accepted by many people. Currently there are discussions held by the KZN office of the Premier in collaboration with sector departments as well civil societies in the attempt to give war rooms a relevant name. Literature on public participation, decentralization as well as on good governance supported by various diagrams and tables was used to argue in support that citizen’s voices should be integrated in development plans that affect them directly. The study was empirical, employed qualitative methodologies and used triangulated means to collect the data. Content analysis was used to analyse the collected data. The focus of the research was to investigate the extent through which, war rooms as decentralized spaces for change, serve as a unique mechanism to achieve public participation at a ward level in respect to currently existing strategies at a ward level. The study intended to also highlight mechanisms that are used by the war room as well to diagnose the support that the war room is receiving from other government departments. Study findings revealed that the Lunerburg war room executive committee members still lack proper training in relation to their roles and responsibilities within the war room. Members of the Lunerburg community didn’t know where the war room is located and what it does at a ward level. It was also discovered that the Lunerburg war room is not resourced to enhance public participation and accelerate service delivery on its own. Operations of the Lunerburg war room enable community members as beneficiaries of the war room to remain passive participants rather than active participants in the decisions that affect them directly. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2014.