Offers innovative, accessible tools to enable facilitators to empower those people who are frequently omitted from decision-making processes. Focuses on participatory capacity building in ways that address the practical needs and strategic interests of the disadvantaged and disempowered. Also examines how differences in class, ethnicity, race, cast, religion, age and status can also lead to the politics of exclusion.

This work examines the factors that shape and influence home-school relations. At its heart is an analysis of parent-teacher relationships in an inner city borough, drawn from case studies of five primary schools and a parents' centre. Interviews with parents are revealing windows into parents' views on a range of issues, including curriculum, discipline and parents' relationships with their children's teachers.; The author also considers teachers' perspectives on these matters, and explores the influence of social class, ethnicity and gender on parent-teacher interactions. While presenting these issues within a consideration of broader themes such as citizenship, community, power and participation, the book discusses the reasons why initiatives designed to improve home- school relations appear to result in such limited change.

From two influential and visionary thinkers comes a big idea that is changing the way movements catch fire and ideas spread in our highly connected world. For the vast majority of human history, power has been held by the few. "Old power" is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful spend it carefully, like currency. But the technological revolution of the past two decades has made possible a new form of power, one that operates differently, like a current. "New power" is made by many; it is open, participatory, often leaderless, and peer-driven. Like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it, but to channel it. New power is behind the rise of participatory communities like Facebook and YouTube, sharing services like Uber and Airbnb, and rapid-fire social movements like Brexit and #BlackLivesMatter. It explains the unlikely success of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and the unlikelier victory of Donald Trump in 2016. And it gives ISIS its power to propagate its brand and distribute its violence. Even old power institutions like the Papacy, NASA, and LEGO have tapped into the strength of the crowd to stage improbable reinventions. In New Power, the business leaders/social visionaries Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms provide the tools for using new power to successfully spread an idea or lead a movement in the twenty-first century. Drawing on examples from business, politics, and social justice, they explain the new world we live in--a world where connectivity has made change shocking and swift and a world in which everyone expects to participate.

Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples’ activities. Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.

The Role of Public Participation in Energy Transitions provides a conceptual and empirical approach to stakeholder and citizen involvement in the ongoing energy transition conversation, focusing on projects surrounding energy conversion and efficiency, reducing energy demand, and using new forms of renewable energy sources. Sections review and contrast different approaches to citizen involvement, discuss the challenges of inclusive participation in complex energy policymaking, and provide conceptual foundations for the empirical case studies that constitute the second part of the book. The book is a valuable resource for academics in the field of energy planning and policymaking, as well as practitioners in energy governance, energy and urban planners and participation specialists.

Political party organizations play large roles in democracies, yet their organizations differ widely, and their statutes change much more frequently than constitutions or electoral laws. How do these differences, and these frequent changes, affect the operation of democracy? This book seeks to answer these questions by presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of party organization in nineteen contemporary democracies. Using a unique new data collection, the book's chapters test propositions about the reasons for variation and similarities across party organizations. They find more evidence of within-country similarity than of cross-national patterns based on party ideology. After exploring parties' organizational differences, the remaining chapters investigate the impact of these differences. The volume considers a wide range of theories about how party organization may affect political life, including the impact of party rules on the selection of female candidates, the links between party decision processes and the stability of party programmes, the connection between party finance sources and public trust in political parties, and whether the strength of parties' extra-parliamentary organization affects the behaviour of their elected legislators. Collectively these chapters help to advance comparative studies of elections and representation by inserting party institutions and party agency more firmly into the centre of such studies. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Universite libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Muller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.

This field manual provides a well-tested approach for promoting citizen participation. It breaks down the traditional boxes separating human rights, rule of law, development, and governance, and reconnects them in order to create an integrated approach to rights-based political empowerment. A New Weave of Power, People & Politics combines concrete and practical 'action steps' with a sound theoretical foundation to help users understand the process of advocacy planning and implementation. This is an 'Action Guide' that builds on the authors' 50 years of combined experience in advocacy, gender, human rights, popular education, and social change. These collective experiences were gathered in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and North America, and they range from participatory research and community development, to neighbourhood organizing and legal rights education, to large-scale campaign advocacy. It delves more deeply into questions of citizenship, constituency-building, social change, gender, and accountability.