Search results

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public's perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants "confer" and "retract" in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public's expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes. ; QC 20200319

"Democracy" is a frequently used concept in the Western planning field. Scholars, practitioners, and citizens alike regularly deploy it to both explain and contest the nature and legitimacy of urban governance. And yet, in the planning literature, the concept of democracy itself is rarely explained or debated. The assumption being made is that its root meaning for planning is self-evident or agreed upon: public participation in, or mobilization against urban governance. However, my argument in this thesis proceeds from the opposite assumption: that far from self-explanatory or accepted, the contested meanings ascribed to democracy play a central role in shaping conflicts and experiences in planning—both in the literature and in practice. My overarching aim is to contribute with knowledge on this role by specifically examining what the substantial meaning of democracy is assumed to be according to actors in the field; that is, among planning scholars, practitioners, and citizens. The thesis is comprised of a cover essay and four empirical papers based on qualitative case study research on local authority planning in Sweden. In the cover essay, I explore the meanings ascribed to democracy among planning actors, first, by conducting a careful reading of key theoretical texts in the field and, second, by analyzing the individual papers' key findings. To help elicit these rarely explained, often implicit democratic meanings among planning actors, I develop a theoretical framework based on the work of historian Pierre Rosanvallon. He understands the democratic project as a ceaseless attempt to resolve the fundamental indeterminacy as to what constitutes its substantial meaning. This perpetual project is nourished by a deep-seated incompatibility between three of democracy's central ideological components: voluntarism, rationalism, and liberalism. Their incompatibility stems from how each of them is regularly mobilized in response to the pathological tendencies ascribed to the other. These responses, in turn, can be ...

Construction and real estate have been central to the debates on sustainable development. However, the dominant definition of sustainability in construction and real estate remain centred on the environmental dimension. The 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer new opportunities for the building sector to expand its focus. The available literature utilizes the existing green ratings, sustainability assessment tools and standards as the basis for investigating how construction and buildings can contribute to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, less focus was placed on exploring the broad intersection between the building sector, on the one hand, and the SDGs and their targets on the other. This paper uses a multi-step methodology to analyze the potential role of construction and real estate in the 2030 Agenda. The paper identifies SDG targets that depend (directly or indirectly) on construction and real estate activities, and reveals that 17% of the SDG targets are directly dependent and 27% of the targets are indirectly dependent on these sectors' activities. The identified targets are analyzed and are found to be related to all 17 goals—with the largest contributions to SDGs 11, 6, and 7. The results of the analysis are mapped and illustrated in order to provide insights to academics, practitioners and governments. This research contributes to the literature on the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. It also exposes the synergistic possibilities, and the partnerships required, to make use of the potential role of construction and real estate in the implementation of the UN Agenda.

There are two principal reasons behind the lack of success in reaching a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, namely, the malfunctioning negotiations' framework from one side and the complexity of the negotiated issues from the other. This article is mainly addressing the bilateral framework's flaws when it comes to the Oslo accords and the way the two negotiating parties have perceived them. It is an attempt to overhaul the existing Oslo peace process and not to create a new one. Oslo process has become entrenched over more than twenty years of different practices and legal realities. The article is also introducing a negotiating framework that combines the benefits of a multilateral regional track to the Oslo process aiming to redress the latent structural flaws. It is intended not to tackle the final status issues, as there is a plethora of literature doing so. The extensive focus on those complicated issues without redressing the process' structural flaws has led partially to the current stalemate. The role of any mediator or external partner is not to solve those issues on behalf of the principal parties, but to work on the negotiating framework and the process itself.

In this article, I explore the nature of secondary analysis and provide a brief history of the method. Qualitative secondary analysis is a relatively under-used method in education and the social sciences, often due to the lack of easily accessible, relevant, trustworthy, and complete data. I address some of the potentials and limitations that influence its use and explore criteria for assessing the quality and sufficiency of preexisting qualitative research data. Qualitative secondary analysis has important implications for qualitative researchers, students and practitioners interested in generating new knowledge via unobtrusive, reliable, valid, and time/cost effective research through the wider use of existing qualitative data.