Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance

The institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the 19th century seem increasingly ill-suited to the problems we face in the 21st. This dilemma has given rise in some places to a new, deliberative democracy, and this volume explores four contemporary empirical cases in which the principles of such a democracy have been at least partially instituted: the participatory budget in Porto Alegre; the school decentralization councils and community policing councils in Chicago; stakeholder councils in environmental protection and habitat management; and new decentralized governance structures in Kerala. In keeping with the other Real Utopias Project volumes, these case studies are framed by an editor’s introduction, a set of commentaries, and concluding notes.

Verso Press, 2003