Deliberation, Representation, Equity E-Book

Göran Cars

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens’ input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam, to the consideration of alternatives to gold mining in Roșia Montană in Transylvania, to the application of multi-criteria decision analysis in evaluating the impact of e-learning opportunities at Uganda's Makerere University. This book is important new reading for decision makers in government, public administration and urban planning, as well as students and researchers in the fields of participatory democracy, urban planning, social policy, communication design, participatory art, decision theory, risk analysis and computer and systems sciences.

Leseprobe

Deliberation

Representation

Equity

Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes

Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al.

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© 2017 Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al.

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Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson, Göran Cars et al., Deliberation, Representation, Equity: Research Approaches, Tools and Algorithms for Participatory Processes. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108

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This book is a documentation of research funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS, Strategic funds from the Swedish government within ICT – The Next Generation, and The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

PHOTOS Åsa Andersson Broms, Love Ekenberg, Anna Hesselgren, Björn Larsson and Rebecca Medici. Photographs not attributed to specified persons have been taken by Love Ekenberg.

COVER IMAGE Love Ekenberg

DESIGN Karin Hansson

ILLUSTRATIONS Gov2u

ISBN Paperback: 9781783743032

ISBN Hardback: 9781783743049

ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783743056

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783743063

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783742974

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0108

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Table of Contents

Contributors

1

Prologue

3

Introduction

9

CONCEPTUALISATION

17

1

Interdisciplinarity and Mixed Methods

21

2

The Concept of Democracy

33

3

Art as a Creative and Critical Public Space

47

4

Plural Democracy

73

ELICITATION

89

5

Criteria Weight Elicitation – A Comparative Study

95

6

Cardinal and Rank Ordering of Criteria with Clouds

113

7

Attitude Ranking

133

8

Evaluating ICT and Development

145

9

A Mobile Urban Drama as a Model for Interactive Elicitation

161

CALCULATION

179

10

Multi-Criteria Decision Making

185

11

Comparing MCDA Methods

201

12

Algorithms for Decision Analysis

219

APPLICATIONS

239

13

A Model for Flood Risk Management: Bac Hung Hai

245

14

A Model for Flood Risk Management: Tisza

257

15

Roşia Montană Gold Exploitation

267

16

Decision Making in Urban Planning

297

17

Actory: Visualising Reputational Power to Promote Deliberation

313

18

Njaru: Developing Tools for Deliberation in Multiple Public Spheres

335

19

Evaluation of an Online Learning Environment

347

20

A Low Carbon Society by 2050 – The Stockholm-Mälar Region Case

357

Epilogue

369

Publications

373

Contributors

Love Ekenberg is a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg and full professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

Karin Hansson is an artist and a postdoc in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

Mats Danielson is vice president and full professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, and an affiliate researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Göran Cars is full professor of Societal Planning and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Lars In de Betou is a media producer and a musician at Betou media AB and at Stockholm University.

Joost Buurman is assistant director and senior research fellow, Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

Manilla Ernst is a lecturer at the Centre for the Studies of Children’s Culture at Stockholm University.

Tobias Fasth is a researcher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

Rebecca Forsberg is the artistic leader and director of the RATS Theatre in Stockholm.

Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist and senior lecturer at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm.

Karin E. Hansson is assistant professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

Petter Karlström is a senior lecturer and program coordinator in interaction design at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

Florence N. Kivunike is a lecturer in the Department of Information Technology, School of Computing and Information Technology, College of Computing and Information Sciences at Makerere University.

Aron Larsson is associate professor in Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and Mid-Sweden University.

Thomas Liljenberg is an artist in Stockholm.

Hans Liljenström is full professor at the Division of Biometry and Systems Analysis, Department of Energy and Technology, at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the director of Agora for Biosystems at the Sigtuna Foundation.

Adina Marincea is a researcher at the Median Research Centre (MRC) in Bucharest.

Adriana Mihai is a researcher at the Center of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity (CESIC) at the University of Bucharest as well as an affiliated researcher at Median Research Center.

Mona Riabacke is a consultant in risk and decision analysis at Riabacke & Co in Stockholm.

Willmar Sauter is professor emeritus of theatre at Stockholm University.

Uno Svedin is visiting professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and senior researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC).

Michael Thompson is senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), fellow at the James Marin Institute for Science and Civilization, University of Oxford, and senior researcher at the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Research, University of Bergen.

F.F. Tusubira is managing partner at Knowledge Consulting Ltd in Kampala. He is also the founding former CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance.

Harko Verhagen is senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.

Måns Wrange is an artist, former vice-chancellor of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and visiting professor of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University.

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Prologue

Participation has become an important part of research and design processes, not least in fields such as art, urban planning and design. At the same time, there is an ever-growing demand for fair participatory processes, supported by IT-based methods such as voting systems, communication platforms, and various crowd-sourcing techniques. However, the success of these has been very variable. Loosely speaking, communications have been tremendously successful in some domains, whereas tools for more analytical support have failed to a significant extent.

The question arises whether this is to do with the specific tools, or whether there are some hidden mechanisms that are more dominant, for instance relating to the conceptualisations involved. We might have ideas of democracy, fairness, and equity that are inadequately represented in the tools available, making them useless for anyone concerned with such notions. Concepts like these are of course social constructs, and there are no final and unifying ideas regarding what participation and deliberation actually mean in relation to them – totally independent of whether the methods involved are IT-supported or not. Nevertheless, the tools must at least mimic the preconceptions, whatever they are. Often there are underlying liberal notions of democracy and equity involved somewhere, where an individual’s right to participate is emphasised and assumed, but the idea that the same individual should be provided with at least some reasonable means of doing it on an equal basis is not necessarily present.

In these contexts, there is often a strong tendency to try to reach, or even impose, consensus, ignoring the fact that unequal power relations in a group of participants can actually be both meaningful and motivating, and can enlighten the various conditions, unspoken norms of community and the different interests and diversity found in all societies. It therefore seems a good idea to attempt to specify what we actually mean by the various concepts we have here, and, assuming that we accept these concepts, investigate how we can instrumentalise them when forming fruitful concepts of fairness, equity, participation and democracy in this digital era.

The problems involved are not easy and there are (fortunately) no definite answers, but trying to clarify this seems to be worth the effort. Moreover, if we also can utilise the concepts and provide some accessible tools as structural and analytical support, we can probably better understand the decision structures involved. If we identify and analyse the various components and processes involved, much can be gained. In this book, we discuss various aspects of these problems: our aim is not only to analyse them but to provide solutions and methods, while still keeping in mind the significant conceptual problems involved.

To make this reasoning more concrete, one central question has been to combine a reasonable concept of deliberate democracy with a reasonable notion of equity and representation. And even if we are able to do this, there are several more practical issues to be resolved. If we take participatory democracy seriously and really want to obtain large-scale citizen involvement and transparency in public participatory decision making, then decision making processes become significantly more difficult. The various decision scenarios are usually far from clear, and likewise the process of the decision formation.

Firstly, it is complicated conceptualising participation in relation to representativeness and engagement as well as a multitude of other factors, including the methodology. Secondly, even if we have a clear picture of the participating agents, it is still very difficult to understand what are the true preferences involved. To elicit these involves several complicated tasks. Thirdly, even if we have access to these preferences and attitudes, we want to be able to utilise them, for instance, for more analytical and transparent decision making. However, neither these preferences nor the factual information available can normally be assigned precise values, making the processing and calculation of this complex information also very difficult from an algorithmical viewpoint.

To tackle these problems, we have for some years been working with various aspects of participatory decision making, and have created IT-supported process models for decision making in such settings. By combining a number of fields – such as mathematics, social science, and the arts – we have addressed both the problem of communication, internally within governmental bodies and externally to citizens, and that of modelling and analysis of decision structures and processes. We have, not surprisingly, found that collaborative information sharing and deliberative discussions are important parts of a democratic process which should take place on a multitude of platforms. We have also found that the vast number of specific tools and methods available are seldom used to any significant extent. Surprisingly little in the literature records actual use of decision processes with elaborated tool support, and very little research relates to successful uses of inclusive decision processes. Even if they incorporate peer communication and discussions as a way of reaching consensus, the discussions are seldom combined with any sophisticated means of enabling deliberative democracy, with all the complexities involved, even disregarding the obvious practical factors, such as time, access, and means to participate in the collaborative work.

Despite this rather lugubrious perspective, we nevertheless believe that the potential of more systematised tools would be substantial if these problems were better understood and handled, and here is also where the tool support becomes instrumental. In the work behind this book, we have not only been studying descriptive aspects, but have also aimed to solve problems by developing and using new tools, methods, and working cultures, even in more innovative forms such as artistic performances, as a basis for constructive dialogues and expressions of preferences and analysis. We have tried to find new problem formulations and solutions, with the intention of carrying the decision from agenda-setting and problem awareness to feasible courses of action via formulations of objectives, alternative generation, consequence assessments, and trade-off clarifications. Our ambitions have been to provide applicable and computationally meaningful public decision mechanisms, involving various components such as multiple-criteria, multi-stakeholder points of view, uncertain scenarios, uncertain appraisals of the consequences involved, vague value assessments, and visual formats for presentation of risk information.

The work in this book has been partly funded by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS as well as by strategic funds from the Swedish government (SFO) within ‘ICT – the Next Generation’. It has been developed partly within the eGovlab at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences and partly within the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. The result of all this is that we are now considerably better able to analyse the decision components of the different interests at stake as well as organise the necessary decision making procedures, where, for example, municipalities in constructive modes can handle dialogues and decision making, even in conflicting situations. Furthermore we know much more about the effects of a proposed plan, how conditions for constructive dialogues can be created, how options can be valued, how the decision situations can be organised against the background of perceived values and problems, and how to utilise the potentials of various models and tools when applied from government, public administration, urban planning, and citizen/stakeholder perspectives. We believe that this socio-technical construct is a major step in the use of well-informed decision analysis for evaluation of critical societal issues, and hopefully will have a significant impact of the applicability of decision theory in general and on modernising the field of decision, policy and societal risk analysis.

Love Ekenberg, Karin Hansson, Mats Danielson and Göran Cars

Vienna, New York, Stockholm

Introduction

© L. Ekenberg, K. Hansson, M. Danielson, G. Cars et al., CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108.22

Tools and methods to support participatory decision making often focus on a specific part of the process, ignoring the wider context. In this project we have started out from a broader picture, situating particular parts of the process in relation to each other and trying to promote a mutual recognition of different levels of information production that play a role in the decision making processes. The research project has looked at participatory decision making processes in the following cases:

Rinkeby-Kista: Urban Development

The suburbs of Husby and Kista are situated next to each other in Rinkeby-Kista in the north of Stockholm, and were built in the 1970s and 1980s. There are huge differences between the two areas. The population of Husby has over 12,000 residents, registers high unemployment rates and has a high proportion of first- and second-generation immigrants. Kista is known as the Silicon Valley of Sweden; it contains several of Sweden’s leading companies in new technologies and IT, and over 25,000 people work there. It is an expanding area with many new developments and there are tensions arising from gentrification.

Svartån River: Pollution

The river Svartån flows through Örebro, the sixth largest city in Sweden. The river is under intensive agricultural use, and is polluted from nitrate fertilisers, with quite severe social and economic consequences including a decline of cultural and economic value of the land. The aim of the case study was to reach a more sustainable long-term solution with improved water quality in spite of socio-economic constraints.

The Red River Delta: Flooding

The Red River Delta, and more specifically the Bac Hung Hai polder in northern Vietnam, exhibits characteristics of a region in stress: increasing numbers of floods, dense and increasing population, and a lowland terrain. The 225,000 ha of the polder is largely agricultural land, with an elevation ranging from sea level to 10 metres. The case study involved 11,200 persons (out of a total population in the polder of 2.8 million), all of whom are at risk of flooding. The aim of the study was to design, with strong stakeholder involvement, a disaster risk management insurance scheme for the region.

Tisza: Flood Risk Management

The Tisza river traverses Hungary from north to south. Repeated floods are severe, especially in the north eastern part of Hungary: financial losses, and costs of compensation to victims and mitigation strategies are increasing. The aim of the case study was the same as for the Red River Delta, above.

Roșia Montană: Gold Exploitation

Roșia Montană is a commune of Alba County in western Transylvania with rich mineral resources that have been exploited since Roman times. It is also the context for a longstanding conflict around plans to open a new mine. The aim of the study was to clarify the decision components involved and suggest a course of action.

Upplands Väsby: Urban Development

Upplands Väsby is a municipality in the northern part of the Stockholm region with just over 40,000 inhabitants. It experienced rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a commuter suburb for the labour-force in workplaces in the central region. Rapid growth of the Stockholm region has opened up new possibilities for the future development of Upplands Väsby and the plan is to increase its population, and also the number of workplaces, and to strengthen public and commercial services.

The Stockholm-Mälar Region: a Low-Carbon Society

The Stockholm-Mälar region is home to almost three million inhabitants, with a rapidly expanding population. It is also a region with very high innovation orientation, involving global high-tech, telecom, medical/pharmaceutical specialities and other cutting-edge technologies. The design of policies for the region is highly relevant for future-planning in other areas.

Figure 1. The participatory analytic decision model.

A comparison of our case studies shows how information is developed and structured on different levels. On what can be called a conceptualisation level, various ideas and meanings are expressed and developed in a plurality of forums, from the dominant public sphere in global media resources to the webpages of local organisations, residents’ closed social media groups and semi-private e-mail lists, as well as agencies’ direct communication with residents in meetings, focus groups and surveys.

On an elicitation level, the municipal, organisations or individuals are using a variety of methods to extract data produced in some of these public sources. On a calculation level, the data is analysed and developed to create meaningful and more informed feedback to the discussions and decision making that takes place on the first conceptualisation level.

The Participatory Analytic Decision Model (Figure 1) on the previous page consists of three interacting layers: the conceptualisation layer where public opinions are developed and surveyed, enabling feedback from inhabitants and stakeholders; the elicitation layer where data is gathered; and the calculation layer where data is modelled and analysed using multi-criteria decision analysis. The challenge here is to acknowledge the inequalities and power asymmetries on the conceptualisation level where problems are acknowledged and developed, but at the same time to use the data produced in these contexts in a meaningful way.

Participants in a decision process are never a homogenous group. Within a neighbourhood, differences in interest due to intersecting factors such as age, sex, professional status, ethnicity or religion may occur. Some people spend their entire lives at the site, while others are in a stage of transfer, and the local commons is intertwined with many parallel social commons. Residents living in a neighbourhood might have very different interests to residents in adjacent areas of the municipality and the region. In order to conceptualise the problem, definitions and interests at stake, the public spheres that create discourse at the site need to be understood. Given the fact that residents have conflicting interests it can be analysed and discussed to what extent these differences can be overcome by reformulations of possible solutions, and how mechanisms for conflict resolution can be incorporated. To identify conflicts and common interests, the interplay between stakeholders has to be addressed. This effort includes a mapping of interests among stakeholders involved.

Before making any decision, the problem has to be clarified, and the stakeholders have to be defined. The democratic problem is that the public sphere – where the issue is most often recognised and defined – is not representative of all but is most often dominated by powerful groups. Digital media strengthens the influence of these already vocal circles. Furthermore, the public sphere is fragmented and one might talk about multiple public spaces rather than one. Therefore it is important to understand how the public opinion is formed in order to identify the communication structures on site. This might help to clarify the representativeness of the so-called public opinion, and thus give elected politicians a better understanding of the opinions expressed in this room. It might also give us insights into how we can design communication systems that support alternative public spheres, in order to strengthen a broader citizen participation in the formulation of the public agenda. Thus, an important part of the research project was to create means for active citizenship and communality, and the development of a diversity of public discourses.

Contemporary participatory methods are also locked into traditional ways of using computer-based text and images that largely restrict the capacity for communicating. Therefore, in the context of public administration in general, and public planning in particular, multimodal communication using a variety of techniques and tools for the mediation of preferences, opinions and values should be encouraged, enabling the enrichment of the content communicated between decision-makers, stakeholders and the general public. It is important, then, to design process models for how such enriched content may be incorporated in public decision making and planning. This calls for a common model encompassing different points of view, multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders using different methods of appraisal.

The book is structured after this model, presenting research that focuses on different levels of the model: conceptualisation, elicitation, calculation. The conceptualisation section introduces methods and projects that focus on the inequalities and conflicts within participatory processes, as well as providing alternative public spheres and modes of communication. The elicitation section describes research that focuses on the quantification of qualitative data, solving problems such as how to extract data in participatory processes where information is derived through user input and the retrieved information is situated in a structure. The calculation section describes studies focusing on finding efficient processes to solve the quite complicated mathematical structures that these types of complex decision making can generate. The final section describes applications that employ tools and procedures from one or more of these different levels.

CONCEPTUALISATION

Communication processes are complex as well as dynamic and therefore it is not possible to understand them using one single method or standpoint. To understand the modalities, communication tools, and processes in public decision making, we therefore use a variety of research methods and approaches as well as different types of researchers; twisting and turning the situation under study to illuminate it in several complementary ways. This way of using a mix of approaches is referred to as triangulation, combining and integrating methods, or mixed methods. This simply means that one mixes different quantitative and/or qualitative approaches.

As the theme is public participation, participatory research methods have also been an important part of our research and the development of our democratic concepts and models. The rationale behind our participatory approach is not only to gather or conceptualise data with the help of research participants, but also to develop models that will enable change by way of participation, since those that are affected by ‘problems’ have been involved, assuming that the implementation of the outcome of the research will then also be more effective and sustainable. In general, this is the rationale for using participatory approaches, such as participatory urban planning and participatory design. Such methods are used to create a better-informed planning and design process, based on the basic democratic idea that all, regardless of age, gender or level of education, have a right to participate in decisions that claim to generate knowledge about them or that will affect the way they live or work. However, in these interdisciplinarity settings the differences between research paradigms are sometimes significant. That is why there is a need for tools and models clarifying the relations and conflicts between different researchers and methods.

In Chapter 1 we therefore describe what it means to work with participatory methods in an interdisciplinary research project, and how to deal with differences in ontologies and epistemologies. As a way of communicating different researchers’ positions, we draw a map of different positions for researchers and participants. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of gameplay as a useful model for understanding conflicts in the interdisciplinary research setting.

We know that participatory methods have become an important part of the research and design processes in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), and in fields such as art and urban planning and design. But there are no unifying ideas on what participation actually entails and there is often an underlying liberal notion of democracy, where the individual’s right to participate is emphasised and unequal power relations in the participatory situation are ignored. Unspoken norms of community and ignorance of the different interests and diversity found in most groups become problematic when translated from one cultural context to another. There is also a tendency to ignore the fact that unequal power relations in a group of participants can actually be meaningful and motivating. Therefore it is important to clarify what we actually mean by democracy in these contexts and in Chapter 2 we describe how we look at democracy and present a model for evaluating democracy based on these observations and the results of Chapter 1.

There is an excessive focus on the method in participatory approaches, while the role of the artist/designer/researcher is overshadowed. As participatory methods depend on the person enacting them, the researcher using the method should be an equally important object of study. However, as participatory methods have become more mainstream, issues of technology have been emphasised at the expense of concerns about relationships between people. Within the arts there is also a criticism that the concept of participation has been reduced to an aesthetic that acts more in an excluding than an including way. In Chapter 3 we therefore describe and analyse the more artistic parts of the undertakings in the book, focusing on the role of the artist/researcher within research and exploring art as a participatory methodology in the case of Husby. Chapter 4 explains the plural rationality approach and then lays out the various methods by which it has been applied and discusses the differences between this approach and the more conventional ones.

1 Interdisciplinarity and Mixed Methods

© L. Ekenberg, K. Hansson, M. Danielson, G. Cars et al., CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108.01

This chapter is based on Hansson, K. Accommodating Differences: Power, Belonging, and Representation Online. Stockholm University. 2015.

The researchers in this project have worked in diverse fields, including e-government, e-participation, decision support and analysis, design research, urban planning, and art. Interdisciplinarity has been a core value of the project, while using various methodologies from various fields, not the least qualitative and mixed methods. As we also engage with research participants in various ways, sometimes as informants, sometimes as co-researchers, a diverse group of people has been involved. This diversity, regarding both contexts for the research and the demographic of the participants, added even more complexity to the project. In this chapter we focus on what interdisciplinarity means in this context and what combining different fields and different groups of people entails in practice. We also introduce the concept of gameplay as a useful term in interdisciplinary research settings.

Interdisciplinarity: Combining Methods, Concepts and Theories

Interdisciplinarity commonly refers to the integration of two or more disciplines tackling a common problem. Interdisciplinarity is also common in complex real-life situations where one research perspective is not enough. In contrast to multidisciplinarity, which denotes a juxtaposition of multiple disciplines each investigating the problem in its own way, interdisciplinarity is about mixing different field-specific methods and developing new methodologies that combine different data, methods, concepts or theories. A considerable amount of academic research is interdisciplinary.

Most interdisciplinary research projects are narrow in scope, integrating adjacent fields, and interdisciplinary research projects are more common in more exploratory contexts than in instrumentally oriented ones. Interdisciplinary research projects are also often about concrete problem-solving, they are often especially innovative, and can consist of several sub-projects.

This research project contains all these characteristics. Even though the scope of the project was wide, including people from diverse fields like art, e-participation, urban planning, and decision analytics, the fields that were integrated were narrower, such as art and urban planning, or e-participation and decision analytics. However, our common denominator was participation and democracy, and by focusing on this overall theme and sharing basic democratic theories, disparate fields and sub-projects were kept together on a common ground.

The conceptual distance between research fields is often pointed out as the cause of communication problems and failure in interdisciplinary research, and we were aware of this risk. It is easy to believe that the correlation between the conceptual distance between research fields and failure, is also the explanation for the level of interdisciplinarity. However, we found that much more basic conditions for collaboration were of real importance, such as constraints for participation in time and capital. Especially when involving a large number of people as co-researchers, participants or informants, the differences in their ‘gameplay’, meaning the rules and cultures for accumulated resources in their field, can be hard to overcome, especially if they are ignored. In the consensus culture of Swedish workplaces these differences can be experienced as conflicts. The tendency is to focus on what participants have in common rather than recognising their differences, hence misunderstandings due to ignorance are often grounds for conflicts that eventually develop.

Another important factor in our projects combining different fields and groups of people has been different attitudes to participation and the power inequalities within the participatory setup in different research methodologies. In the following pages we will therefore look at the role of the participant in different methodologies.

The Role of the Participant

The differences in ontology and epistemology between research fields may be most clearly expressed in the different attitudes to the data and role of the participant. For example, in the field of decision analysis the data is often taken for granted: it is something you have or do not have, that can be extracted and translated into numbers. Participants in the research are seen as informants who deliver data that is ‘out there’ and can be extracted if you just ask the right questions. The data can be easily illustrated in diagrams and tables.

In contrast, more qualitatively oriented research fields, such as design research, look at the data more critically as something that is situated in a certain context and made ‘in here’: co-created by the researcher and the participant in the research situation and produced in a hegemonic discourse. Here the participant is seen more as a co-designer or co-researcher and as the expert on his or her own reality. This data is best presented as a narrative and illustrated as quotes and documentary images and films. These differences are often seen as expressions of two different incompatible belief systems that cannot exist in the same scientific space, or in the same research publication. We have chosen rather to see these differences as different positions in a shared process, where one section of the research process is about creating high-quality data that represents some part of reality in some way, and another section of the research process is about using this data as a starting point for theories and calculations. Both paradigms are needed to describe a complex reality.

The differences in attitudes towards participation can be illustrated by comparing some previous urban planning projects in which members of our research team have been actively involved as researchers coming from the fields of computer science, urban planning, social science, and art. As a way to create a common vocabulary, we used these projects to identify differences and commonalities in the perceptions of the participants and the role of the method. The projects, described in Table 1 on the next page, are fairly typical for urban planning practices in Sweden and show the diversity of research practices represented in the group of researchers’ portfolio of methods. They are also typical for interdisciplinary research, as the focus is to solve a concrete problem that needs a diversity of perspectives to be apprehended.

What these projects have in common is that they all involved participants in one way or another. By looking at how they did it, and what role the participants played, we can describe some of the differences between these methodologies. Researchers in the realm of social science commonly use participatory methods, such as surveys, focus groups and interviews. However, some researchers also want the research to be participatory. Participatory research is a general term for the use of participatory methods to change the way research is conducted. It emerged as a response to a research paradigm that alienates the researcher from the researched. Instead, participatory researchers aim to change the power relations between researcher and participants and to create knowledge that clarifies these relations. Participation in this perspective is not only about how we produce knowledge, but also about how this production empowers the participants. Participatory methods in areas like participatory urban planning and participatory design are used as ways to create more informed planning and design processes, to make the implementation more effective and sustainable. Above all, the participatory practices are based on the democratic idea that everyone has a right to participate in decisions that affect them. Most uses of participatory methods are not this radical — instead, participation is seen as a way to understand a social reality of some sort by inviting the participants of this social reality to contribute. The participant is thus seen differently by different researchers, from the participant as a passive research object to the participant as an active co-creator of data.

Table 1. Summary of eight cases of participatory processes in urban planning in Sweden.

One of the more minimal modes of participation is where the participant is viewed as an object that is involved to secure compliance and lend legitimacy to the process. For example, in the district of Husby in Stockholm, one of our research sites, the developers involved a large group of residents in town meetings and workshops where people were invited to give input on the planning of the area. However, the more urgent matters, like who could afford to live in the area after the renovations, were not discussed and when the gentrification plans were presented they were legitimised by the claim that residents had been involved in the planning.

Participants can also be seen as instruments and participation as a way to make projects or interventions run more efficiently, by enlisting contributions and delegating responsibilities, for example, over data gathering. Another of our research cases, the municipality of Upplands Väsby and the plan for development of the railway station and its vicinity, can be taken as an illustration of how a complex planning process can become more informed by including citizens’ input in the planning process.

Upplands Väsby in the northern part of the Stockholm region has just over 40,000 inhabitants. Municipal plans include an increase of the population, but also an expansion of the number of workplaces and strengthening public and commercial services. An important feature of the municipality’s development strategy is changing its image from a mono-functional dormitory suburb to being part of the region characterised by urban qualities: creating an urban fabric with higher density where different functions are physically integrated. The significance of culture and the promotion of street-life are stressed in the visions for the future. At present, the municipality is engaged in a number of activities to realise these ambitions. A long-term vision is being developed. This activity includes a variety of measures aiming at a more active involvement of the residents. Substantial new construction and ‘fill-in’ are to be carried out in the central part of the municipality with the aim of creating and strengthening urban qualities. This comprehensive change process is complicated, involving a number of stakeholders with varying interests.

The plan for the development of the railway station illustrates this complexity. Residents living in close vicinity to the railway station, whose local environment will be most affected by the project, consider themselves self-evident stakeholders. But other individuals will also be affected, directly or indirectly, by the project. For example, train commuters from other parts of Upplands Väsby will benefit from improved means for intermodal public transport. For individuals working in the area, the project means that the adjacent outdoor environment will change dramatically, and for current and potential Stockholm residents, suffering from the housing shortage in the Stockholm region, the plans for redevelopment of the railway station and adjacent land could create housing options. Thus, an initial issue is to define groups with an interest at stake. As a way to understand citizens’ and other stakeholders’ specific standpoints we used a survey to get participants’ opinions on different alternatives that also could be weighted in relation to each other. Having done that, it become obvious that these interests were diverse and conflicting. Participants can also be seen as more like someone to consult with, as agents, and participation as a way to get in tune with public views and values, co-create problem definitions and solutions and enhance responsiveness. For example, in Husby we used seminars as an adjunct to an art project in the public room, not only as a way to understand the problems but to develop ideas and strategies.

Finally, data can be seen as something that is created for a purpose, and participants can be seen as creative artists, with political capabilities, critical consciousness and confidence. In the project, artists were invited to explore and interpret the situation in multimodal installations. These artworks played the role of probes, starting discussions with residents and other stakeholders.

Figure 1. Positions for the researcher, the participants and the data in relation to different epistemologies.

It is also important to remember that artefacts such as prototypes and interactive interfaces are important for participation, and also have agency, relations and power. Different modalities and materialisations change the way the research is perceived and used. A prototype can, for example, be a simple abstract sketch that encourages participation as it is open for development. Unlike a detailed CAD drawing that almost looks like a finished product but is easier to criticise, or a computer program that needs a certain expertise to read. Artefacts are also interpreted differently depending on their symbolic value: a performance by an artist, for example, is interpreted differently to a data sheet with values generated by a group of computer scientists.

Combining the scale of different types of participants with a scale of different types of views of the researcher, we get a map (see Figure 1) where one can place the use of different methods, corresponding to different epistemologies, from seeing the researcher as someone who is coming up with general theories looking at participants’ common behaviour (commonality), to ideas of the single participant’s particularity and subjectivity as a basis for knowledge production (singularity). In this project we have been combining different positions on this map, and used the tension and contradictions between these positions as a source for innovation.

Difference in Gameplay between Research Areas

It is not only the attitude towards the research subject that differs between different areas, but also the gameplay of the areas. This more basic problem in interdisciplinary research needs careful attention, especially when involving a large number of people as co-researchers, participants, or informants. For example, differences in the parties’ time constraints for participation are often ignored and can therefore be a reason for tension or lack of engagement. Research practices, just like games, contain an economy of some sort where the challenge is to accumulate resources. In games, users commonly achieve higher levels and ‘score’ by doing different activities, so-called game ‘challenges’.

In the above-mentioned case from Husby there were three different research disciplines involved, and people at different stages of their career ladders:

Artistic researchers, most of whom financed their participation as part of a temporary teaching position, also involving students in the research.A professor in urban planning, tenured position, full-time employee. A professor in computer and systems sciences, tenured position, full-time employee. An associate professor in computer and systems sciences, part-time employee. PhD students in urban planning.PhD students in computer and systems sciences.Local actors from the area, participating in the project as co-researchers.

In this group there were thus at least seven different ‘game challenges’. For example, the PhD students needed to publish articles in refereed journals in their area of study, in order to complete their education. The artistic researcher needed to show her work in prestigious venues and to win as much attention as possible from gatekeepers in the art world. The associate professor needed to demonstrate evidence of accomplishment with an impressive and extensive publication record containing research articles in referenced journals. In the field of urban planning, the PhD students would write monographs and journal articles. In computer and systems sciences it is more common to contribute to conference proceedings. The local co-researchers might have political motives for participating, for example not only gaining new insights from the collaboration but also a network of contacts that could be useful in the local context.

The fields of urban planning and computer and systems sciences are also differently positioned on the qualitative-quantitative scale. In order to be published, scholars need to adhere to different styles of writing, and style can be especially difficult to integrate in interdisciplinary research. Aesthetics show whether you are part of a group or not: they are an important identifier and can be the reason why, for example, a publication is seriously reviewed or not, or that the artist gets attention from the gatekeepers of the art world. However, these different game rules are not usually clarified, either because participants are ignorant of the differences or because they do not want to give the differences too much space. Unspoken differences can also be reasons for conflict. For example, a person in full-time employment can easily forget that other participants attend working-group meetings in their free time. Co-writing articles can also become difficult for researchers from different paradigms: since they need to publish in the most prestigious journals in their fields in order to advance their careers, they cannot risk using research approaches or concepts inappropriate to their own field.

These differences are not easy to overcome, and there will be conflicts. To create better conditions for interdisciplinary research it is good to have some sort of reflexive practice and to articulate questions about participants’ different economic systems, motivations and practical constraints.

The previous map of researchers’ and participants’ positions can also be useful when navigating between different research paradigms and situations, and aid the establishment of strong research collectives.

Further reading

Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P. and Hillgren, P-A. Participatory Design and ‘Democratizing Innovation’, in Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, Eds. T. Robertson, K. Bødker, T. Bratteteig and D. Loi. Sydney: PDC ’10, The 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. 2010.

Cornwall, A. Whose Voices? Whose Choices? Reflections on Gender and Participatory Development. World Development. 31(8), pp. 1325–1342. 2003.

Cornwall, A. and Jewkes, R. What Is Participatory Research? Social Science Medicine. 41(12), pp. 1667–1676. 1995.

Dearden, A. Participatory Design and Participatory Development: A Comparative Review. PDC ’08: Experiences and Challenges, Par­ticipatory Design Conference, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, October 1–4, 2008,pp. 81–91. 2008.

Gaventa, J. and Cornwall, A. Challenging the Boundaries of the Possible: Participation, Knowledge and Power. IDS Bulletin. 37(6), pp. 122–128. 2006.

Hansson, K., Cars, G., Danielson, M., Ekenberg, L. and Larsson, A. Diversity and Public Decision Making. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology. 6(11), pp. 1678–1683. 2012.

Reason, P. and Bradbury, H., Eds. The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. 2008.

Wallerstein, N. Power Between Evaluator and Community: Re­search Relationships within New Mexico’s Healthier Communities. Social Science and Medicine. 49(1), pp. 39–53. 1999.

2 The Concept of Democracy

© L. Ekenberg, K. Hansson, M. Danielson, G. Cars et al., CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0108.02

This chapter is based on Hansson, K. Accommodating Differences: Power, Belonging, and Representation Online. Stockholm University. 2015.

The concept of democracy can be confusing as there are many implicit ideas and understandings of democracy, sometimes contradictory. In this chapter we develop our thoughts on e-democracy, e-government, and open democracy with the help of political sciences, and we also develop a model for evaluating deliberative democracy.

Digital differentiation and complex, opaque decision processes in collaborative media are threats to representative democracy for many reasons. The participatory dilemma is compounded online, as people who already have a great deal of influence gain even more powerful tools, hence it is important to understand problems and handle them with careful deliberation and representation. The suggested model focuses on these concepts, addressing the problem of lack of supportive tools and venues for broad deliberation, and lack of analytical tools. The model can be used for evaluating how tools and projects support broad deliberative discussion, and to describe how and by whom the data is produced. The aim is to create a better understanding of how the participatory dilemma in online deliberative processes can be handled.

The concept of democracy is generally taken for granted in areas such as e-government, open government, and e-participation. The underlying concept of democracy that form the basis for technological development is usually an unarticulated liberal conception demonstrated in the way researchers address different problems. Democracy in this liberal discourse is an instrument similar to a market economy, where citizens vote for the political parties of their choice, based on how they satisfy citizens’ needs and interests. Here, the idea of individual autonomy and transparency is an essential condition for making enlightened choices. Concepts such as collaborative or open government promote a more participatory style of government favoured by proponents of deliberative democracy. Participatory urban planning, established in legal systems, is a further opportunity for participatory democracy.

The central idea of this participatory paradigm is a return to a classical democratic ideal where broad, public, deliberative conversation is essential for reaching a shared understanding of the problems at stake and agreement on the decisions to be taken. Without active and engaged citizens, the gap between them and their representatives creates alienation and turns democracy into a marketplace for political ideas consumed by a passive audience.

The deliberative democracy model has also been criticized, for its dependence on the concept of a neutral public sphere without agonistic interests where all the facts are presented and everyone can share a common understanding. Critics point out that participation in the public sphere is highly unequal, and a hegemonic discourse dictates what is permissible to express in this sphere and what is considered ‘political’. As a result real consensus cannot exist, and there is a risk that belief in this idea can in fact undermine democratic institutions. It is also easy to be critical of the central aim of deliberative democracy: creating a neutral sphere beyond self-interest and passion, where ‘objective’ reasoning and consensus is possible. By contrast, radical democracy embraces a plurality of values and identities, and proposes turning conflicting interests into competing interests rather than seeking one solution that fits all.

In this research project we have turned to Robert A. Dahl’s pluralist theory of democracy for finding a common ground for what we mean by democracy. Dahl’s theory is a useful starting point as it does not constrain democracy to a particular context, but rather sees it as an iterative and scalable process that includes those affected by its decisions. Dahl’s democratic model can thus apply to members of a small group, citizens of a state, or participants in a voluntary organisation. Democracy, in Dahl’s perspective, is an ongoing reflective process that is not only about collective decision-making but also about who is a representative ‘citizen’ in the decision-making processes.

Basic democratic rights to participate in the deliberative processes of agenda-setting, discussion and voting include the aim that everyone involved has an enlightened understanding of the problems and opportunities, as well as the right to express their understanding. Equal representation is important on multiple levels, from setting the agenda to discussion and voting.

We can reflect on the degree of democracy in a situation by analysing how membership is decided; how the members have set the agenda; how discussion around the problem is organised, and who can participate; how, by whom and when the decisions are made, and if a level of understanding is maintained. The situations may look very different: the organisation of an online working group, the government of a country, or the editing of a post on Wikipedia.

In our overviews of research projects on e-participation, e-government and open government we identified problems in the deliberative part of this democracy model, where problems are defined and developed in a reasoning process. We also found problems in the representative part of the model, where membership is defined, and where someone is taking a decision. The available tools often lack structure and sophisticated means to support more complex reasoning in the deliberative process. Participants in many projects also lack democratic legitimacy due to unequal representation: there often is a rather limited group that has the means and the motivation to be fully active members. So let us look more closely at two of the main features in this democratic process: deliberation and representation.

The Deliberative Process

A common image for illustrating the democratic deliberative process is the one of groups of men in a café talking in a civilised manner, where different arguments are discussed and every aspect of the problem is explored until a common understanding is developed and consensus is reached. The underlying assumption is that if we just collect the right information from a diversity of perspectives and experiences we will be able to take an informed, rational decision. This decision process can be taught, and it includes weighing pros and cons and predicting the consequences of different actions.

Understanding is a central notion in this communicative process. And in areas such as e-participation, e-government and open government requirements for openness and transparency are also proposed, meaning that the whole decision process, including data gathering and decision mechanism, should be open for inspection. Interoperability is another related concept in the field of computer science, meaning that information should not only be open, but also easily accessible with standards that are simple to reuse and that makes the data sharable. With the concept of understanding we emphasise that access to data not is enough if it is not possible to interpret and process it. Too much information can, for example, sometimes make understanding more difficult and hinder people from participation. Understanding is difficult even when it comes to simple decisions. It takes time and energy to gather information and to predict and understand the future consequences of a situation. In the field of decision theory, forms of deliberative reasoning have therefore been developed and instrumentalised. Such instruments are, for example, about structuring the decision procedures, providing quantitative data regarding alternatives and the criteria involved. In this context the deliberative processes are described in different iterative stages:

Figure 1.N. and G. Urbonas et al., Husby Chanel, in Performing the Common, Husby, Stockholm, 2012. Photo by Åsa Andersson Broms.

The first stage is to identify and define the issues at stake: How do we know we have a problem? Why is it a problem? How and where do we think we can find a solution? The second stage is about structure: What are the different aspects of the problem? What do we know about the different perspectives? What are the different solutions identified? The third stage is about opening up the problem and capturing all available information needed to understand what different solutions will lead to: What could happen? How likely is it? What are the consequences of different events? How can they be measured? How are the various criteria related to each other? The fourth stage is about moderating discussion and/or modelling the problem. Different perspectives, goals and criteria are brought together with the help of a moderator. These different goals, criteria, and gathered information can be put together in a model where the outcome of relations between different events, probabilities and weight of criteria can be calculated.

Central to the process is creating a shared understanding of the phenomena involved through transparency and openness. Evaluation of the model is important throughout the process and the process can be iterated in the light of new information. Finally a decision basis is formed, which explains the problems and recommends different solutions.

These stages are of course a simplification. The deliberative process is dynamic and distributed over time and space. It takes place in a variety of contexts and modalities. It also accommodates diverse participants representing different experiences and viewpoints.

Representativeness in Deliberative Democracy

The deliberative process has been criticised from different perspectives. Most important in our overview is the problem with representation in the political process. It matters who it is that discusses and takes decisions. Feminist scholars especially emphasise the importance of ‘situated knowledge’ meaning that knowledge is always situated in a person’s prior understanding of the information. This is why it is important to have representation not only of different perspectives but also of different people. People have different and sometimes antagonistic interests, but also produce and interpret the information differently, which is why the outcome of information gathering also depends on who it is that produces the information. A democratic deliberative process also needs mechanisms for neutralising and balancing asymmetrical power relations in order to make all perspectives visible. However, this kind of enlightened reasoning may only be possible if there are no major conflicts between different groups. In practice, politics is full of passion and arriving at a consensus on rational grounds is often impossible: the conflicts between different interest groups and world views are simply too great. In addition, the agenda and discussion are governed by a hegemonic discourse. In this dominant discourse there are constraints on what political positions it is possible to take.

Democratic representation is therefore not simply about the people who are affected by the decision also being involved in taking the decision, but also about having the means and the motivation to participate. Democracy is not just about legal rights to vote or to speak freely, it is equally important to have the social, economic, and cultural capital required to participate as a full citizen in political life. Online, this means having the digital literacy needed to participate fully in the production of the information that informs the deliberative process. Democracy is also about the recognition of one’s identity, that the questions you feel are important also are acknowledged as political, and that you can identify with the actors in the public arena. Representation is also complicated in a more global system where those affected by decisions made in a certain location might live somewhere else. Therefore the question about representation is increasingly relevant, as the nation state as the basis for the institutionalisation of democracy is questioned.

The above description of the deliberative process and democratic representation can be summarised in the following criteria that can be used when analysing tools and processes for collaboration from a democracy perspective (see Table 1 on next page).

Table 1. Model for evaluating democracy: criteria for deliberation and representation.