Descripción del proyecto
Un análisis más profundo de la participación ciudadana
La participación ciudadana en los asuntos públicos no es algo nuevo. Involucrar a los ciudadanos en las decisiones que conforman sus vidas es fundamental en cualquier democracia y clave para generar confianza entre los ciudadanos y las instituciones públicas. El objetivo es aumentar la participación pública en asuntos de interés colectivo. Teniendo esto en cuenta, el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos InPart identificará nuevos modos de participación pública, sobre todo en entornos en los que se desalienta la participación de las personas. En concreto, el proyecto se centrará en prácticas informales que suponen trabajar en torno a procedimientos formales y espacios públicos, y que dependen de permanecer desapercibidas. El equipo del proyecto adoptará un enfoque cualitativo para investigar de manera comparativa contextos locales (sistema sanitario ruso) y mundiales (industria farmacéutica) en los que proliferan las situaciones no democráticas.
Objetivo
How to ensure meaningful public participation in governing matters of collective concern? With the growth of distrust and alienation between citizens and established political institutions, it urgent to improve democracy by finding new ways of involving citizens in decisions that shape their lives. I make a counterintuitive proposal to look for new modes of public participation in informal practices creatively employed by citizens to contest governance arrangements, especially in settings where they are discouraged from doing so. Scholarship traditionally defines public participation as dependent on making issues public, i.e. visible and debatable, whereas informality is considered dysfunctional and anomic, not least to democracy itself. Therefore, informal practices that involve working around formal procedures and public spaces, and depend on remaining invisible, have not been explored as modes of public participation. My project is the first comprehensive study of public participation by means of informal practices. It takes a qualitative approach inspired by the ethnographic ‘rear-mirror’ methodology to comparatively investigate local (Russian healthcare system) and global (pharmaceutical industry) sites where non-democratic situations abound and identify how informality mediates participation in health, a domain personally relevant for many citizens because their lives are at stake. I will elucidate the effects of this mediation and elaborate the theoretical significance of conceptualising certain informal practices as public participation. This project will offer a fundamentally novel insight into the impacts of informal practices on formulating and addressing matters of collective concern, enable discerning a wider spectrum of participatory modalities, and open up new avenues of democratisation. I will draw on my previous research on informality in health and pharmapolitics and on my extensive international network to achieve the project goals.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
6200 MD Maastricht
Países Bajos