...This chapter explores how corporations mobilize public participation as a strategy to enhance their sociopolitical legitimacy with the help of grassroots lobbying consultants. In particular, it considers how corporate interventions in the public sphere are related to corporate interests...

... Era on the evolution of consultation in California and New York. It also looks at the Great Consultation and the fiscal theory of democratization and concludes by assessing the implications of new deliberative assemblies for public participation. California new deliberative assemblies in California...

... and economic elites colonized “pure” participation in order to legitimate the expansion of capitalist markets, suggesting that regulation and governance questions are always a part of public participation and that participatory practices are never exactly utopian. citizen s entrepreneurial citizens...

...This concluding chapter reexamines the pitfalls and unrealized promises of public participation in a context of severe structural inequalities. Focusing on remedies suggested in the other chapters of this book, it argues that critical perspectives on participation are necessary in order to leverage...

...Just as sustainability has come to serve as a euphemism for profit-minded redevelopment, public participation and community engagement have become a ritualized but ultimately empty performance of democracy and shared decision making. This chapter examines how environmental justice activists have...

... authority changed the way local political and economic leaders viewed public participation. It then discusses three types of organizations that claimed to represent the city's communities: community development corporations, community congresses, and the ward operations of city councilors. It also considers...

...This chapter examines the impact of new technologies facilitated by political consultancies on public participation in an era of “digital” media campaigns that promise individual empowerment. Drawing on interviews with the consultants who harnessed participatory technologies in the 2008...

...This book explores how public participation fosters severe structural inequalities that limit the potential for true democratization. It examines the implications of new participatory innovations for the exercise of authority and governance as well as the practices that sustain and undermine...

... the mythologist Gilbert Durand called anthropological archetypology. It then considers alternative narratives concerning Flight 93 that rely on elements of the American social imaginary rooted in populist distrust of official and state power. It also provides an overview of public participation in the local...

... surprising insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns...