In the present context of increasing human population demography, worldwide social crises, and rapid ecological global change, large cities are facing major socio-environmental challenges. This convokes authorities to adapt their governance and urban planning to reconcile urban development, ecological systems, and city dwellers in the most sustainable way. To achieve such goals, local officials have to associate all local actors, including city-dwellers, to the decision-making process through participatory governance and/or participatory systems. Here, we elaborated an original pilot project governance system for a \"Participatory System Combining Town Planning and Science\" (the 2PS-CiTy), as part of the revision of the Local Urban Plan (LUP) of Paris, France, into a Bioclimatic LUP held from 2020 to 2024. By implementing 2PS-CiTy, we aimed to answer \"How to turn trees into a lever for inhabitants\' engagement in urban consultation systems?\" Trees were chosen because they are emblematic elements of nature with significant roles in ecosystemic services such as urban climate regulation. Parisians were invited to (i) share in the first questionnaire some information on their knowledge about the LUP and their engagement in it, (ii) identify urban trees they consider remarkable, (iii) explain their choice in a second questionnaire, (iv) contribute to the urban consultation as part of the LUP revision, and finally, (v) give their feedback during a dedicated survey. Out of the 41 Parisians who took part in 2PS-City, 83% declared they were motivated to participate because they could contribute to the tree census, which in turn can constructively contribute to the Parisian LUP revision to bring more nature and sustainability in town. This study demonstrates that trees can be used as a lever for inhabitants\' engagement in urban consultation systems to make cities more sustainable. Our survey also showed that the 2PS-CiTy governance system could be improved by (1) developing a participatory culture among decision-makers and (2) preventing nowadays silo governance from developing the most promising public governance systems that involve the departments of green space, urban planning, and local democracy.

The most effective structure in designing the participation process is local government units. It is much easier for local governments to establish closer dialogue with citizens, create negotiation environments for them and identify appropriate needs for participation. The intense feeling of centralization in terms of the duties and responsibilities of local governments in Turkey leads to the inability to transfer the negotiation processes in participation practices to realistic/realizable practices. As a result, permanent institutional practices do not carry on sustainably; they turn into structures established to fulfill legal obligations only. The transition from government to governance, with the winds of change began after 1990 in Turkey, revealed the necessity of reorganizing the duties and responsibilities of executives at both local and national levels regarding active citizenship; the necessity of activating local participation mechanisms was emphasized. For this reason, the application of the Headmen\'s (Headman means \"Muhtar\" in Turkish. Sometimes \"Mukhtar\" uses instead of Headman in some studies. But in this study Headman used to descripe partipatory process. In Turkey, there two types of \"Headman\". One of them is village headman. Villages are legal entities, so village headmen have much more authority. The second one is neigborhood headmen. Neigborhoods are not legal entities. So that, neigborhood headman is responsible to City Mayor.). Workshop, designed by the Tekirdağ Metropolitan Municipality, was periodically subject to the research as an ongoing method, and its effectiveness for citizen participation was analyzed using the qualitative research method in the study. The reason why Tekirdağ was chosen in the study is that it has the only metropolitan municipality in the Thrace Region, periodic meetings and participatory democracy discourses on the sharing of duties and powers with new regulations increase. The practice was examined through 6 meetings held until 2020 since there were disruptions in the planned meetings of the practice on account of the fact that the study coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic process.

Current national and international guidelines for the ethical design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics emphasize ethical theory. Various governing and advisory bodies have generated sets of broad ethical principles, which institutional decisionmakers are encouraged to apply to particular practical decisions. Although much of this literature examines the ethics of designing and developing AI and robotics, medical institutions typically must make purchase and deployment decisions about technologies that have already been designed and developed. The primary problem facing medical institutions is not one of ethical design but of ethical deployment. The purpose of this paper is to develop a practical model by which medical institutions may make ethical deployment decisions about ready-made advanced technologies. Our slogan is \"more process, less principles.\" Ethically sound decisionmaking requires that the process by which medical institutions make such decisions include participatory, deliberative, and conservative elements. We argue that our model preserves the strengths of existing frameworks, avoids their shortcomings, and delivers its own moral, practical, and epistemic advantages.

In the context of global democratic crises and pervasive neoliberal policies, civil society organizations (CSOs) play a critical role in promoting democratic processes and advancing social change on local, national, and transnational scales. However, such organizations also (need to) grapple with how they themselves put social justice and democratic principles into practice, and resist coloniality within. This article examines these questions in the case of People Powered-Global Hub for Participatory Democracy, a recently found transnational CSO that advocates globally for participatory democracy as a mechanism for social change and employs these principles in its own governance and operations. The analysis focusses on the creation of People Powered and its first year of practice. Drawing upon decolonial frameworks-and based on our own experiences as founding members of People Powered and our reading of interviews and documents-we identify concrete practices through which the organization seeks to enact epistemic justice, shift power, and emphasize relationality. We argue that People Powered\'s decolonial roots, collectively articulated values and commitments, radical transparency, and its consistent employment of meaningful participation and reflexivity have built and are likely to sustain this transnational solidarity for social change. At the same time and perhaps critical for fostering solidarity and social change in the long term, People Powered embraces, rather than evades, tensions and contradictions that emerge in these efforts.

This article provides an explanation for how increased public participation can paradoxically translate into limited democratic decision-making in urban settings. Recent sociological research shows how governments can control participatory forums to restrict the distribution of resources to poor neighborhoods or to advance private land development interests. Yet such explanations cannot account for the decoupling of participation from democratic decision-making in the case of planning for climate change, which expands the substantive topics and public funding decisions that involve urban residents. Through an in-depth case study of one of the largest coastal protection projects in the world and drawing on global scholarship on participation, this article narrates the social production of resistance to climate change infrastructure by showing how the state sidestepped public input and exercised authority through appeals to the rationality of technical expertise. After a lengthy participation process wherein participants reported satisfaction with how their input was included in designs, city officials switched decision-making styles and used expertise from engineers to render the publicly-supported plan unfeasible, while continuing to involve residents in the process. As a result, conflict arose between activists and public housing representatives, bitterly dividing the neighborhood over who could legitimately claim to represent the interests of the \"frontline community.\" By documenting the experience of participants in the process before and after the switch in decision-making styles, this article advances a sociological description of public influence in policy: The ability for participants in a planning process to recognize their own input reflected in finished plans.

This essay looks to Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey, as well as a contemporary political theorist, Kevin O\'Leary, for some guidance in confronting the present crisis in American democratic norms and practices-including that swirling around issues of public health.

Kerala, a small state in South India, has been celebrated as a development model by scholars across the world for its exemplary achievements in human development and poverty reduction despite relatively low GDP growth. It was no surprise, then, that the Covid 19 pandemic that hit Kerala before any other part of India, became a test case for the Kerala model in dealing with such a crisis. Kerala was lauded across the world once again as a success story in containing this unprecedented pandemic, in treating those infected, and in making needed provisions for those adversely affected by the lockdown. But as it turned out, this celebration was premature as Kerala soon faced a third wave of Covid 19 infections. The objective of this paper is to examine Kerala\'s trajectory in achieving the success and then confronting the unanticipated reversal. It will examine the legacy of the Kerala model such as robust and decentralized institutions and provisions for healthcare, welfare and safety nets, and especially the capacity of a democratic state working in synergy with civil society and enjoying a high degree of consensus and public trust. It will then examine the new surge of the virus and attempts to establish if this was due to any mistakes made by the state or some deficits in its model of \"public action\" that includes adversarial politics having a disruptive tenor about it. We will conclude by arguing that the Kerala model is still relevant, and that it is still a model in motion.

This investigation aims to show the relationship between participation and psychological empowerment and between participation and interaction under an institutional political participation programme. This initiative known as Ágora Infantil (AI) is characterised by an obligatory draw-based deliberative participation methodology with superordinate goals based on group dynamics, with games playing a central role. The evaluation was carried out using a quasi-experimental design, with quantitative measurements of the experimental and control groups, along with systematic observation of the target group. The results support the hypotheses proposed: Participation in the AI programme led to an increase in psychological empowerment and positive interactions between the participants. These results offer information as to what design should be used for these types of political initiatives to favour inclusion and empowerment of children, while at the same time improving classroom relationships.

BACKGROUND: Sedation in palliative care meets a precise definition and corresponds to a medical practice. We assessed the comprehension of this practice by the French population.
METHODS: In 2015, citizen expressed their views on the Claeys-Leonetti bill by means of a consultative forum made available on the Internet site of the National Assembly. The content of the messages filed, regarding the right to deep and continuous sedation until death was analyzed using the ALCESTE textual data analysis software, supplemented by a thematic analysis in order to identify the perception that Internet users had of this practice.
RESULTS: Among the 1819 Internet users who participated in the forum, 67 expressed their views as Health professionals, 25 of whom were directly involved in palliative care, as well as 10 sick persons. Analysis with the ALCESTE software highlighted two classes of statements. The first dealing with deep and continuous sedation, reflecting the specificity of the discourse of the Internet users. The second one consisted of textual units in which the modal verbs were dominant and overrepresented, thus providing information on the participants\' perceptions. The thematic analysis highlighted four themes: death, intent, treatment and fear.
CONCLUSIONS: Deep and continuous sedation is perceived as a euthanasic practice or raises fear of such a drift. Provision of extended and accurate information to the population and health professionals is essential to ensure that this new model of sedation is integrated into the care of the terminally ill patients and their families.

The use and utility of science in society is often influenced by the structure, legitimacy, and efficacy of the scientific research process. Public participation in scientific research (PPSR) is a growing field of practice aimed at enhancing both public knowledge and understanding of science (education outreach) and the efficacy and responsiveness of scientific research, practice, and policy (participatory engagement). However, PPSR objectives focused on \"education outreach\" and \"participatory engagement\" have each emerged from diverse theoretical traditions that maintain distinct indicators of success used for program development and evaluation. Although areas of intersection and overlap among these two traditions exist in theory and practice, a set of comprehensive standards has yet to coalesce that supports the key principles of both traditions in an assimilated fashion. To fill this void, a comprehensive indicators framework is proposed with the goal of promoting a more integrative and synergistic PPSR program development and assessment process.