Community foresight for urban sustainability: Insights from the Citizens Science for Sustainability (SuScit) project

A key strength of backcasting is arguably the emphasis it places upon envisaging longer-term distant futures, allowing participants and users to think beyond incremental changes in their current lived experience and to embrace the more radical and disruptive socio-technical changes which may be necessary to deliver sustainability. In so doing, however, backcasting may run the risk of obscuring significant differences in current lived experience, negating alternative problem framings and normatively derived views of what constitutes sustainability. This paper reports an innovative UK attempt to develop an inclusive ‘bottom-up’ community foresight process for urban sustainability research. Unlike most backcasting studies, the methodology was initially grounded in an exploration of the community participants' current lived experience and understandings of sustainability. Given the particular purpose of the study the primary outcome from the work was structured around the articulation of a ‘community-led’ agenda for urban sustainability research, rather than an explicit normative vision and transition pathway. However, the methodology could easily be adapted for use in other contexts, and showed potential to contribute to the formation of local ‘transition arenas’: facilitating network formation and building capacity for local sustainability initiatives and experiments.     

Who Speaks,and in What Voice? The Challenge of Engaging ‘The Public’ in Health Policy Decision-Making

Abstract

Despite widespread calls for greater public involvement in governance, especially in relation to health policy, significant challenges remain in identifying any such legitimate ‘public’ voice. This research investigates this problem through a case study. It examines how actors experienced and interpreted a government-commissioned citizen’s jury on health spending prioritization in relation to the work of the local health care consumers’ organization. The analysis highlights an unproductive tension around this encounter, and points to more complementary ways in which such top–down and bottom–up efforts might be coordinated. It, therefore, contributes significantly to efforts to strengthen the public voice in contemporary health governance.     

Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV): Issues in combining economic and political processes to value environmental change

This paper explores and contrasts the different social processes of valuation now appearing as economic means of valuing the environment. Monetary valuation via stated preference approaches has been criticised for assuming well formed and informed preferences and excluding a range of sustainability concerns such as rights, fairness and equity. Deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) in small groups is a novel hybrid of economic and political approaches which raises the prospect of a transformative and moralising experience. Critics of standard contingent valuation approaches have advocated this as offering a way forward. However there has been a lack of clarity as to the means of obtaining values, the expected outcomes and their role. Moving to group settings of deliberation raises concepts of social willingness to pay and accept which are distinct from an aggregate of individual value, although this does not seem to have been widely recognised. A new classification of values is presented appropriate to the literature trying to merge economic and political processes. Values associated with the individual may be exchange values, charitable contributions or fair prices, while social values can be speculative, expressive or arbitrated. The use of DMV is shown to result in different values due to variations in the institutional setting and process of valuation.     

Choice modeling at the “market stall”: Individual versus collective interest in environmental valuation

The market stall, or valuation workshop, has recently been proposed as a way of addressing some of the limitations of conventional stated preference analysis. In this paper, we attempt to combine a participatory technique similar to the “citizens' jury” with choice modelling, a stated preference technique increasingly being applied in environmental economics. Our focus is on how changes in the context of decision-making (between choices made in isolation and those made in a group setting, and between choices made on individual well being versus collective criteria) produce differences in estimated welfare measures. The empirical context used is that of water quality improvements under the Water Framework Directive, the most significant reform in water legislation in the European Union for many years. We find that the choice experiment format can be successfully implemented in a valuation workshop and that moving from individual to collective choice produces, in this instance, a rather interesting change in both values and preferences which depends on the respondent's interests.     

The Citizens' Right to Information and the Duties of a Democratic State in Modern IT Environment in the Light of the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and the ISI Declaration on Statistical Ethics

Modern information technologies, particularly the technology of very large data bases, Internet and modern mass media, have changed the processes of production, storage and dissemination of information. These technologies have a direct impact on the practical realization of citizens' rights to information. In democratic societies, in modern IT environment, information is produced and disseminated by many social and economic entities. Many producers and disseminators of information do not know or do not obey the criteria which should be met by any information delivered to the public. In this paper the advantages and the threats for the citizens' rights to information generated by the distribution and globalization of information processes in modern IT environment are discussed.
It seems that for the protection of the citizens' rights to information, there is the need for specification and codification of quality criteria and standards for information produced and disseminated with the use of modern IT. Official statistics may and should play an important and active role in defining those criteria and standards. Professional ethics of statisticians and of official statistics seems to be the proper basis for that. Ethical principles of statistics are formulated in two basic documents: The fundamental principles of official statistics adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 1994 and the ISI Declaration on statistical ethics adopted by the ISI in 1985.