Building Local Participatory Democracies in the Era of Threatened National Democracies and Resurgent Authoritarianism.

With advancing urbanization and importance of cities, municipal/ local governments are increasingly responsible for developing strategies to promote and improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of their communities, and in so doing, to contribute to sustainable development nationally and globally.
While the formulation of sustainability strategies is vital in itself, the process of strategy development becomes an important vehicle for building local participatory democracy: Community development strategies require public participation in order to allow local communities articulate their needs, priorities and aspirations. Such processes facilitate public debates, expand public space unavailable to traditionally excluded sectors of society, allow for divergent aspirations and rights to be taken seriously, counteracting prevailing exclusionary and elitist practices in local governance and the pervasive power of the state. The process of formulating community development strategies, can provide individuals and various groups with opportunities to divest some decision-making power away from local authorities to the community residents, transitioning them into engaged stakeholders in the governance of their community.
This session seeks presentations on different experiments in opening and equalizing participation for all residents in local governance, on creating individual experiences and abilities in community decision-making, on different contexts and paths of transitions in micro- and meza-level governmental decision-making power and on building practices and institutional infrastructure providing for sustained inclusive, empowering and impactful forms of citizen participation in governance.