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In this paper I argue that the liberal problem of religion, which defines religion in terms of dogmatism or opaque justifications based on ‘revealed truth’, needs to be rethought as part of a broader problem of dialogue, which does not define religion as uniquely problematic.

Habermas argues for religious positions to be translated into ‘generally accessible language’ to incorporate religious citizens into democratic dialogue and resist the domination of instrumental rationality by enhancing ‘solidarity’. I contrast this with Rowan Williams’ and Gadamer’s work.

Williams conceptualises religion in terms of recognising the finitude of our being, rather than dogmatism or opacity. This recognition, he argues, allows people to transcend the ‘imaginative bereavement’ of seeing others as means. Using Williams, I argue that Habermas misdefines religion, and reinforces the domination of instrumental rationality by treating religion as a means. I then use Gadamer to argue that the points Williams makes about religion can apply to secular positions too by recognising them as traditions subject to finitude.

This is original because it argues that the liberal problem of religion misdefines both religion and secular positions, by not recognising that both are traditions defined by finitude. To reach, dialogically, a ‘fusion of horizons’, where religious and secular people are understood non-instrumentally in their own terms of reference, will take time and not trade on immediately manifest – ‘generally accessible’ – meanings.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect various pathways for public sector accounting and accountability research in a post-new public management (NPM) context.

The paper first discusses the relationship between NPM and public sector accounting research. It then explores the possible stimuli that inter-disciplinary accounting scholars may derive from recent public administration studies, public policy and societal trends, highlighting possible ways to extend public sector accounting research and strengthen dialogue with other disciplines.

NPM may have represented a golden age, but also a “golden cage,” for the development of public sector accounting research. The paper reflects possible ways out of this golden cage, discussing future avenues for public sector accounting research. In doing so, it highlights the opportunities offered by re-considering the “public” side of accounting research and shifting the attention from the public sector, seen as a context for public sector accounting research, to publicness, as a concept central to such research.

The paper calls for stronger engagement with contemporary developments in public administration and policy. This could be achieved by looking at how public sector accounting accounts for, but also impacts on, issues of wider societal relevance, such as co-production and hybridization of public services, austerity, crises and wicked problems, the creation and maintenance of public value and democratic participation.

The authors investigate two contrasting, yet mutually constitutive strategies for regulating open drug scenes in the city of Aarhus, Denmark: A strategy of dispersing marginalized substance users from the inner city, and a simultaneous strategy of inclusion in a new, gentrifying neighbourhood.

The authors apply a multi-temporal ethnography approach, including data from studies dating back to 2002. This enables us to scrutinize reconfigurations of processes of exclusion and inclusion in urban city life based on studies that in different ways feed into the broader picture of how socially marginalized citizens are included and excluded in urban space.

The municipality of Aarhus sways between strategies of dispersion and exclusion and those of inclusion of marginalized citizens. Taken together, these strategies constitute a “messy middle ground” (May and Cloke, 2014) in responses to the street people rather than either clear-cut punitive or supportive strategies. Finally, we point to the limit of inclusion in more recent strategies aimed at including marginalized citizens in urban planning of a new, gentrifying neighbourhood.

The article builds on studies that in critical engagement with the dominating focus on punitive or revanchist approaches to regulation of homeless citizens' presence in urban space have shown how such regulating practices are rarely punishing alone. We contribute to this literature by showing how seemingly contradictory attempts to exclude, disperse and include socially marginalized citizens in different urban settings are relational rather than in outright opposition. In continuation of this, we show how dispersal strategies both depend on and are legitimized by the promotion of alternative and more inclusive settings elsewhere.

Many megacities in the Global South have developed without any systematically regularized modernization processes. Therefore, urbanization is accompanied by the inappropriate level of economic and social opportunities. This macro-structural constraint of urbanization contributes to frame the patterns and features of many location-based poverty and inequality.

Dhaka followed the similar trajectory of development without creating substantial opportunities for its underclass, poor, and marginalized citizens. This unequal pattern of development influences the disproportionate environmental burdens of the marginalized people, who have little or no voice in the urban decision-making process. People experience unequal environmental inequality through their differential exposures to poor housing and/or living conditions, along with a lack of access to safe drinking water, sewage, adequate waste disposal systems, and so on.

In this context of urban injustice, this environmental justice movement (EJM) is an evidence of demanding basic rights among the unprivileged citizens. To some extent, this is a response to the state’s structural failure to provide urban environmental services (and social justice) to majority of its poor citizens.

Evidence suggests that in context of fragile democracy, an EJM can generate opportunities for progressive urban politics as well as contribute to redistributive development opportunities for its poor and marginalized citizens. Most megacities in the Global South inherit urban governance from their colonial heritages, which were often criticized for its citizen-detached and top-down nature.

Dhaka is not an exception in this context. In the present socio-political condition, even though the environmental movement is not very welcomed by the government – more particularly from the ruling political party – it can have tremendous implications on redistributive urban politics. This chapter focuses on Dhaka, which is currently one of the world’s largest megacities in the Global South.

This chapter highlights the local patterns and process of the unequal environmental burdens and the subsequent mobilization, demanding environmental justice in that process, as well as how that movement contributes to redistributive urban politics. The discussions of this chapter also have the implications on public policy discourse focusing on environmental rights, movements, and citizens-centered politics in the megacities of the Global South, with renewed relationships between the state and its citizens.

This article attempts to highlight the defining role that community media engagements play during times of the pandemic. It is argued that the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic forced community news media houses to reinvent their news reporting practices to cover issues pertaining to the marginalized and underprivileged sections of the society. It explores the role of community media in engaging and empowering the citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to our study is the analysis of the news model of “Video Volunteers” (henceforth VV), an independent community-based online news platform based in India. To understand the level of citizen participation and engagement in the making and dissemination of news during the pandemic, the authors conducted 13 interviews with different stakeholders of VV, including founders and news audiences.

It seeks to reveal that when the mainstream media have failed to represent the issues of a local community, it is the independent media platforms like VV which function as a veritable source of information and sharing of knowledge. Most importantly, this paper emphasizes that the communicative model of independent community-based online platforms has been most successful in the coverage of the pandemic and the level of engagement with the citizenry.

The study contributes to the aspects of reciprocity and collaborative journalism in community news media and its potential impacts on news creation and dissemination.

The paper aims to examine a citizen-centric model of governmental entrepreneurship that transforms public service management for the empowerment of marginalized women.

The study adopts a qualitative methodology to analyze the distinctive model of a rural livelihoods program in India. A fieldwork was conducted in four villages, a total of 250 women were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire and eight focus-group discussions were conducted. The data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis. Finally, the findings were shared with women in the study area.

The analysis suggests that the adoption of distinct management for social welfare program results in social legitimacy and social value creation. JEEViKA illustrates that citizen-centric social entrepreneurship model is an outcome of internal and external governance mechanisms, strategy that thrusts on skills and capacity as investment, tools local women (community resource persons) as instruments and targets spatial saturation as an intervention creates political and economic participation, and that marketability promotes power over economic resources that enable freedom from servitude.

The model provides a direction to overcome multiple barriers to addressing poverty and marginalization.

Poor and government can leverage through the collaborative capacity to meet ever-evolving social needs by developing a state-society partnership in citizen-centric governmental entrepreneurship.

The policies to overcome large-scale marginalization can adopt citizen-centric model to create social legitimacy that furthers social value among the poor and marginalized rural women.

This study provides a model that illustrates government ability to transform marginalized poor as co-producers of development benefits.

The USA’s higher education leaders and professional organizations have called for increased professional development programming at graduate colleges to better prepare US graduate students for their future careers. This study aims to investigate the demographic characteristics of graduate students participating in co-curricular professional development (PD) and sociocultural development (SD) programming at a graduate college at a large, selective and research-intensive public university in the Midwestern USA.

Using institutional data from six semesters, the authors examined the characteristics of students that attended the graduate college’s programs at one university. The authors analyzed which students were most likely to attend PD and SD programs using multinomial logistic regression models.

Female students, students from US historically marginalized racial groups, and US Pell Grant recipients (low-income students) were found to have a higher likelihood of attending both PD and SD programs at the centralized graduate college.

The findings will be of interest to graduate deans and educators who support graduate students. Further evaluative research on the usefulness of such programs at other institutions would help graduate colleges better understand the role they play in meeting graduate students’ needs.

The findings contribute to the understanding of the important role of the US graduate college in the development of graduate students. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first study to evaluate the backgrounds of graduate students who pursue co-curricular PD and SD opportunities.

This chapter works with Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” (1996b) to understand how a Smart City initiative was being implemented and as a consequence who benefitted. While a model of citizenship is offered in smart cities, the “actually existing” smart city in fact reconfigures models of citizenship in ways that instrumentalize technology and data that can reinforce the patterns of exclusion for marginalized groups. Therefore, this chapter aims to understand how citizens participate in smart city projects and whether they can in fact lead to the exacerbation of existing urban historical, material, and social inequalities. The chapter focuses on some of those excluded by smart city projects: the urban poor, street traders, and those who live in informal settlements and explores the way in which they access and participate in the city. In the Global South context, India is a key actor in implementing a national-level smart city program, and research was undertaken in the city of Chennai to investigate the way that the India Smart Cities Mission was being planned and implemented and the corresponding implications for marginalized communities. The chapter argues that there is a need to recognize the value of a range of everyday, small-scale ways in which citizens employ technologies and data that meet their needs in a social and spatially embedded context. In this way, marginalized people may be empowered to have what Lefebvre describes as “the right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation” (1996, p. 173) in urban space.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a study of a practice can lay the foundation to describe this very practice whilst transformations of it were taken place. Descriptions of changes to the practice of social work which was observed empirically serve as a starting point for experimenting with how social scientists, though often exploring transformative study objects, can remain focused on describing the object, under study.

The study was done through circa one year of fieldwork conducted with participant observation in two Danish municipal units offering services to socially marginalized people and interviews with social workers and employees in drug/alcohol treatment and psychiatric units.

The object of study within social sciences, though changing, is able to be described. Through the theories of “Social Navigation” (Vigh) and “Strategy and Tactics” (de Certeau), the practice of social work can be described as one concrete bounded practice but one which is performed within a transformative/changeable environment that are capable of influencing it. In this case, the experience of a changeable seascape might serve as a metaphor for how study objects change within an environment of change; how they can be viewed as “motion within motion” (Vigh).

Even though fields such as anthropology and organizational studies seem to rid themselves from their objects of study (culture and organization, respectively) and dissociate themselves from descriptions thereof these objects might still be of value to us. Even though the objects of study in postmodern anthropology and organizational studies are defined as unbounded, anti-essential, ephemeral, ever-changing non-objects, this might not be the entire picture. Despite their ever-changing shape, we might still be able to study and describe them if we take their changeable form and environment into account.

This research aims to examine the introduction of participatory budgeting (PB) in local governments in two Francophone countries, namely, Benin and Niger, and how local contextual factors influence its practices.

The research employs a multiple case study design with a comparative approach to analyze the introduction and practices of participatory budgeting across selected municipalities in Benin and Niger. Hopper (2017) and Lassou et al.’s (2018) notion of “pragmatism” within neopatrimonialism is mobilized to analyze the data from sources including interviews and documents. The analysis is conducted at both the country and local government levels.

Participatory budgeting took roots in a number of municipalities. Its introduction and adoption has promoted participatory governance especially from traditionally marginalized segments of society (e.g. women); albeit to varying degrees, in the face of the prevailing national neopatrimonial context. Furthermore, despite donor's push for a standardized model of PB implementation, actual practices took varying shapes, a consequence of differing local conditions and circumstances.

In terms of limitation, it was not possible to access a number of research participants sought, particularly in Niger. But access to key documents from government, donors and civil society organizations help mitigate this to a large extent.

A major practical implication is the importance of adaptation to local socio-economic contexts and circumstances. As shown in the study, a blanket introduction and implementation of PB across societies based on a standardized model is unlikely to succeed and be sustained in the long run. A great deal of flexibility is required to accommodate indigenous realities on the grounds.

The study contributes to shed light on public sector budgeting regarding participatory budgeting practices in an under-researched setting: Francophone Africa.