Maricopa County is the home of the Phoenix metropolitan area, an expansive city with serious air quality concerns. To ameliorate air quality in the county, the Maricopa County Air Quality Department developed a website and mobile application called "Clean Air Make More" as a means of outreach and engagement. In…
Maricopa County is the home of the Phoenix metropolitan area, an expansive city with serious air quality concerns. To ameliorate air quality in the county, the Maricopa County Air Quality Department developed a website and mobile application called "Clean Air Make More" as a means of outreach and engagement. In doing this, the county has found a way to engender a bilateral relationship between individuals and their government agency. This study analyzes the effectiveness of Clean Air Make More in establishing this relationship and engaging the community in efforts to improve air quality. It concludes that the design of the application effectively meets user needs, but marketing efforts should target populations disposed to taking action regarding air quality.
This dissertation examines whether participatory budgeting (PB) processes, as a case of participatory governance and an innovative approach to local governance, promote inclusive and deliberative government decision-making and social justice outcomes. The first chapter introduces the case of the dissertation, PB in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It reviews…
This dissertation examines whether participatory budgeting (PB) processes, as a case of participatory governance and an innovative approach to local governance, promote inclusive and deliberative government decision-making and social justice outcomes. The first chapter introduces the case of the dissertation, PB in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It reviews the history of PB and the literature on PB in South Korea and discusses three issues that arise when implementing legally mandated PB. The second chapter explores whether inclusive PB processes redistribute financial resources even without the presence of explicit equity criteria, using the last four years of PB resource allocation data and employing multi-level statistical analysis. The findings show that having a more inclusive process to encourage citizen participation helps poorer districts to win more resources than wealthier ones. The third chapter is a follow-up exploratory study; the possible reasons behind the redistributive effects of PB are discussed using interview data with PB participants. The findings suggest that the PB process could have been redistributive because it provided an opportunity for the people living in the comparatively poorer neighborhoods to participate in the government decision-making process. Additionally, when scoring proposals, participants valued ‘needs’ and ‘urgency’ as the most important criteria. The last chapter examines the 32 PB meetings in order to find the combinations of conditions that lead to a deliberative participatory process, employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This dissertation contributes to the field of public management, and particularly participatory governance by providing a review of the literature on PB in South Korea, presenting empirical evidence on the redistributive effect of PB without explicit equity criteria, and finding the combinations of meeting conditions that could be used to promote deliberation in the context of PB.
