Guest Editors:
Konrad Miciukiewicz, University College London, UK, konrad.miciukiewicz@ucl.ac.uk
Carolina Aguerre, Catholic University of Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay, caguerre@ucu.edu.uy
Kang Cao, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China, k_cao@126.com, caokang@ecust.edu.cn
Soumyadip Chattopadhyay, Visva-Bharati University, India, soumyadip.chattopadhyay@visva-bharati.ac.in
Junyao He, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, j.he@rug.nl
Hiroki Nakajima, University of Tokyo, Japan, h-nakajima@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Przemysław Pluciński, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, przemyslaw.plucinski@amu.edu.pl
Elvin Shava, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, elvins@uj.ac.za
The Special Issue aims to bring together contributions from different geographical, political and economic contexts – from South American cities marked by privatization and spatial fragmentation (Portes & Roberts 2005, Goldfrank & Schrank 2009, Caldeira & Holston 2015, Montero et al 2023), through young Central and Eastern European democracies (Poljak Istenič & Kozina 2020, Paliokaitė & Sadauskaitė 2023) and African countries characterised by increased uncertainty and low levels of trust (Zeiderman 2015, Majogoro et al 2025, Gbeku Alidzi et al 2026) and Southern Asian cities reliant on patronage politics and informal socio-political networks (Chattopadhyay 2015, Hasan Swapan 2016, Patel at al. 2016), to Central and Eastern Asian states defined by the presence of strong central governments (He & Warren 2011, Lin 2026, Knox & Carmichael 2026) and theocratic political systems in the SWANA region (Ali 2025, Komarolya & Sajedi 2026) – in order to critique and contextualise the conceptualisations of participatory urban governance by interrogating the engagement of citizens and other societal actors across different stages of the ‘result chain’ (Emerson & Nabatchi 2015).
The contributions can link national and local planning frameworks with deliberation dynamics, outputs (e.g., statutory and non-statutory urban plans), outcomes (e.g., changes in the built environment or local services), and long-term multidimensional impacts on urban communities.
Submissions are invited from geography, sociology, politics, public administration, planning, transdisciplinary urban studies and cognate fields to advance current debates on participative governance in the city by examining citizens' engagement across a variety of urban processes, from strategic planning through urban regeneration and slum upgrading to water and waste management and transportation planning.
Among others, the submissions may examine:
- relationships between national political contexts and local participatory urban governance;
- expressions and mechanisms of participatory governance in different national and local settings;
- differences between cultures of public engagement;
- dynamics of the deliberation process;
- motivations of different stakeholders to initiate, join, or withdraw from participatory processes;
- interactions and tensions between government- and citizen-led forms of participation;
- implementation, selective adoption or rejection of participatory process proposals and grassroots demands;
- multidimensional relations between processes, outputs, outcomes, and long-term impacts;
- the gap between expected and achieved levels of citizen engagement and ways of addressing it;
- effects of participatory deliberation on legitimacy, public value, and accountability of the local government;
- emergence of new actors, coalitions, networks, and alliances, including technological players;
- digital governance, civic technology, and smart cities;
- creation of inclusive and alternative spaces for engagement (through street protest, judicial recurse etc.);
- impacts of participatory governance on social justice and socio-spatial inequalities;
- interplays between inclusive governance, urban resilience, and climate change adaptation and mitigation;
- dynamics of participatory governance in informal settlements and marginalized communities;
- comparative experiences across Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe and South America.
Submissions from women, Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) scholars, and colleagues based in the Global South are particularly welcome.
Society Register is free both for authors to publish in and for readers to access without a paywall.
Manuscript Template:
Authors should prepare their manuscripts according to the Society Register template available at: https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/sr/about/submissions
Timetable:
Call for Papers published: 29th of July 2026
Submission Deadline for full research articles: 30th of October 2026
Publication of accepted manuscripts: 30th of March 2027
REFERENCES
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Chattopadhyay S. (2015) Contesting inclusiveness: Policies, politics and processes of participatory urban governance in Indian cities, Progress in Development Studies 15(1): 22-36, https://doi.org/10.1177/1464993414546969
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