ABSTRACT
Christa Pelikan: 0000–0002–5526–8878
Mario Ragazzi: 0000–0002–6913–4264
This chapter offers a comparative discussion of the meaning, practices and implications of ‘active participation’ in the specific settings of our project. Drawing up a critical appraisal of the literature on new governance models and radical practices from the 1960s onwards, the authors analyse participatory processes in the four action research sites along the key dimensions of stakeholder selection, their decision-making powers and ownership of resources. This research highlights an emergent potential role of restorative justice as a balancing factor, increasing active participation in highly institutionalised contexts like Vienna, while making it more inclusive in socio-ethnically polarised situations where bottom-up initiatives may tend to reinforce in-group dynamics.
