The Tipping Point: Embedding Participatory Systems to Redesign Inequitable Public Policy (RIPP)

Two questions drive this project:

What are the political, economic, and social dynamics that enable embedded and meaningful participation?

What does it take to move from isolated participatory initiatives, to systems that are continuous and resilient?

This collaborative and practice-based research initiative will investigate the conditions that push, pull, and require institutions to partner with communities, and develop a ‘Participatory Systems Framework’ to measure and support such conditions. The framework will examine the ecosystem of forces that shape institutional behaviour, including grassroots mobilisation, community leadership structures, networks of activists, champions within government, funding structures, and inter-institutional dynamics. The research will be grounded in four participatory democracy experiments in Kenya, Nigeria, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, with a focus on health and climate inequities. Through these action-research experiments, the research-practitioner team will test the framework, to track and evaluate the material and contextual conditions under which decision-making is opened up to wider and more diverse publics, and how such participation can be sustained over time. A key focus will be distinguishing between rhetoric and reality: identifying where participation leads to meaningful shifts in power and outcomes, and where it remains superficial or symbolic.

Long-term, our ambition is a shift in how participatory governance is understood: from a symbolic exercise deployed at the discretion of progressive institutions, to a social and political imperative demanded by governments and citizens everywhere. We will co-create both academic and practical outputs - including a framework, public events, and an accompanying toolkit - that contribute to reorienting how participatory governance is understood, practised, embedded, and demanded, and how it becomes genuinely accessible to all.

Co-PIs: 

Katy Rubin (Co-PI) is a Legislative Theatre practitioner and strategist based in the UK, and founder of The People Act hub for creative civic practice. She works in partnership with governments and communities to co-create equitable public policy, and advocates for a participatory democracy that’s joyful, creative, and inclusive. She currently collaborates with cities around Europe to design policy initiatives on housing, health care, education, the climate crisis, and urban planning, alongside training new practitioners. Katy is also a Senior Fellow with People Powered: Global Hub for Participatory Democracy; a Senior Atlantic Fellow at the LSE; and former executive director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Her Legislative Theatre work with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was awarded the International Observatory of Participatory Democracy’s 2022 award for Best Practice in Citizen Participation.

Miqdad Asaria (Co-PI) is an Associate Professor based in the Department of Health Policy at LSE. His research and teaching focus on the intersection between health inequality and climate change. Miqdad works with and advises governments and policy institutes around the world and was awarded the LSE outstanding teacher of the year award for his innovative teaching methods. Prior to his work at LSE, Miqdad has also worked at the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the UK Department of Health.

Research Team:

Kitti Baracsi is an AFSEE Senior Fellow and Creative Learning Specialist. She works at the intersection of art, critical pedagogy and urban research. She curates and facilitates community art initiatives and creative learning spaces. Her work focuses on urban inequalities, collective practices and rethinking knowledge production. She has a background in Communication Science, Aesthetics and Pedagogy. Born in Hungary, based in Lisbon, she collaborates with movements, schools, associations, cultural institutions and universities across Europe and occasionally in Latin-America. She is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at LSE Inequalities and Associated Researcher at Center for Research in Anthropology at ISCTE-IUL. She is co-founder and member of several collectives in Lisbon and internationally.

James Muraguri is the Founder and Senior Advisor of the Institute of Public Finance (IPF), a Nairobi-based think tank that works on public financial management in Kenya and across Africa. His work centers on making public budgets more transparent, accountable and responsive to citizens. It spans budget participation, health financing, procurement governance and public debt accountability. James also serves as an Advisor to the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary/ Permanent Representative of the Republic of Kenya to the United Nations in New York, under Kenya's State Department for Foreign Affairs, supporting its multilateral engagement on global economic governance and reform of the international financial architecture. He is an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity at the LSE. On The Tipping Point, James leads the Kenya case study, which looks at how community voice can be embedded in county health budgeting in Kitui.

Jite Phido is an AFSEE Senior Fellow and a communication for development specialist with over a dozen years of experience developing communication-based solutions with marginalised people across Nigeria, to ensure they have equal access to information, opportunities, and essential resources. She currently works as a Senior Programme Manager on the Innovation Team at Results for Development (R4D).