Internationally renowned facilitator and public participation consultant James L. Creighton offers a practical guide to designing and facilitating public participation of the public in environmental and public policy decision making. Written for government officials, public and community leaders, and professional facilitators, The Public Participation Handbook is a toolkit for designing a participation process, selecting techniques to encourage participation, facilitating successful public meetings, working with the media, and evaluating the program. The book is also filled with practical advice, checklists, worksheets, and illustrative examples.

The book revisits the concepts of “the new politics of welfare” and “Adivasi and Indigenous livelihoods”, situating the existing body of knowledge of these subjects within the context of state policy and the socio-cultural developments witnessed in India after independence, specifically the impact of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) in the Adivasi/ Indigenous areas. Since India’s independence, the major challenge before the State has been how to provide employment to the vast amount of unskilled labour in rural areas. In order to examine the functioning of institutions under MGNREGA in a tribal community of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, this book assesses the act’s impact on, and drawbacks regarding, the socio-economic condition of the Indigenous people, evaluating the constraints faced by the functionaries in implementing the scheme. Its findings point out the inefficiency and rampant corruption involved in the implementation of the MGNREGA over the years. The book will serve to contribute to raising awareness on the part of the targeted groups and, above all, to showing officials the importance of transparency and responsible governance for the effective implementation of this scheme. India needs to develop its own pro-active measures to cultivate a democracy of the oppressed, in order to combat the current tyranny of the majority which prevails in the country. Its findings also provide new data showing that large-scale MGNREGA policy represents an important tool of mitigating violent conflict in India.