Book Review: Unpacking Participatory Democracy: From Theory to Practice
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Namrata reviews Unpacking Participatory Democracy- From Theory to Practice – Edited by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande (Orient Blackswan, 2025).
At a moment when democracy feels increasingly procedural rather than participatory, brittle rather than responsive, Unpacking Participatory Democracy: From Theory to Practice arrives as both a diagnosis and a declaration of faith. Edited and anchored by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande, the volume does not treat democracy as an abstraction to be theorised at a distance; instead, it insists on democracy as lived labour—messy, local, unfinished, and insistently human.
The book’s central provocation is simple yet radical: democracy cannot survive on elections alone. Transparency, accountability, and meaningful participation are not decorative values but structural necessities. Without them, the promise of citizenship erodes into tokenism. In an era marked by statelessness, exclusion, and narrowing civic space, the editors ask urgent questions: Who gets to speak? Who is heard? Who decides what counts as development?
