On Their Own Terms: How Informal Settlement Residents Interpret Urban Inclusion and Exclusion Within the Context of Participatory Mechanisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how residents of Nima and Old Fadama—Accra's largest informal settlements—perceive and interpret urban inclusion and exclusion within the framework of existing participatory mechanisms designed to enhance their voice in urban governance. Our findings reveal that participants largely equate urban inclusion with having a voice in community-level decision-making processes. However, this voice does not often translate into substantive inclusion, as decision-making remains dominated by powerful actors, exposing a disconnect between the rhetoric of participation and residents’ lived experiences. Moreover, urban exclusion is primarily framed as the suppression of residents’ voices in urban governance, which they attribute to their socio-economic, political, and spatial marginalization. We argue that participatory mechanisms must be restructured to foster genuine resident engagement, ensuring that their needs and priorities are meaningfully represented in urban policy agendas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".