In 2016, the news of the protests at Standing Rock broke through the nation. The Sioux Falls tribe of North Dakota embarked on a fight to protect their sacred lands and water from potential desecration and pollution. The documentary film, Awake, a Dream from Standing Rock, was released the following year depicting the resistance movement created at the camps at Standing Rock. This film became the subject matter for my project in which a film screening followed by a post-show discussion to explore the resistance movement and creative choices of the film as they pertain to indigenous rights, climate change, and corporations. The panel included Leroy Hollenback, a corporate social responsibility director from a Global 500 company, and Monte Yazzie, a Phoenix activist and film critic. The panel analyzed the artistic choices the filmmakers took and how that shaped the message of the film. Furthermore, the panel discussed what policy implications the film brought to light. In the end, indigenous resistance in efforts to protect Earth's biodiversity is present globally, making Standing Rock a modern case study that can instruct future movements.

This dissertation examines whether participatory budgeting (PB) processes, as a case of participatory governance and an innovative approach to local governance, promote inclusive and deliberative government decision-making and social justice outcomes. The first chapter introduces the case of the dissertation, PB in the city of Seoul, South Korea. It reviews the history of PB and the literature on PB in South Korea and discusses three issues that arise when implementing legally mandated PB. The second chapter explores whether inclusive PB processes redistribute financial resources even without the presence of explicit equity criteria, using the last four years of PB resource allocation data and employing multi-level statistical analysis. The findings show that having a more inclusive process to encourage citizen participation helps poorer districts to win more resources than wealthier ones. The third chapter is a follow-up exploratory study; the possible reasons behind the redistributive effects of PB are discussed using interview data with PB participants. The findings suggest that the PB process could have been redistributive because it provided an opportunity for the people living in the comparatively poorer neighborhoods to participate in the government decision-making process. Additionally, when scoring proposals, participants valued ‘needs’ and ‘urgency’ as the most important criteria. The last chapter examines the 32 PB meetings in order to find the combinations of conditions that lead to a deliberative participatory process, employing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). This dissertation contributes to the field of public management, and particularly participatory governance by providing a review of the literature on PB in South Korea, presenting empirical evidence on the redistributive effect of PB without explicit equity criteria, and finding the combinations of meeting conditions that could be used to promote deliberation in the context of PB.