What Happened to Participation? Urban Development and Authoritarian Upgrading in Cairo's Informal Neighbourhoods

Participation appeared in development discourses for the first time in the 1970s, as a generic call for the involvement of the poor in development initiatives. Over the last three decades, the initial perspectives on participation intended as a project method for poverty reduction have evolved into a coherent and articulated theoretical elaboration, in which participation figures among the paraphernalia of good governance promotion: participation has acquired the status of “new orthodoxy”. Nevertheless, the experience of the implementation of participatory approaches in development projects seemed to be in the majority of cases rather disappointing, since the transformative potential of ‘participation in development’ depends on a series of factors in which every project can actually differ from others: the ultimate aim of the approach promoted, its forms and contents and, last but not least, the socio-political context in which the participatory initiative is embedded. In Egypt, the signature of a project agreement between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Federal Republic of Germany, in 1998, inaugurated a Participatory Urban Management Programme (PUMP) to be implemented in Greater Cairo by the German Technical Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) and the Ministry of Planning (now Ministry of Local Development) and the Governorates of Giza and Cairo as the main counterparts. Now, ten years after the beginning of the PUMP/PDP and close to its end (December 2010), it is possible to draw some conclusions about the scope, the significance and the effects of the participatory approach adopted by GTZ and appropriated by the Egyptian counterparts in dealing with the issue of informal areas and, more generally, of urban development. Our analysis follows three sets of questions: the first set regards the way ‘participation’ has been interpreted and concretised by PUMP and PDP. The second is about the emancipating potential of the ‘participatory approach’ and its ability to ‘empower’ the ‘marginalised’. The third focuses on one hand on the efficacy of GTZ strategy to lead to an improvement of the delivery service in informal areas (especially in terms of planning and policies), and on the other hand on the potential of GTZ development intervention to trigger an incremental process of ‘democratisation’ from below.

Inference on copula-based correlation structures

We propose an extension of the approach provided by Kluppelberg and Kuhn (2009) for inference on second-order structure moments. As in Kluppelberg and Kuhn (2009) we adopt a copula-based approach instead of assuming normal distribution for the variables, thus relaxing the equality in distribution assumption. A new copula-based estimator for structure moments is investigated. The methodology provided by Kluppelberg and Kuhn (2009) is also extended considering the copulas associated with the family of Eyraud-Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern distribution functions (Kotz, Balakrishnan, and Johnson, 2000, Equation 44.73). Finally, a comprehensive simulation study and an application to real financial data are performed in order to compare the different approaches.

Law, Informal Institutions and Trust: an Experimental Perspective

This dissertation has studied how legal and non-legal mechanisms affect the levels of trust and trustworthiness in an economy, and whether and when subtle psychological factors are crucial for establishing trust and even for recovering trust from a breach of contract. The first Chapter has addressed the question of whether formal legal enforcement crowds out or crowds in the amount of trust in a society. We find that formal legal mechanisms, especially formal contracts backed by a powerful authority, normally undermine trust except when they are perceived as legitimate, or when there are no strong social norms of fairness (i.e. the population in a society is considerably heterogeneous), or when the environment in which repeated commercial relationships take place becomes highly uncertain. The second Chapter has examined whether the endogenous adoption of a collective punishment institution can help a society coordinate on an efficient outcome, characterized by high levels of trust and trustworthiness. The experimental results show that the endogenous introduction of collective punishment by means of a majority-voting rule does not significantly improve coordination on the efficient equilibrium. Not all subjects seem to be able to anticipate the change in behavior induced by the introduction of the mechanism, and a majority of them vote against it. The third Chapter has explored whether high-trustors adapt their behavior in response to others’ trustworthiness or untrustworthiness more quickly, which in turn supports them to maintain higher default expectations of others’ trustworthiness relative to low-trustors. Our experimental results reveal that high-trustors are better than low-trustors at predicting others’ trustworthiness because they are less susceptible to the anticipated aversive emotions aroused by the potential betrayal and thereby have a higher willingness to acquire the valuable information about their partner’s actions.

Collective actions for environmental monitoring and conservation: citizen science, informal environmental education, and participatory approach

This PhD was driven by an interest for inclusive and participatory approaches. The methodology that bridges science and society is known as 'citizen science' and is experiencing a huge upsurge worldwide, in the scientific and humanities fields. In this thesis, I have focused on three topics: i) assessing the reliability of data collected by volunteers; ii) evaluating the impact of environmental education activities in tourist facilities; and iii) monitoring marine biodiversity through citizen science. In addition to these topics, during my research stay abroad, I developed a questionnaire to investigate people's perceptions of natural areas to promote the implementation of co-management. The results showed that volunteers are not only able to collect sufficiently reliable data, but that during their participation in this type of project, they can also increase their knowledge of marine biology and ecology and their awareness of the impact of human behaviour on the environment. The short-term analysis has shown that volunteers are able to retain what they have learned. In the long term, knowledge is usually forgotten, but awareness is retained. Increased awareness could lead to a change in behaviour and in this case a more environmentally friendly attitude. This aspect could be of interest for the development of environmental education projects in tourism facilities to reduce the impact of tourism on the environment while adding a valuable service to the tourism offer. We also found that nature experiences in childhood are important to connect to nature in adulthood. The results also suggest that membership or volunteering in an environmental education association could be a predictor of people's interest in more participatory approaches to nature management. In most cases, the COVID -19 pandemic had not changed participants' perceptions of the natural environment.

New perspectives in statistical mechanics and high-dimensional inference

The main purpose of this thesis is to go beyond two usual assumptions that accompany theoretical analysis in spin-glasses and inference: the i.i.d. (independently and identically distributed) hypothesis on the noise elements and the finite rank regime. The first one appears since the early birth of spin-glasses. The second one instead concerns the inference viewpoint. Disordered systems and Bayesian inference have a well-established relation, evidenced by their continuous cross-fertilization. The thesis makes use of techniques coming both from the rigorous mathematical machinery of spin-glasses, such as the interpolation scheme, and from Statistical Physics, such as the replica method. The first chapter contains an introduction to the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and spiked Wigner models. The first is a mean field spin-glass where the couplings are i.i.d. Gaussian random variables. The second instead amounts to establish the information theoretical limits in the reconstruction of a fixed low rank matrix, the “spike”, blurred by additive Gaussian noise. In chapters 2 and 3 the i.i.d. hypothesis on the noise is broken by assuming a noise with inhomogeneous variance profile. In spin-glasses this leads to multi-species models. The inferential counterpart is called spatial coupling. All the previous models are usually studied in the Bayes-optimal setting, where everything is known about the generating process of the data. In chapter 4 instead we study the spiked Wigner model where the prior on the signal to reconstruct is ignored. In chapter 5 we analyze the statistical limits of a spiked Wigner model where the noise is no longer Gaussian, but drawn from a random matrix ensemble, which makes its elements dependent. The thesis ends with chapter 6, where the challenging problem of high-rank probabilistic matrix factorization is tackled. Here we introduce a new procedure called "decimation" and we show that it is theoretically to perform matrix factorization through it.

Hierarchical active inference for cognitive architectures

This thesis explores the methods based on the free energy principle and active inference for modelling cognition. Active inference is an emerging framework for designing intelligent agents where psychological processes are cast in terms of Bayesian inference. Here, I appeal to it to test the design of a set of cognitive architectures, via simulation. These architectures are defined in terms of generative models where an agent executes a task under the assumption that all cognitive processes aspire to the same objective: the minimization of variational free energy. Chapter 1 introduces the free energy principle and its assumptions about self-organizing systems. Chapter 2 describes how from the mechanics of self-organization can emerge a minimal form of cognition able to achieve autopoiesis. In chapter 3 I present the method of how I formalize generative models for action and perception. The architectures proposed allow providing a more biologically plausible account of more complex cognitive processing that entails deep temporal features. I then present three simulation studies that aim to show different aspects of cognition, their associated behavior and the underlying neural dynamics. In chapter 4, the first study proposes an architecture that represents the visuomotor system for the encoding of actions during action observation, understanding and imitation. In chapter 5, the generative model is extended and is lesioned to simulate brain damage and neuropsychological patterns observed in apraxic patients. In chapter 6, the third study proposes an architecture for cognitive control and the modulation of attention for action selection. At last, I argue how active inference can provide a formal account of information processing in the brain and how the adaptive capabilities of the simulated agents are a mere consequence of the architecture of the generative models. Cognitive processing, then, becomes an emergent property of the minimization of variational free energy.