How can we ensure the people most affected by public decisions have a genuine say in making them? This is the question that has guided Dr Bussu's career.
After her PhD in Participatory Governance, Dr Bussu chose to step outside academia for a few years to test her ideas in practice. At Involve, a think tank specialising in democratic innovation, Dr Bussu wrote policy papers on participatory and deliberative democracy and helped design and test NHS Citizen, an ambitious deliberative system commissioned by NHS England. Dr Bussu later helped develop Participation Compass, a resource on citizen engagement methods for practitioners and policymakers. As a senior researcher at Local Trust, a London-based charity, Dr Bussu helped design and evaluate Big Local, a large community development programme spanning 150 communities across England, working shoulder to shoulder with residents and policymakers. At Local Trust, Dr Bussu also built a research network to encourage community-led research and stronger ties between local groups and universities and worked with the Participation Lab at the University of Reading, finding better ways to share complex data with community groups so they could evaluate their own work.
That grounding in practice has stayed with me ever since. From 2017 to 2018, Dr Bussu was a research associate at UCL, where she led a participatory evaluation of integrated health and social care as a Researcher-in-Residence, embedding myself within the organisations she was studying to help close the gap between research and everyday practice. Dr Bussu then spent five years, from 2018 to 2023, as a senior lecturer in politics and public administration at Manchester Metropolitan University before joining University of Birmingham in 2023, where she's found a wonderfully supportive home for my research.
Dr Bussu's work today centres on participatory governance and democratic innovations, often using creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement. Dr Bussu has been exploring how social movements and grassroots politics use, and reinvent, democratic innovations in the pursuit of social justice, a theme at the heart of the book she co-edited, Reclaiming Participatory Governance: Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovations (Routledge, 2023). Dr Bussu has led projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy and services and more recently employment policies; coproduced research on health and social care integration; and she studied models of local governance and facilitative leadership within collaborative settings. Dr Bussu is especially interested in how we embed participatory governance into everyday policymaking so it has lasting impact, and in making sure democratic innovations genuinely include people who are too often pushed to the margins.
Dr Bussu currently leads INSPIRE, a Horizon Europe project on building more inclusive, intersectional spaces of democratic participation across Europe, and is proud to serve as co-editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy.
Whatever the project, Dr Bussu tries to bring the same conviction that shaped her career from the start, and that now sits at the heart of INSPIRE: a recognition that people - and particularly those who are structurally marginalised or silenced in public life because of classism, racism, sexism, ableism, ageism - hold forms of knowledge that are essential to good policymaking and strong democracies. Our job as researchers is to help build the spaces and the conditions where that knowledge and those voices can shape decisions on genuinely equal terms.