Participation may refer to:
Participant redirects here.
In Philosophy participation is the inverse of inherence.
Accidents are said to inhere in substance. Substances, in turn, participate in their accidents. For example, the color red is said to inhere in the red apple. Conversely, the red apple participates in the color red.
Participation also is predicated by analogy to a dependence relations between accidents. Thus an act may be said to participate in time in the sense that every act must occur at some time. In a similar way, color may be said to inhere in space, meaning that a color occurs only on the surface of a body—and thus only in space.
Inherence, on the other hand, would not normally be predicated analogously of accidents.
Participation in social science refers to different mechanisms for the public to express opinions - and ideally exert influence - regarding political, economic, management or other social decisions. Participatory decision-making can take place along any realm of human social activity, including economic (i.e. participatory economics), political (i.e. participatory democracy or parpolity), management (i.e. participatory management), cultural (i.e. polyculturalism) or familial (i.e. feminism).
For well-informed participation to occur, it is argued that some version of transparency, e.g. radical transparency, is necessary but not sufficient. It has also been argued that those most affected by a decision should have the most say while those that are least affected should have the least say in a topic.