Public participation in governance is regarded as a key element in enhancing urban sustainability. While there is a wealth of participation efforts in Indian cities, there are inadequate processes for regular, inclusive, egalitarian, informed and well-structured democratic participation that provide a real say to citizens in public decision-making. ‘Deliberative democracy’ has emerged as one way to improve effective public participation in decision-making, though it is mostly prevalent in developed countries. An action research initiative was implemented over several years in Pune, India. It used mixed methods to introduce and assess the applicability to the Indian urban context of high-quality public deliberations. This article presents a case study of a deliberative democracy initiative, framing the transformative public involvement needed to address sustainability problems. It also shows how the integration of the mixed methods approach in the action research to design and facilitate deliberative participation processes, helped to broaden and deepen understanding, and enhanced the transformative capacity of the research design.

公众参与治理被视为增强城市可持续性的关键因素。尽管印度城市进行了大量的参与努力，但常规，包容，平等，知情和结构良好的民主参与的流程不足，无法在公民的公共决策中享有发言权。尽管在发达国家中普遍存在“协商民主”，但它已成为提高公众有效参与决策的一种方式。在印度浦那实施了一项行动研究计划，历时数年。它使用混合方法来介绍和评估高质量公共讨论在印度城市环境中的适用性。本文以协商民主倡议为例，确定解决可持续发展问题所需的变革性公众参与。它还显示了将动作研究中的混合方法方法整合在一起，以设计和促进协商参与过程，如何拓宽和加深理解，并增强了研究设计的变革能力。