The problem the Motion addresses is structural. In the United Kingdom, local governments typically have administrative powers that stop at mean low water, and many do not even own the foreshore. Marine decision-making has long been dominated by national and international bodies, leaving councils—the tier of government closest to citizens—largely absent from ocean policy. Yet marine citizenship research identifies that local scale decision-making is more accessible, transparent, and trusted than governance at other scales. This mismatch between where ocean decisions are made and where citizens engage with them creates what researchers call an implementation gap, and it was precisely this gap that Buchan, who was elected as a councillor during her PhD, experienced from both sides of the science-policy boundary.

The Motion for the Ocean was conceived in 2020 as a deliberate attempt to replicate the international success of climate emergency declarations, but with an ocean focus that was then missing from most climate policy. At the time, there was little political recognition that successful climate mitigation requires ocean action. A motion, in political terms, is a tool through which a new commitment is proposed, debated, and voted upon by a council. The first model Motion was drafted in 2021 with three components: background context linking ocean recovery to ocean-climate action ahead of the UN climate conference COP26; a set of council pledges grounded in marine citizenship research, designed to embed ocean recovery into core decision-making and budgeting; and a set of national policy asks to be sent from the council to national government, informed by further marine science.

Buchan proposed the first Motion to Plymouth City Council, which passed in November 2021, helping to embed marine citizenship as a core principle of the Plymouth Sound National Marine Park. Adapted versions were subsequently co-developed for inland councils and for the devolved nations of Wales and Scotland. Of the 40 councils that have now passed the declaration, nine are inland—a paradigm shift in where ocean responsibility is understood to lie, demonstrating that marine citizenship does not require ocean proximity. The approach from Blandford Forum, a smaller inland town council, led to the co-development of an inland version of the model Motion emphasizing source-to-sea thinking, since its administrative area has no coastline at all.

The initiative has achieved international recognition that few place-based governance experiments ever reach. It was presented at the 2024 UN Ocean Decade Conference, featured in the 2024 European Week of Regions and Cities round table on strengthening blue citizenship, and cited as a case study of good practice in a High-Level Ocean Panel paper on blue health as well as in the leading Oceans and Human Health textbook. Wales has become the first UK nation to adopt an ocean literacy strategy, Y Môr a Ni, with Monmouthshire County Council—the first in Wales to pass the Motion—having developed an action plan focused on driving behavior change. The Ocean and Society Survey, which gathered 8,440 responses, found that 80 percent of respondents consider marine protection crucial, providing a public mandate for the councils that declare.

What the case study makes unusually visible is the cost of this success in human effort. The authors estimate that the voluntary, in-kind time commitment behind the Motion amounts to around 200 days over four years—unfunded labor contributed by the researchers, by the Local Government Association Coastal Special Interest Group, and by the Ocean Conservation Trust. The Coastal SIG hosts documents and declarations on its websites, updates its 58 member councils quarterly, and has raised the Motion’s profile through national conference presentations. The Ocean Conservation Trust manages the public interface, encouraging people to write to their local councillor asking them to propose the Motion. At least six declarations arose directly from marine citizen contact, and thousands of people have interacted with the Motion through the engagement program at the National Marine Aquarium.

A core principle of the engagement has been to remain apolitical, and this has proven decisive. Politicians from across the political spectrum have proposed and supported local Motions, and the authors have strived to avoid the trap of politicized environmentalism. Because the marine citizenship origin of the Motion sees people as part of the marine environment rather than excluded from it, sustainable marine business and development sectors are treated as necessary partners alongside conservation. Partnerships with organizations such as Healthcare Ocean and the British Sub-Aqua Club, the UK’s governing body for scuba diving, whose members’ toolkit has led to at least two declarations, have extended the Motion’s reach into unexpected constituencies.

The authors analyze the Motion through four models of research-policy relations: knowledge shaping policy, politics shaping knowledge, co-production of knowledge and governance, and science and policy as autonomous systems. The case study illustrates that effective impact involves all of these at once. The Motion is founded on evidence-based content; local declarations are politically negotiated, with wording sometimes revised in response to amendments at council meetings—Monmouthshire was the first to amend its Motion to include rivers; iterative co-production makes the model responsive to policy shifts; and uptake is shaped by the differing institutional logics of research and council politics. The model Motion undergoes regular revision to reflect political, socio-economic, and ecological changes, operating as a dynamic, living knowledge exchange mechanism rather than a static template.

The gap between local government and marine policy is not unique to the UK. Even in the European Union, where marine spatial planning policy and a history of Integrated Coastal Zone Management exist, the gap remains evident, and researchers have called for more meaningful local government engagement in marine planning. The authors argue that while the specific wording of the model Motion is unlikely to transfer directly to other national policy contexts, the principles and practice of research-policy relations documented in the case study can facilitate the co-creation of locally relevant political mechanisms elsewhere. Transnational municipal networks connecting cities in climate action are structurally well placed to champion the Motion internationally, though low political ocean literacy persists as a barrier.

The reflections that close the case study are pointed. The authors note that promoting system change requires system change itself: councils must remodel their governance processes to deliver ocean recovery, yet chronic underfunding of local government, low ocean literacy, and the endemic undervaluing of the marine environment stand in the way. For academia, they ask how funding can be redesigned to provide the flexibility and longevity needed to sustain the relationships that underpin effective impact, and how career pathways can support boundary-spanning early-career researchers—people who have worked in multiple sectors and can translate between worlds. The Motion’s declarations, the authors emphasize, are starting points rather than endpoints. But the broader message is one of possibility: evidence-based transformation of ocean governance is achievable, and it can begin at any career stage, in any council chamber, with a single motion on the agenda.

Subject of Research: The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations

Article Title: The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations

Article References: Buchan, P. M., MacDonald-Lofts, R., Cunningham, E. G., Bridge, N., & Clifford, G. (2026). The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations. Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, 4, Article 1904467. https://doi.org/10.3389/focsu.2026.1904467

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/focsu.2026.1904467

Keywords: marine citizenship, ocean literacy, local government, ocean recovery, research impact, marine governance, Motion, Ocean, scaling, marine, citizenship, local

The rapid evolution of social media platforms, the algorithmic infrastructures that sustain them, and the emergence of new forms of mediated participation have reshaped how individuals engage, interact, and construct meaning online. The editorial accompanying the collection argues that digital citizenship is no longer confined to formal political participation but is enacted through everyday practices of consumption, identity construction, interpersonal interaction, and discursive negotiation. At the same time, it is shaped by structural conditions, including algorithmic mediation, platform governance, surveillance, and socio-cultural expectations, that both enable and constrain individual agency.

A first thematic cluster centers on misinformation, disinformation, and the dynamics of public discourse. Febri Sonni analyzes economic conspiracy theories in Indonesia, showing how financial narratives become distorted through digital channels and influence public perceptions and decision-making. In parallel, Sarhan and Hegelich investigate coordinated inauthentic behavior in the German COVID-19 discourse, offering a nuanced view of how deliberate manipulation intersects with broader discursive trends. Together, these contributions highlight the civic risks associated with algorithmic amplification, ideological polarization, and the erosion of shared informational norms, risks that intensify as recommendation systems reward engagement over accuracy.

A second group of articles focuses on youth engagement, digital literacy, and participatory cultures. Hai and Xiong explore how Generation Z navigates credibility, identity, and social influence when sharing news, revealing that technical competence alone does not guarantee responsible information behavior. Huang and colleagues examine how social media shapes urban image and tourism behavior among Chinese Generation Z, while Xu and colleagues analyze short-video addiction and its relationship with the tendency among university students to disengage from competitive pressures. These studies collectively demonstrate that digital citizenship among young people involves complex negotiations of trust, belonging, and social responsibility rather than simple mastery of tools.

A third thematic axis addresses identity, self-presentation, and mediated social interaction. Chang and colleagues offer a multidimensional investigation of VTuber audiences, revealing how virtual personas shape participatory culture and transnational belonging. Other studies examine motivations for digital dating, long-term use of AI companion applications, and the emotional dynamics of mediated relationships. These works make clear that digital citizenship is not only cognitive or informational but also emotional, relational, and embodied, extending the concept into territory that traditional civic education frameworks have largely ignored.

Platform governance, privacy, and digital rights form another critical set of contributions. Zhang and colleagues explore the privacy paradox among middle-aged and elderly users, highlighting tensions between autonomy, vulnerability, and platform power. Research on algorithmic governance and digital rights, such as the work of Hegelich and colleagues, shows how opaque systems shape user agency in ways users cannot readily perceive or contest. Meanwhile, studies on digital literacy and responsible participation, including García-Peñalvo and colleagues, underscore the importance of critical competencies for navigating complex digital environments. These articles resonate with broader debates on data governance, surveillance, and the responsibilities of institutions and platforms in safeguarding equitable participation.

The Research Topic also includes research on consumer behavior, digital commerce, and the interplay between online and offline decision-making. Ruan and colleagues examine narrative strategies in live-streaming commerce, while Chen and colleagues explore the concept of time in digital storytelling. These contributions deepen understanding of how digital citizenship is enacted through consumption, meaning-making, and interaction, showing that commercial platforms are also sites where civic identities and values are negotiated.

Finally, several articles address political and ideological dynamics within social media ecosystems. Research on antifeminist opinion leaders on YouTube, by Martínez and García, illustrates how platformed discourse can shape civic attitudes and deepen ideological polarization. Studies on digital activism and civic participation, such as those by Sánchez-García and colleagues, examine how users mobilize for social causes, while analyses of social media’s role in democratic resilience, by Pérez-Colomé and colleagues, highlight both opportunities and risks for civic engagement. The findings suggest that the same infrastructures that enable grassroots mobilization can also amplify divisive rhetoric and manipulation.

Taken together, the 27 articles offer a multidimensional and empirically grounded view of digital citizenship in the era of social media. They reveal a landscape where opportunities for connection, creativity, and civic engagement coexist with challenges related to polarization, manipulation, inequality, and emotional strain. The collection invites scholars, educators, policymakers, and platform designers to rethink digital citizenship as a complex, relational, and evolving construct, and it underscores the need for interdisciplinary approaches integrating communication studies, psychology, sociology, ethics, and technology governance. As social media continues to evolve, so too must conceptualizations of digital citizenship, toward frameworks that recognize its complexity, embrace its potential, and address its risks with rigor and responsibility.

Subject of Research: Editorial: Digital citizenship in the new era of social media

Article Title: Editorial: Digital citizenship in the new era of social media

Article References: Fernández Muñoz, C. (2026). Editorial: Digital citizenship in the new era of social media. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1942912. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1942912

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1942912

Keywords: Editorial, Digital, citizenship, social, media, scientific research

The concept is not new. The relationship between culture and citizenship can be traced back to the French Revolution, when the royal collections were made public and the very first public museum was created. As an academic idea, cultural citizenship emerged in the 1990s within debates on belonging, recognition and minority cultural rights, and has since been productive across disciplines and geographies. Yet, as Gigante notes, the mechanisms through which cultural citizenship can actually be enacted in museums remain largely unexplored, and the term is often disconnected from its theoretical lineages. Her definition is deliberately political: post-national forms of political belonging and agency over one’s spatial-cultural context through situated and collective cultural practices, meaning the power to challenge borders and norms and co-create our surroundings by coming together through culture and the arts.

Policy discourse has featured the phrase since the early 2000s, but often in a diluted form. In the European context, cultural citizenship appeared as one of four dimensions of citizenship in the Council of Europe’s report on Education for Democratic Citizenship, where it was identified with a set of competencies such as cultural awareness, knowledge of heritage and history, and literacy skills that would enable citizens to engage in a democratic society. Northern European countries such as the Netherlands operationalised the concept to navigate the complexities of postmigrant societies, where defining citizenship through culture becomes a terrain of negotiation. These experiments reveal a central tension: cultural citizenship carries normative connotations when mapped onto legal membership in a nation-state, defining what makes a good cultural citizen, but it can also signify the emancipatory power of culture to redesign the politics of belonging.

Recent European cultural policy signals a shift toward the more emancipatory reading, a process partly expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, which foregrounded the role of local communities in the cultural sector. The 2020 Rome Charter identifies five cultural capabilities for equitable cultural citizenship, from the opportunity to explore cultural roots to the ability to share cultures and protect common cultural resources. The Porto Santo Charter, adopted under the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the EU, places cultural citizenship within the endeavour to build a pluralistic society where cultural institutions foster cultural democracy through their processes and public offer. In the European Commission’s Culture and Democracy: The Evidence report, cultural citizenship is defined as contributing to the right of citizens to shape their society and to influence the creation and interpretation of meaning in that society. Beyond Europe, a more politicised use appears in Australia, where the term supports cultural diversity and values the forms of cultural capital that community members acquire through cultural production.

Despite these efforts, Gigante argues, policy documents often dim the concept’s radical potential by reducing it to a set of competencies, framing it as something to be managed and measured without understanding its mechanisms on the ground, or treating it as the cultural dimension of citizenship and conflating it with civic duties. Her brief addresses this gap by grounding cultural citizenship in empirical research conducted between 2021 and 2022 across ten art organisations in the UK, Southern Europe and the Americas. The research involved twenty-one interviews with museum directors and public programmers across education, outreach and engagement departments, and investigated public programmes as social process rather than curatorial practice, with particular interest in place-based, public-facing practices delivered mainly in person through participatory formats.

The findings suggest that place-based public programmes emerge as strategic sites of cultural citizenship, providing a space for democratic innovation through situated, collective cultural practice. Operating at the intersection of departments and straddling the inside and outside of museums, these programmes bring together communities of cultural citizens through collective practice and can promote collective action and belonging. They become a liminal space, both relationally, where staff and local communities can meet, and physically, where the everyday politics of the neighbourhood colour the practices of the museum and are coloured by them in the process. One exemplar is Museo Situado at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, an active collaboration network between the museum and local associations operating through monthly assemblies. Another comes from Santiago de Chile, where the director of the Museo Salvador Allende explained how, during the social uprising of October 2019, the team decided to close the exhibitions and open the museum to the community, making the museum available to the social process of the neighbourhood, with programming that included local cabildos, wellbeing workshops and talks on the new constituent process.

From this evidence base, Gigante distils a tripartite framework recognising three fundamental spheres of such work: spatial, relational and political. The spatial sphere concerns the physical environments where activities are carried out, in the gallery or other locations in the neighbourhood, and the symbolic meanings attached to them. The relational sphere captures the inherently collective and interpersonal nature of place-based cultural practice. The political sphere is about understanding the power dynamics of cultural production in place, from deciding whose voices are heard to what structures of solidarity can be implemented. The framework is useful for translating abstract principles of participation and social cohesion into practice: through conversations with community members it might become evident that a particular community is facing a particular issue, which will then require the activation of specific structures of solidarity. Building takeovers, where communities lead or curate activities in the museum, such as the Takeover Programme at Mansions of the Future, show how physical infrastructure can be the point of departure for citizen-led cultural practice relevant to place and responsive to community needs.

The relational infrastructure emerges as at once the strongest and the most fragile pillar of cultural citizenship practice. It includes relationships within departments, crucially curatorial, learning and engagement, relationships with communities, and cross-sector partnerships. Despite being considered soft, relational infrastructure is what sustains institutions by providing them with relevance and legitimacy. Yet the research revealed structural fragilities: relational work is crucial to a project’s success but often invisible in institutional structures, and high staff turnover during the pandemic highlighted the vulnerability of this work, often described as exhausting and demanding. Local knowledge and trust-building reside with staff directly involved in place-based practice, shaped by the individual values and sensitivity of postholders, which makes this labour both powerful and difficult to sustain and transfer. Funding patterns compound the problem, as project-based structures reward novelty and wide reach, whereas place-based work is most successful with small numbers over time. When museums are already struggling to overcome mistrust from local communities, short-term project-based engagement risks causing more harm than good.

The cross-cultural evidence informed a Model for Progressive Cultural Citizenship Praxis, a tool that cultural leaders can use to interrogate existing programming and guide the design of new work. The recommendations are directed at both organisations and funders. Cultural organisations are advised to foster cross-departmental interactions, improve the visibility and documentation of public programmes to enable study of their long-term impact, work within and beyond the physical site in response to communities’ felt experience of place, make resources available to local communities including skills and use of space, embed local expertise as a strategic input, and deliver programmes reflecting the diversity of local communities, from tours in multiple languages to community-led skillshares. Funders are urged to reframe funding criteria that embrace open-ended outcomes and evaluation frameworks capturing impact as depth instead of spread, valuing longevity over numbers, incremental meaningful change over novelty, and deepening relationships over constantly reaching new groups, and to design funding cycles that support co-production with continuity.

As cultural institutions observe incremental shifts toward participatory governance, the brief concludes that the challenge is not only to recognise the value of relational labour and its potential for social cohesion within public programming, but to equip it with adequate infrastructure through funding models that value long-term commitment to communities, evaluation frameworks that go beyond quantitative metrics, and institutional practice that makes space for slowness and care. Strengthening mechanisms for participatory and democratic decision-making, such as citizen assemblies like the Voice Assembly at New Art Exchange in Nottingham and community critical friends such as the Cultural Citizens at Eastside Projects, points toward a sector where museums deliver on their civic and democratic aspirations. Fostering citizen-led cultural practice, the research suggests, requires risk-taking and a willingness to embrace complexity, reflexivity and collective leadership, because it is also work that cannot be done in isolation.

Subject of Research: Cultural citizenship, museums, public programming, participatory governance, cultural policy

Article Title: Cultural citizenship through museums’ place-based public programmes: an evidence-based framework for cultural policy and organisations

Article References: Gigante, L. (2026). Cultural citizenship through museums’ place-based public programmes: an evidence-based framework for cultural policy and organisations. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16375. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16375

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16375

Keywords: Cultural, citizenship, museums, place-based, public, programmes, evidence-based, framework, policy, organisations, scientific research

The authors’ diagnosis begins with an observation about language. When deinstitutionalisation re-emerged on the global mental health agenda in recent years, it did so largely because investigators and advocates documented the persistence of long-term institutionalisation and serious human rights abuses inside psychiatric facilities, from locked wards in high-income countries to large custodial complexes in low- and middle-income settings. Yet the responses that followed, they argue, have been framed overwhelmingly in managerial and technocratic terms. Reform is described as a matter of service coverage, of reducing bed numbers, of expanding the mental health workforce, and of designing interventions that can be scaled across diverse health systems. These are legitimate operational concerns, but the authors warn that when they become the entire vocabulary of reform, they obscure the institutional, political and social conditions through which psychiatric care is actually organised.

That narrowing has consequences. A policy framework that measures success in beds closed and patients reassigned can coexist comfortably with practices that reproduce segregation under new names. The essay points to transinstitutionalisation, the well-documented drift of institutionalised people from psychiatric hospitals into other custodial or quasi-custodial settings such as nursing homes, shelters, forensic facilities, private care homes and the streets, as evidence that closing a hospital does not by itself dismantle the logic of confinement. It also points to fragmented systems of community care that, in the absence of adequate housing, income, work and social support, leave former patients circulating between emergency departments, police cells and short-stay units. Most insidiously, custodial and segregationist logics can persist inside nominally community-based services, where group homes and day centres may replicate the routines, hierarchies and restrictions of the wards they replaced.

To recover the fuller meaning of reform, the authors turn to history, and specifically to South America, a region they argue has been systematically marginalised in the geographies of mental health reform knowledge. The dominant narrative of deinstitutionalisation, built around Basaglia’s Italy and the community psychiatry movements of the United States and Britain, treats the Global South as a latecomer importing models developed elsewhere. The South American record tells a different story. In Brazil, the psychiatric reform movement that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s was inseparable from the struggle against military dictatorship and the broader democratisation of society. Mental health workers, users and families organised politically, and the movement’s demands were written into law: the 2001 Brazilian mental health law oriented the national system toward the substitution of hospitals with open, community-based psychosocial care networks. Deinstitutionalisation there was not a health-sector technical adjustment but a citizenship project, contested in congresses, conferences and the streets.

Argentina offers a parallel trajectory with its own inflections. The Argentine movement, likewise entwined with human rights activism that gained urgency after the return to democracy in 1983, culminated in a 2010 national law that explicitly framed mental health care in rights-based terms, declared the goal of reducing hospitalisation and established the presumption of capacity for people with mental health conditions. In both countries, the authors suggest, the relationship between institutional transformation, democratisation, social mobilisation and citizenship was constitutive rather than incidental: the shape of psychiatric reform reflected the shape of the political order being fought for. These histories demonstrate that deinstitutionalisation has developed through distinct national configurations rather than a single exportable blueprint, and that the direction of reform depends on who holds power over the definition of madness and its treatment.

The South American experience also furnishes cautionary lessons. Even where legal frameworks are ambitious and substitute services exist, implementation has been uneven, funding fragile and hospital sectors resilient. Brazil’s psychosocial care network, despite its international reputation, has faced periods of retrenchment and political contestation, and large psychiatric hospitals have proved difficult to close in practice. The persistence of custodial arrangements, including privately run therapeutic communities and faith-based asylums that have grown in some contexts, illustrates the authors’ point that institutional logics migrate and mutate rather than simply disappear. Reform, on this reading, is never a milestone reached but a horizon that must be actively defended against regressive pressures, a framing that explains why the authors describe deinstitutionalisation as a contested horizon rather than a legacy.

From this analysis the essay derives three lenses for re-engaging with psychiatric deinstitutionalisation. The first is attention to context and history: reform proposals should be read against the specific political, economic and institutional conditions of the places where they are applied, rather than evaluated against a universal template derived from a handful of canonical cases. The second is the decentring of dominant geographies of reform, which means treating South America, and by extension other regions outside the usual centres of knowledge production, as sources of theory and strategy rather than merely sites of implementation. The third is the foregrounding of lived experience, which places the knowledge of people who have been institutionalised, and of their families and movements, at the centre of what counts as evidence about care, coercion and community.

These lenses are not merely interpretive; they redirect attention to the concrete sites where reform is produced. The authors enumerate them across research, policy, professional training, activism and governance. What researchers choose to measure, what curricula teach future psychiatrists and psychologists about the history of their institutions, what advocacy coalitions demand, and how governance structures distribute authority over mental health budgets all shape whether reform deepens or stalls. A technocratic framing tends to concentrate these decisions among planners and funders; a political framing recognises that the boundaries of the psychiatric institution are negotiated in legislatures, courtrooms, user movements and neighbourhood clinics. The essay’s contribution is to insist that these sites, and the social struggles that play out within them, are proper objects of global mental health scholarship rather than background noise to service-design questions.

The argument lands at a moment when the global mental health field is expanding rapidly, driven by the enormous burden of mental disorders, the scale-up agendas of international agencies and a growing rights discourse exemplified by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. That convergence creates both an opening and a risk. The opening is that a new generation of practitioners and policymakers is asking, many for the first time, what should be done with the large institutions that still hold hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The risk is that the answer defaults to a narrow toolkit of bed reduction and task-shifting that leaves the underlying architecture of exclusion intact. Montenegro and colleagues’ intervention is a reminder that the founders of deinstitutionalisation were not primarily optimising service delivery; they were contesting the power of the asylum and asserting the full citizenship of its inmates.

Reclaiming that horizon, the authors conclude, means accepting that deinstitutionalisation is not a policy that was tried and found wanting, but a project that remains incomplete and continually contested. The South American trajectories, with their fusion of clinical innovation, legal transformation and social mobilisation, show that another relationship between mental health care and the state is possible, and also that gains can be reversed when the political conditions that produced them erode. For a field increasingly fluent in metrics, the essay’s most provocative claim is that the most important outcomes of psychiatric reform, dignity, autonomy and belonging, are precisely the ones that resist measurement by bed counts and coverage targets, and that the future of global mental health will depend on whether it can learn to see them.

Subject of Research: Psychiatric deinstitutionalisation and the politics of mental health reform in global mental health

Article Title: Why deinstitutionalisation still matters: Reclaiming a contested horizon in global mental health

Article References: Montenegro, C., Szabzon, F., Bowen, S., & da Mosto, D. (2026). Why deinstitutionalisation still matters: Reclaiming a contested horizon in global mental health. PLOS Mental Health, 3(9), e0000699. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000699

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000699

Keywords: deinstitutionalisation, global mental health, psychiatric reform, human rights, South America, community care, transinstitutionalisation, citizenship, mental health policy, social mobilisation, institutional reform, lived experience

The study rests on a conceptual framework borrowed from social theory. Oboh anchors his analysis in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, the notional space in which governments, media, and citizens exchange views on matters of common interest. Since Habermas’s work was translated into English in 1962, scholars have used the idea to explain how democratic societies negotiate collective concerns. Contemporary researchers of counterpublics have extended the model, arguing that the public sphere is better understood as a multiplicity of overlapping publics rather than a single unified arena. Social media, Oboh notes, has accelerated this transformation: citizen journalists now create virtual spaces where people process their thoughts and share ideas on any issue of public interest, much as Habermas envisioned for the print-era bourgeois public sphere.

Within that framework, the media occupy a pivotal position. They are, metaphorically, the nexus that connects countries and regions in a notional space, and for most people they are the primary source of political information, including information on the conduct of governments and citizens. Oboh argues that the thoughts and feelings people hold about Africa are partly built on what media report about the region, and that media can also serve as ideological weapons projecting the views of their proprietors. A government that performs well in office, he observes, gains little public credit if the media fail to report that commitment, which is why objective coverage matters both for accountability and for image formation.

To test these propositions empirically, the study adopted a survey method with a non-probabilistic, purposive sampling technique. The sample was drawn from staff and students of Benson Idahosa University and from media practitioners in Benin City, Nigeria. A total of 384 questionnaires were distributed and 368 were retrieved, an attrition rate of 4.3 percent. The instrument was a structured questionnaire with 29 items in four sections, covering respondent background, the effects of media coverage, the effects of government actions, and the effects of citizens’ conduct on the African image. Responses were recorded on a five-point Likert scale, with mean scores above 3 indicating general agreement and standard deviations capturing the dispersion of opinion. Three null hypotheses were then evaluated using the Pearson correlation coefficient.

The results on media coverage were the clearest. The statement that media coverage of the good things done by Africans creates a good image for Africa recorded the highest mean in its block, 4.26, signaling strong agreement, while the claim that media reports of government actions do not affect Africa’s image scored a low 2.18, indicating disagreement. The grand mean of 3.44 for the media block suggested that respondents broadly accepted that the media exert a reasonable influence on how Africa is viewed. Statistically, the Pearson correlation between media coverage of African affairs and the public view of the African image was r = 0.365, a positive moderate relationship, with a significance value of 0.000, well below the 0.05 threshold. The null hypothesis of no correlation was therefore rejected: the more the media cover African affairs, the more other regions are likely to know about the continent.

Government actions also proved consequential. The single strongest item in this block was the statement that corruption by some African leaders has an impact on the image of Africa, with a mean of 4.11. The grand mean of 3.21 indicated that respondents believed government conduct shapes public assessment of the region, although a fairly high standard deviation of 1.32 revealed considerable diversity of opinion. The Pearson correlation between government actions and the public view of the African image was r = 0.340, again a positive moderate relationship significant at 0.000, leading to rejection of the second null hypothesis. In plain terms, when governments act in ways aligned with public expectations, the image of the region improves; corruption and misgovernance do measurable reputational damage.

The evidence on citizens was weaker but still significant. The grand mean of 2.95 for the citizen block showed respondents were essentially neutral about how much individual conduct shapes the continental image, and a standard deviation of 1.28 confirmed a fair diversity of views. Yet the Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.229, significant at p = 0.000, indicated a weak positive relationship between the actions of African citizens and the public view of the African image. The third null hypothesis was rejected as well. Oboh interprets this to mean that how African citizens relate to members of other regions, including what they share on social media, does feed into external perceptions, even if the effect is smaller than that of media and government.

Beyond the survey, the study situates Africa’s image problem in the structures of global politics and economics. Oboh argues that the region’s difficulties today stem less from colonialism than from misplaced priorities by past and present leaders who ignored citizens’ welfare. He highlights the debt burden as a central constraint: between 1970 and 2002, Africa received 540 billion dollars in loans, paid back 550 billion, and still owed 293 billion at the end of 2002. Some African nations remain aid-dependent, with foreign assistance exceeding 50 percent of government expenditure in certain cases, a dependency that erodes economic sovereignty. He also points to the absence of a permanent African seat on the United Nations Security Council, noting that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for reform of the council’s outdated structure and criticized its lack of representation for Africa as undermining the body’s credibility and legitimacy.

The digital dimension runs throughout the analysis. Oboh argues that technological development is not value neutral, and that Western control of digital technology shapes how virtual spaces frame discussions of globalization and digital governance. He urges African governments to use both legacy and new media to project their positions, and to exploit social media networking sites to share the continent’s own narratives and correct impressions that have undermined its image. At the same time, he warns that citizen journalists sometimes circulate untrue stories about African governments, and that such stories carry negative consequences precisely because audiences abroad are more likely to believe accounts shared by African citizens about their own governments than accounts shared by outsiders.

The study’s conclusions come with candid limitations. Because the sample was purposive and drawn entirely from Nigerian academia and media, the findings reflect an African perspective on Africa’s image and cannot be generalized to non-African audiences; Oboh recommends that future research survey international respondents or compare African and non-African viewpoints directly. His recommendations are nonetheless pointed: media organizations should report factual accounts of government actions; governments should encourage inclusive, participatory democracy; citizens, at home and in the diaspora, should feel a sense of ownership in their governments’ success and report on them objectively; and the United Nations should consider making Africa a permanent member of the Security Council to enhance both the continent’s image and its contribution to global peace. The overarching message is that Africa’s reputation is a joint enterprise, and that governments, media, and citizens who work more closely together on socioeconomic development will, in the process, reshape how the committee of nations sees the region.

Subject of Research: Public perceptions of how African governments, media, and citizens influence Africa's global image

Article Title: Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image

Article References: Oboh, G. E. (2026). Impact of the actions of governments, media, and citizens on public view of African image. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00373-y

Keywords: Africa, public sphere, media coverage, governance, citizenship, survey research, Habermas, correlation analysis, African image, UN Security Council, foreign debt, social media