Abstract
AbstractScholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.
Highlights
One of the most important contemporary developments in public policy and administration has been the rise of innovations in participatory governance, which seek to complement representative institutions and enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of policy making (Ansell & Gash 2008; Elstub & Escobar 2019)
governancedriven democratization’ (GDD) sits at the intersection between routinised participation and incumbent democracy (Blaug 2002), as an example of democratic engineering, where lay citizens are brought in to support politics and public agencies, with the aim to increase legitimacy and produce better policies
democracy-driven governance’ (DDG) falls at the intersection between routinised participation and critical democracy (Blaug 2002), as social movements and local civil society enter local state institutions and reshape them to respond to bottom-up demands for reforms and rights
Summary
One of the most important contemporary developments in public policy and administration has been the rise of innovations in participatory governance, which seek to complement representative institutions and enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of policy making (Ansell & Gash 2008; Elstub & Escobar 2019). One of the dilemmas faced by social movement-led governments is whether to use the levers available to them to implement social programmes from the top down, or invest in longer term work by opening up state institutions to citizen participation to ensure that social reforms respond more directly to bottom-up demands, rather than technical advice (Roth 2019: 78–79) This is an important point, because we can hypothesise that the political success and endurance of a DDG reform agenda depends on both delivering improvements in living standards and generating a robust pro-participation political culture, which could increase its resilience and help build a consensus in favour of participatory democracy (Lima 2019; Martinez 2019; Blanco et al 2020). With regards to Barcelona, an example of this is the hosting of the ‘fearless cities’ conference, which brought together a cross-country network of radical municipalist governments and activists to co-ordinate demands and political activism from local through to global scales (Russel 2019)
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