Abstract
ABSTRACT Citizen-led initiatives raise practical and theoretical questions about the criteria by which their democratic legitimacy should be judged. While existing analytical and normative frameworks are problematically based on a `state'/`citizen' binary, a network ontology which sees these as strategically-deployed constructs is more practically adequate for analysis. We demonstrate this through a case of a successful citizen initiative, and conclude that such analysis should examine processes of strategic networking, along with claims and constructions of representation and identity. This means not taking participants' categories, identities, and evaluations for granted, and privileging the possibility of challenge as a fundamental democratic criterion.
Highlights
Across Europe, citizen-led initiatives are once again being seen as positive alternatives to the retrenchment and privatisation of the welfare state, providing opportunities for better, more responsive delivery of public goods alongside thedemocratisation of the public sphere (Moulaert et al, 2010; Wagenaar et al, 2015)
We propose a network ontology which provides the underpinning for an analysis of processes of strategic networking (Hay & Richards, 2000) and the performance of representation and identity claims (Saward, 2010)
Prompted by the theoretical and practical issues raised by such initiatives for local democracy, we identify the problems arising when applying prevalent criteria for evaluating their legitimacy, and claim that the root of these problems is the binary ontology of ‘citizen’ and ‘state’
Summary
Across Europe, citizen-led initiatives are once again being seen as positive alternatives to the retrenchment and privatisation of the welfare state, providing opportunities for better, more responsive delivery of public goods alongside the (re)democratisation of the public sphere (Moulaert et al, 2010; Wagenaar et al, 2015). As constructs these provide strategic resources amongst which actors may choose, albeit constrained by the plausibility and acceptability (and so legitimacy) of any claim they make to the other actors involved (principally the putatively represented community and the claim’s audience) (Disch, 2015; Saward, 2010) This is normatively problematic, as it undermines judgements such as the valorising of a ‘citizen initiative’ because it is based in ‘the community’, because the category of ‘community’ is unsettled, but because the usual criteria for making such judgements are themselves bound up in the same binary categorisations. We are concerned with groups of people engaged in strategic networking, who use, as discursive resources, representations of themselves alongside claims to represent others This analysis leads us away from questions of how citizen groups participate in governance and how this matches against existing legitimacy criteria, and prompts us to ask: how are networks constructed? The nature of the Trust and its project allowed high degrees of luidity both in identities and representative claims, and we treat it as an “extreme” case (Flyvbjerg, 2006), which Flyvbjerg suggests are more revealing of basic processes than “typical” or “representative” cases, where similar processes are less obvious but present
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