The Diversity of Citizenship and Democracy in Local Public Management Reform

Abstract

This article conceptualizes the diversity of citizenship and democracy in urban settings by studying the cultural and discursive structures of local public management reform. The reform in question is founded on the ideas of new public management. It has been suggested that in these kinds of reforms, citizens are transformed into consumers. However, this discursive case study shows that this is a simplistic and narrow view by conceptualizing the ways in which people's positions and democracy are interpreted locally. Definitions of local citizenship and democracy are framed simultaneously by multiple discourses, both local and global, yielding a local mixture of citizenship, consumerism and clientism. Representative, expert, participatory and user democracy are all present in the cultural structures of the plans for local government reform, but discourses that afford powerful positions to local citizens remain marginal. Citizens are not identified as being extensively involved in urban governance practices. A strengthening of political agency requires that diverse positions of local citizens and forms of democracy are considered in relation to each other and in relation to power structures and resources.