participatory governance

Democratising public administration through public-common partnerships: the case of the Citizen Assets Programme in Barcelona

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Marina Pera and Sonia Bussu

In a recent article titled Towards Democratisation of Public Administration:Public-Commons Partnerships in Barcelona, part of a Special issue on The International Journal of the Commons (edited by Dr Hendrik Wagenaar and Dr Koen Bartels), we explored public-commons partnerships in Barcelona through a relational lens, examining how they might be contributing to deeper democratisation of public administration.

The commons refer to those cultural and material resources collectively managed by the community and represent an alternative to both the state and the market. Recent literature emphasises the capacity of the commons’ prefigurative politics to develop alternative institutions to neoliberal regimes and/or deliberative and collective forms of resource management. The grassroots movements managing the commons often take an oppositional stance to the state, but they might also depend on its resources. By the same token, the state has an interest in supporting assets and services managed as commons, which offer flexibility and efficiency, while encouraging citizen participation in local politics.  

Within political contexts sympathetic to progressive socio-economic projects, such as  new municipalism in Barcelona, formalised alliances between the local state and the commons started to emerge, facilitating the development of novel policy instruments that respond better to the demands of the commons and open opportunities for more participatory policymaking. So-called public-common partnerships are long-term agreements based on cooperation between state actors and the commons members. In our paper, we wanted to understand better the relational work behind these partnerships and the role of boundary spanners that build bridges between two worlds, such as the state and the commons, which are often quite distant in terms of visions of local democracy and the language to articulate such visions.  We take the case of the Citizen Asset Programme (CAP) in Barcelona to explore the relationships between public officials and commons members, highlighting how these collaborations shape governance practices and can help foster a collaborative culture within public administration.

CAP was approved in 2016 and aims to create the institutional framework to recognise and support commons-managed municipal assets in the city. Based on qualitative analysis of interviews with public officials and commons members involved in the partnership, as well as official documents, we drew out insights on the relational dynamics that facilitated the creation of two policy instruments under CAP: The Community Balance Metrics and the Social Return on Investment of Can Batlló. The first one is a set of indicators to evaluate the performance of community-managed assets considering their transformative potential and including dimensions of internal democracy, care, inclusion, and environmental sustainability. The second helps to measure the value of activities and volunteer work carried out in the community centre of Can Batlló.

Through a series of vignettes depicting the different state and commons actors involved, we examined how they forged alliances and employed creative thinking to manage conflicts, resistance, and scepticism from both the local administration and the grassroots movements. Public officials from the Active Democracy Department were able to build trust among commons representatives by recognising their needs and potential. They explained the workings of public administration in a clear language. They created spaces of open-ended dialogue between grassroots movements and different departments to facilitate the development of policy instruments, measures and indicators that valued the commons’ innovative work, while still coherent with existing legal requirements. For instance, a working commission was set up involving members of Can Batlló, the Legal and the Heritage Department, as well as representatives of the District administration. This public-commons partnership developed a comprehensive agreement to regulate asset transfers, which fully recognises the social and economic value of the commons.

By the same token, the commons members played a crucial role in communicating to grassroots movements the work of the Active Democracy officials and build mutual trust. On the one hand, they helped the commons understand feasibility issues of their demands; on the other they pressed the public administration for greater transparency and creative interpretation of existing regulatory framework to strengthen democratic values underpinning asset transfer agreements.

Two cooperatives supported these partnerships as consultants. They contributed knowledge of innovative public policies from across the world. They also facilitated knowledge sharing to encourage cooperation between commons members and state institutions, for instance by inviting grassroots groups from other parts of the world to share their experience of working with the state.

The work of these public-commons partnerships is gradually reshaping the administrative culture and fostering more transparent and democratic working practices within the public administration. An example is the joint work to develop the Community Balance Metrics, which helps evaluate the performance of the commons using indicators agreed upon by both local public administration and the commons. However, these processes face a number of challenges, as they clash with established working routines and performance evaluations of public administrators that hardly ever value participatory work. Existing literature suggests that despite the introduction and encouragement of new practices, there is a tendency to revert to traditional policymaking methods when faced with unexpected problems. When boundary spanners that had supported the partnership exit the process, they can leave a vacuum that is hard to fill and that can jeopardise the partnership. In Barcelona, ongoing discussion between Can Batlló members and the City Council on who is responsible for funding the refurbishment of one of Can Batlló’s building is causing friction within the partnership and some of the work has stalled.

Inevitably this collaborative work is hard to sustain, but in the face of multiple and overlapping crises facing local government, these public-commons partnerships are also beginning to open safe space to experiment and do things differently.

Picture credit: Victoria Sánchez.

Sonia is an Associate Professor in INLOGOV. Her main research interests are participatory governance and democratic innovations, and creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement. She led on projects on youth participation to influence mental health policy and services, coproduction of research on health and social care integration, models of local governance, and leadership styles within collaborative governance.

Marina is a researcher at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She holds a PhD in Public Policy from UAB and a M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University (New York). She has been a visiting scholar at CUNY Graduate Center (New York) and at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham. Her research interests
include community assets transfer, democratisation of public administration, community development and public-common partnerships.

Citizen Assets Transfer in Barcelona: the role of the commons in democratising public administration and public service delivery

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Dr Marina Pera from Autonomous University of Barcelona is presenting a critical analysis of the asset transfer policies in Barcelona at our next INLOGOV seminar, which starts at noon on Thursday 30th November at our Edgbaston campus.

Marina will examine opportunities and risks raised by citizen management of municipal assets, taking a community empowerment perspective.

Barcelona is a city with a long tradition of neighbourhood associations, community and cultural centres run by citizens. Since the 1970s, in response to citizens’ demands, a number of municipal assets have been transferred to local non-profit organisations with economic support from the City Council.

The transfer of these assets was decentralised to the administrative districts, which in some cases led to practices of co-option and clientelism. In 2015, the Bases de gestió cívica (civic management legal basis) was collaboratively designed and approved: a local regulation that standardises the allotment of assets, increasing transparency on asset transfers. However, the Bases of gestió cívica did not solve some of the challenges that had emerged from the collaboration between the local state and community actors. One of the main challenges was the insufficient adaptation of regulations and administrative procedures to the idiosyncrasies of grassroots organisations with low levels of professionalisation. These place a huge burden on these community groups, who had to invest time and resources in bureaucratic procedures, hindering their original mission and accelerating their de-politicisation. 

In 2016, with the rise of a progressive government in the city of Barcelona, an ambitious policy was approved, the Citizen Assets Programme (CAP). This policy aimed to recognise, support, and consolidate urban commons: spaces and facilities rooted in the community that were apt to be transferred to non-profit organisations in order to be managed democratically. The CAP thus aimed to empower the community and promote citizen participation. This policy entailed greater transparency and legitimacy surrounding the process of asset transfer and the accountability of grassroots and non-profit groups. However, the Citizen Assets Programme has been facing a number of challenges in terms of legal issues, resistance by public officials and scepticism by non-profit organisations.

Despite the difficulties involved in the implementation of the Citizen Assets Programme, it has presented an opportunity for collaboration between the City Council and the commons. The efforts to create an environment of trust and mutual learning among public officials and community groups has allowed the development of innovative administrative instruments that recognise the transformative work of the commons, through innovative public-commons partnerships. This seminar therefore aims to analyse alternative forms of asset management beyond public direct and outsourcing management, engaging in current debates on collaborative culture in public administration, the dismantling of the welfare state and community empowerment.

Seminar details

The re-arranged seminar will run 4-5pm on Thursday 7th December at the University of Birmingham Edgbaston campus in Muirhead room G15. 

Further information, link to attend and registration can be found at the eventbrite. 

Register on Eventbrite

Back to square one: Decolonising democratic innovations must start with the normative foundation

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Dr Abena Dadze-Arthur

Originally published on the Agora blog

A slippery foundation

Without a question, decolonisation is a slippery concept already! Decolonising democratic innovations (DI) is even more slippery because of its inherently normative foundation. Here, Temidayo Eseounu’s argument in her blog, which forms part of the Political Studies Association’s Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group’s blog series on Decolonising Democratic Innovations, could not be more to the point: ‘Eurocentric normative values such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality are intrinsic to the theories of participatory and deliberative democracies, which underpin democratic innovations’. Indeed, the fact that a citizen jury or mini public, where groups of citizens meet to reflect on problems and assess policy proposals, is firmly rooted in a set of Eurocentric norms makes it a productive democratic innovation in a Western context, where people value above all individual rights and personal expression and are used to openly criticizing their leaders. Such an approach to public participation is in harmony with the social contracts found in Western civilizations, which typically construct mankind as free and equal by nature, and base political authority on the individual self-interests of members of society. Typically, under a Western vantage point, a well facilitated citizen jury or mini public would be praised for offering a ‘platform for exchange’, ‘giving a voice to marginalised members of the community’, ‘deepening democracy’ and ‘improving governance’.

‘Equality’ or ‘inclusion’ are not universal concepts

Such normative framing, which indeed constitutes the very foundation of the concept of democratic innovation, disregards the vastly different realities of most non-Western societies, their underpinning Weltanschauung, core values, beliefs, ethics, and their historical social contracts that help to structure the relationship between the people and their government. In many societies, the universalism of normative values and motivations, such as inclusion, equity, representation and equality, is fallacious – they are inherently Eurocentric! Irrespective of how expertly designed a citizen panel or mini public might be, it would not work well in many collectivist societies in non-Western contexts, where people do not prioritise values such as equality, individualism and personal freedom. For example, participatory activities in non-Western governance settings, such as the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, are not aiming to tackle a democratic deficit, accomplish egalitarian objectives or wholly enhance governmental accountability. In those contexts, while the purpose of a mini public might very well be public service improvements for all, however they are not intended to provide a platform for collectively debating political questions behind services and policies, nor to strengthen inclusion, equality or equity beyond particular segments of the population – as it might be in the West.

Different strokes for different folks

Being clear about the normative foundation of participatory and deliberative events in non-Western settings requires a holistic understanding of the respective local context, or life world, which is a state of affairs in which the everyday world is experienced by the people, who simultaneously create social reality while being constrained by it. For instance, the Balinese life world is based on viewing the cosmos as a grand hierarchy, wherein animals and demons are at the bottom, gods and god-kings are at the top, and ordinary mortals are distributed throughout an elaborate assortment of fixed status ranks in between. The often cantankerous nature of Western-type citizen panels that assume every human being is equal and has a right to pursue his or her self-interest could be viewed as an incomprehensible and disrespectful exercise that causes more damage than good to the community and established hierarchies. Similarly, the press in Arabic Bedouin societies often portrays Western-style democratic innovations with their explicit advocacy and public naming and shaming as ‘uncivilized’. The Bedouin culture of ‘saving face’, loyalty to the leader and respect for his ‘God-given’ mandate, safeguarding family honour and tribal traditions is not compatible with the reform-seeking debates and critical tirades that can typify Western-style citizen juries. Under the vantage point of bedoucrats (those who believe in Bedoucracy, which proffers a model of Arab public management that originates in the Bedouin tribal culture and joins traditional bureaucratic design with tribal power culture), many Western-type democratic innovations amount to little more than a ‘narcissist circus’. However, the Bedouin culture of mediating by means of patience and forgiveness and seeking compromise, which signifies some synergy with Western-style citizen juries, has ensured that there are a number of age-old traditional institutions in Arab Bedouin societies that can be built upon for the purpose of engaging members of the public in participatory and deliberative exercises.

This was done in a Taiwan Buddhist village. Aware of the foreign (Eurocentric) norms that underpin the theory and design of democratic innovations, a team of facilitators who were tasked with conceiving and facilitating a citizen assembly to explore public service challenges and policy solutions in a Taiwanese Buddhist village, had no other choice but to construct and formulate from scratch not a democratic but a culturally appropriate innovation by building on traditional institutions. Given that the citizens’ life world was particularly characterised by a collective emphasis on ‘belonging to one large family’ and ‘respecting social hierarchy’, the facilitators knew that those agreeing to participate in the citizen assembly would not be willing to raise problems for fear of being seen as disrespecting the family and its established hierarchy. Hence, the facilitators framed the act of problem exploration as a co-operative endeavour along Buddhist concepts, such as the ‘eightfold noble path’ and ‘cause-condition-effect’ and developed a buddhicratic approach to delivering and facilitating a citizen assembly with a normative foundation that was in harmony with local worldviews, values, ethics and social contracts.

What now?

Having unmasked the Eurocentricity of DI’s normative foundation, how do we then begin the process of radical renewal with a view to construct a new, broader, postcolonial normative foundation that allows for an increasingly pluralistic approach? Is it even possible to reconsider the legitimacy and comprehensiveness of the established knowledge on democratic innovations by applying the hermeneutic resources and referencing the precepts of the very theories we criticise? As with all wicked and intractable issues, we may have to accept that there is no one panacea. Instead, theorists and practitioners will need to undergo a paradigm shift and prepare themselves to accept and engage with a rich variety of truths, and their underpinning values, social contracts and hierarchies of power. Given the current dearth of non-Western theories and practical templates on public participation and deliberation, we will need to work on a case-by-case basis in constructing locally sensitive and culturally appropriate innovations that are not necessarily and inevitably aspiring to be democratic, but depending on the case perhaps buddhicratic, bedoucratic or othercratic. Importantly, by capturing the empirical observations from each case and theorising the insights gained on platforms such as this blog, or in special issues such as the one on ‘Decolonising the Public Administration Curriculum’ (link to Call for Abstracts here), or in journals that explicitly focus on promoting knowledge exchange across vastly different contexts and episteme such as Public Administration & Development, in time, we might be able to consolidate empirical regularities and develop new, postcolonial theoretical models.

Abena Dadze-Arthur is Assistant Professor at the School of Government (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham, and Associate Editor of the Wiley journal Public Administration & Development. Combining the experience of an international policy practitioner with the robust theoretical approach of an academic, Abena’s research and teaching focus on decolonizing and transforming approaches to public management and governance, and contributing to the development of indigenous solutions and sustainable change.

Navigating between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’: how urban professionals facilitate citizen participation in marginalised neighbourhoods.

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Simone van de Wetering

Residents of marginalised neighbourhoods have long been governed as a vulnerable group in need of help. Today, they are increasingly expected to be active citizens and (co-)creators in improving their neighbourhood. In the Netherlands, like in other European countries, local and participatory approaches are now central in urban policy for marginalised neighbourhoods. But what does this shift in governance approach look like in the work practice of urban professionals who give shape to citizen participation?

Urban professionals are known to play a key role in realising citizen participation: municipal and non-municipal professionals, ranging from civil servants to professionals working for welfare organisations and other social partners linked to the neighbourhood. What their role exactly entails is, however, not really clear. Especially in terms of the (dis)empowerment of urban residents and in marginalised neighbourhoods. 

On the one hand, urban professionals are seen to empower citizens. They can navigate between different roles and mediate between ‘the state’ and ‘the people’ due to their unique position in between. On the other hand, they can undermine residents’ power. This can happen when, despite emancipatory aims, decision-making authority remains in the hands of public officials or is shared only with a small group of already privileged residents.

I explored how urban professionals gave shape to citizen participation in my ethnographic study of a participatory governance approach in a Dutch marginalised neighbourhood. Here, I found that the work of these urban professionals cannot be classified simply as either empowerment or disempowerment.

While the participatory approach was discursively positioned as embodying active citizenship, in the work practice of urban professionals the idea of vulnerable places and people in need of help was not so easily replaced. Residents were viewed as having problems and simultaneously as having talents and capabilities; they were assumed to be in need of help from the government and from professionals, while also being able to come up with and execute initiatives to improve the neighbourhood.

As urban professionals translated the broader shift in the governance of urban marginality to their work practice, they navigated between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’ and employed, what I call ‘selective empowerment’. This is a differentiated approach towards citizen participation in which professionals ascribe a significant role to themselves as a continuous support system for citizens. In the words of one urban professional: “Participation needs to be supported. . . . We [professionals] need to create a canvas on which participation can go nuts. But you can’t expect a painting to arise without bringing the brushes.” Moreover, they facilitate participation within a normative framework of ‘appropriate’ or more traditional expressions of active citizenship. For instance, youths who violently protested in response to the COVID-19 evening-curfew were redirected to a youth council.

By employing selective empowerment, urban professionals reproduced existing categories of vulnerability while reworking the meaning of ‘active citizenship’ or ‘citizen participation’ with marginalised groups. Acknowledging vulnerability is then not (only) a reproduction of existing inequalities. It is also an embedded approach employed by urban professionals to facilitate context-specific citizen participation against the background of urban marginalisation. A discursive shift in governance approach is not automatically synchronised with the work practice of urban professionals. Based on my research, I propose a more nuanced understanding of the work of urban professionals beyond mere empowerment or disempowerment. These insights may provide a starting point for urban professionals’, and, more generally, local governments’, reflexivity: to challenge not only their perceptions of residents as ‘vulnerable’, but also the storyline of residents as ‘active citizens’. Such reflexivity could imply a move beyond discursive ideals of ‘active citizenship’ towards context-specific practices of participation in local neighbourhood policy.

Simone van de Wetering is a PhD candidate at the Department of Public Law and Governance of Tilburg University. Her research focuses on identity and inequality in the city. In her PhD project, she studies citizen participation in marginalised urban neighborhoods in the Netherlands and France. Taking an ethnographic approach, she zooms in on the strategies of citizens and the state to make urban change.

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