Facilitating citizen participation in marginalised neighbourhoods: selective empowerment in between vulnerability and active citizenship

ABSTRACT

Residents of marginalised neighbourhoods have long been governed as a vulnerable group in need of help. Increasingly, however, they are expected to be active citizens and (co-)creators in improving their neighbourhood. While much is written about the shift towards more participatory governance, less is known about how this shift manifests in the work practice of urban professionals, particularly in marginalised neighbourhoods and in terms of citizen (dis)empowerment. This paper explores how urban professionals give shape to citizen participation in a marginalised Dutch neighbourhood. I found that they navigated between narratives of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘active citizenship’ and employed ‘selective empowerment’: a differentiated approach in which they ascribed a significant supportive role to themselves and facilitated participation within a normative framework. The research offers a more nuanced image of ‘empowerment’ than previous studies suggest, demonstrating that a discursive shift in governance approach is not automatically synchronised with urban professionals’ work practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban marginality
• participatory governance
• urban professionals
• vulnerability
• active citizenship
• selective empowerment

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all of the respondents and to those who facilitated my field research. Thank you for sharing your stories, for providing me access to meetings and for connecting me to others. I am also grateful to those who provided constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper, especially at the 2021 Netherlands Institute of Governance, Critical and Interpretive Public Administration (NIG CIPA) paper sessions and the 2021 International Sociological Association Research Committee 21, Urban and Regional Development (ISA RC21) conference. Finally, I thank my supervisors and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical approval

This research has been approved by the Ethical Review Board of Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University with #2019/26.