Who is responsible for the hockey rink? – A critical analysis of a citizen dialogue meeting in a small Mill town

KEYWORDS:

• Rural community
• Governmentality
• Power

Introduction

Sweden is often perceived as “a model welfare state” (Castell, 2013, p. 1) with a generous welfare system (Bergh, 2011). A substantial part of the welfare provision is organized and administered at the local level, which makes it possible for local citizens to participate in local politics and planning (Öberg & Svensson, 2012; Tahvilzadeh, 2015). To engage citizens in the decision-making process at the local level, a method commonly known as citizen dialogue is used, which is an important element of the Swedish model that is also used elsewhere. Citizen dialogue is generally seen as an instrument of community involvement in local development. Through its civil servants, local government involves local citizens in the municipality’s decisions affecting the local community. It could thereby be regarded as a tool to deepen local democracy by involving citizens or communities in decision-making processes (see Lindholm et al., 2015; Micheletti, 2017). Several researchers (Tahvilzadeh, 2015) point out that citizen dialogue is an activity used by policymakers to motivate and enhance the citizens’ opportunity to participate in the decision-making process and to revitalize democratic decision-making. This revitalization “would repair the malaise of representative democracy, symptomized by declining trust, voter turnout and party membership, and support the need to find alternative and less hierarchical approaches to interaction with civil society” (Tahvilzadeh, 2015, p. 239).

Although citizen dialogue can be seen as an instrument or as a mechanism used to ameliorate democratic deficit, including issues related to social exclusion and segregation, it also risks reproducing mechanisms of exclusion (see Soneryd & Lindh, 2019). Hopkins (2010) notes that those responsible for conducting the citizen dialogue should be aware of the power relations involved when participating in the citizen dialogue and, more importantly, be open to the arguments of the citizens.

Soneryd and Lindh (2019) divide research on the role of citizen dialogue into two streams: a normative and a critical one. Research within the normative stream is based on Habermasian ideas and stresses the participative and deliberative side, including the innate value of citizen dialogue (Eriksen & Fossum, 2000). Steffek and Nanz (2008, p. 2) point out that this emphasis departs from the idea that “legitimate governance can only be realized through deliberative practices.” Furthermore, this stream of research generally focuses on how institutional arrangements can strengthen representative democracy (cf. Abrahamsson, 2013; Fung & Wright, 2003; as cited in Soneryd & Lindh, 2019) and on the conditions under which the citizen dialogue can work (Beierle & Konisky, 2000; Rowe & Frewer, 2000), while aware of the risks and pitfalls of such dialogs.

The critical stream of research generally focuses on the role of citizen dialogue in urban planning and city development, taking current patterns of governance into account. According to Soneryd and Lindh (2019, p. 230), this approach “relies on Foucauldian conceptualizations of power and governmentality, and sees citizen dialogue as part of wider processes of enrolling citizens in city developments that are very difficult for citizens to influence and that are narrowly defined by private interests and investments.” Today there is an increased interest in public-private ownership and the impact that private ownership may have on the role that citizens can play in planning processes (Harvey, 2012, as cited in Soneryd & Lindh, 2019). Citizen dialogue is therefore described as having no real effects, and can be perceived as “fake democracy.”

According to Soneryd and Lindh (2019, p. 230), few studies examine the role of citizen dialogue in government programmes using the framework of governmentality. A citizen dialogue can be approached as government technology supporting various government rationalities and programmes, some better fitting neo-liberal ideals of the competitive city in a global economy and some better fitting other ideals, such as sustainable development or democratisation in a broad sense or maybe even in a Habermasian sense (Soneryd & Lindh, 2019, p. 230)

Soneryd and Lindh (2019) thus follow neither the first nor the second stream in their research, but rather use a critical analytical approach: “We see both democratization and neoliberalism as empirical sources of new forms of governing through extended citizen dialogue” (p. 232).

In this paper we analyze a citizen dialogue meeting in a rural setting from a governmentality perspective. In this context, it is important to bear in mind that the idea of citizen dialogue is in line with the EU and Member States’ policy of rural development. These policies “encourage local development initiatives and public-private and voluntary sector partnerships through participatory approaches” (Arora-Jonsson, 2017, p. 60; see also Li et al., 2016). For instance, Li et al. (2016) examined bottom-up initiatives for revitalizing declining rural communities in a rural area in China and Sweden. In Sweden, the private, public and tertiary sector worked together to meet the challenges, but the revitalization was contingent “on strong leadership either by the local committee, local government or where leading stakeholders played an important role in aggregating the resources and strength required to achieve a rural revival” (p. 512). Arora-Jonsson (2017) also points out that civil servants at the state level, but also the municipal levels, are subject to cuts in their budget and see themselves increasingly as facilitators rather than as directly responsible, as will become apparent later in the dialogue described in this study.

Syssner and Siebert (2020) studied small municipalities’ governance in Sweden and Germany, particularly how civil servants and politicians communicated their planning processes, using a critical analytical approach. They identified two types of communication processes: information and branding (p. 91). First, they provided expert information based on objective facts. They stated: “When communication does occur, it is highly de-politicized and fact-oriented; it is focused on informing citizens, invoking feelings of pride and optimism, and establishing a positive atmosphere in the local community” (Syssner and Siebert 2020, p. 92). Second, the branding process included strategies emphasizing for example, heritage, civic engagement, quality of life, proximity to growth centers, and entrepreneurial spirit (Syssner and Siebert 2020, p. 92). It was about “selling a place” by focusing on some of its specific qualities. As will be seen, this will be informative to our results. However, we will examine the perspectives of two parties, namely local citizens and civil servants.

Hence, this paper aims to critically examine and discuss how local citizens’ engagement in citizen dialogue impacts local decision-making in a small municipality. In the paper, we analyze a citizen dialogue meeting organized by civil servants for the local citizens of a small mill town. The meeting concerned the future of the local hockey rink. The paper addresses the following questions:

1. What are the different rationalities expressed by different actors during different phases of the meeting?

2. How is power articulated during different phases of the citizen dialogue meeting?

The paper is a product of an ongoing research project called “Spatial pockets of (in-)equalities – understanding and enhancing the educational and life careers of young adults in disadvantaged urban and rural areas,” financed by the Swedish research council FORMAS.

Our empirical questions will also lead us to understand how rural community works in the mill town and what possibilities, if any, it has to advance citizenship rights. What opportunities are there for community development vis-à-vis municipal power? Does the municipality strengthen the citizens’ chances for mutual community planning and development, or does it not?

Theoretical considerations

To critically examine the citizen dialogue, we adopt the theory of governmentality (Foucault, 1991). Li (2007, p. 275) suggests that governmentality is “the attempt to shape human conduct by calculated means” in searching how to improve ways of doing things for a population (p. 276). However, even if the aim is to improve things for the population, the theory of governmentality critically examines the power relations embedded in the steering practices and techniques used.

According to Lövgren (2000), steering is a conscious statement of expectations that are conveyed to specific individuals or groups to act, or not to act, in a specific way (p. 23). A steering practice thus consists of management strategies and organized actions based on desired statements and expectations rooted in discourse (Lövgren 2000, p. 23). Steering can take different forms:

… authoritative or hierarchical, non-jurisdictional, unintended, network-, self- and/or co-steering. Steering actions could also be clearly distinguished from their consequences. Although steering actions are often deliberate and based on reasoned argument, such actions can have non-deliberate, unintentional and unforeseen consequences. (Hooge et al., 2017, p. 5)

According to Hooge, Waslander. (2017), governmentality is used as a form of steering in relations and interactions between actors.

Technology or techniques, from a Foucauldian perspective, refer to methods of governing people. Technology is used by different actors in society to affect actions, desires and beliefs (Bevir, 2011, p. 461). It also refers to “bio-power,” which is composed of technologies used to discipline the population to improve their health, longevity and productivity: “ … a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault, 1978, p. 137). From a Foucauldian perspective, power is performative and relational in the micro-process, and more importantly, it includes the concepts of freedom and resistance. In other words, “there is no power without resistance” (Olsson, 1997, p. 172).

In this study, we analyze the steering that occurs in the interaction between civil servants from the municipality and the citizens of a small mill town. This form of steering is contingent on the structure of the relation between the actors in the interaction, in our case in the citizen dialogue we observed. This implies a specific conceptualization of power, which conceives power as possessed and as emerging in relations and interactions. Power shapes specific forms or leads to certain conduct, and more importantly, it can be resisted (Olsson, 1997, p. 172).

In this context, it is important to point out that we perceive citizen dialogue as a technique and technology that democratic authority uses to align citizens to support various government rationalities, agendas, plans and so on – in other words, through governance. The notion of technique as steering is linked to power. However, power from the perspective of governmentality is not fixed, nor does it emanate from a central body (for instance, the state against the people). It is “something that flows all through society, producing people as much as controlling them, deployed on oneself as much as on one by others” (Bevir, 2011, p. 461). Hence power is performative, that is to say, when it acts it is only power if it can impact the action of the person targeted. This critical analytical point of departure allows us not only to delineate different rationalities used by different actors in different phases of the meeting, but also the types of agency expressed during the meeting.

Method

The empirical data in this paper consists of an observation of a citizen dialogue meeting organized by the municipality to discuss the fate of a hockey rink in a small mill town in the early spring of 2019. Half of the meeting was observed by all three researchers, while the second half was observed by one. During the observation, notes were taken not only of what was said and done and how it was said but also of how citizens were placed in the room and how they reacted during the meeting. In collecting the observation data, the researchers adopted a neutral observer role. We did not actively participate in the discussion during the meeting. Some of the participants knew who we were after having conducted ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing young adults and key persons in the mill town at the beginning of 2018.

The descriptions of the context of the small mill town, and of the context itself, are also based on observations during our fieldwork, local Facebook groups, and interviews with various actors from the mill town and the municipality. We also based our analysis on meetings with local actors and the municipality where we presented preliminary results of the research project.

In this paper, we are inspired by a narrative analysis (Robertson, 2017) of the dynamic of the discussion taking place during the meeting between the local citizens and civil servants, focusing on: (1) the content of the discussion, i.e. what was said and done; (2) the rationalities underlying what was said during the meeting; and (3) the use of language and various techniques to express the different actors’ use of power, i.e. how it was said.

Findings

In the following sections, we start with the presentation of the context of the study, including a short history of the hockey rink. This will be followed by a presentation of the meeting, an analysis of three distinct aspects of the meeting from a governmentality theory perspective, and finally a discussion of the main findings of the study.

The small mill town

To understand the dynamics and the rationalities that played out in the dialogue, it is essential to give a brief description of the mill town. The mill town is situated in Bergslagen, once a prosperous mining area and one of the birthplaces of Swedish industrialization (Bergdahl et al, 1997). However, like other mill towns, it has undergone major changes and has had difficulties in reinventing itself and creating alternative economic activities (see Li et al., 2016). The Bersglagen area and the mill town have aging populations and a dwindling tax base because of young working adults moving to urban areas. Hence, several municipalities in the area are experiencing difficulties in providing services. In the mill town, abandoned buildings, shrinking opportunity structures for young adults and political populism reinforce the image of decline in a region with beautiful natural landscapes and cultural values. Young adults generally tend to migrate more than other age groups from both rural and urban areas. Only Sweden’s three biggest cities, Stockholm, Malmö, and Gothenburg, are the exception.

Like most mill towns, the town has experienced a decline in public services. The informants we interviewed witnessed or experienced the closing of the school for children aged 13 to 15 as well as other services. Although some young families have moved to the mill town, the population deficit remains. However, the mill town is not unique. Many small rural towns and villages in Sweden, like in most countries, are facing similar challenges such as a decline in basic services, including economic, recreational and cultural activities, but also public services (see Li et al., 2016).

The population of the mill town is about eighteen hundred and the majority of the population own their houses. When walking around, we were particularly impressed by the well-kept houses, hedges and gardens. Houses in the mill town are cheap, costing about one million Swedish kronor (about 100,000 US Dollars), compared to the urban centers where a similar house would probably cost about eight million kronor depending on the area. There are some blocks of flats, both in private ownership and for rent. The residents in the rental flats are mostly young adults, migrants, asylum seekers, or people with poor income or other social ills.

There are two major companies still operating in the mill town providing jobs: one within the steel industry and one in the wood industry. There are also public sector establishments within health care and schooling. Moreover, some small companies of different types, such as plumbers and painters, are also operating there.

Historically, the mill town has had a strong civil society with various civil organizations, mostly within sports such as football, hockey, floorball, orienteering and skiing. These organizations today increasingly face challenges in recruiting and engaging young people. A board member of a sports club we interviewed pointed out that she, at about 50 years of age, is the youngest on the board. In addition to the sports club, the Swedish Church and the Red Cross provide some leisure opportunities targeting asylum seekers and migrants. There are volunteer initiatives that bring the remaining associations together to organize cultural events in the mill town.

The hockey rink

The hockey rink was built by local people of the mill town in 1994, with some financial contribution from the local iron, steel and wood industries. Hence, the rink has a symbolic value for the community. The municipality took over the hockey rink at the behest of the local community to run and maintain it. The reason was that the hockey team in the mill town did not have enough players to use the facilities effectively. One of the young hockey players in the mill town noted that:

We were a whole bunch (who played hockey), we started in the Beagle Boys and played until we were 20–22 years of age, (…) and then, some from our team, (…) stopped playing, but otherwise, we played together, and went to training and attended matches. (…) Many had played football here and floorball, there is still a bunch continuing with floorball, but hockey was the most important. I don’t know what happened but they closed the hockey rink in the mill town, it was just that, and then we all started in X (the municipal city centre) and played on X’s team …

One of the young women that we interviewed described her relationship to the hockey rink as follows:

When I was a kid, about two, three years old, my dad took me to the hockey rink and they played matches, they were very good at hockey. We have had a strong hockey culture in the mill town, then it disappeared, and this is a typical sign that has affected the togetherness in the mill town … my father was a hockey coach, so I spent my whole life in the hockey rink. We had a hockey school during the summer, people came from Norway and different parts of Sweden, and it was a big event every summer. That has disappeared … We had A and Z (two national teams) that played their first match for the season here every year, and several hundred people came to the hockey rink, the whole mill town was there, but that disappeared as well.

A year after the municipality took over the hockey rink, they closed it. The meeting that we examine in this paper was organized by the municipality to discuss the future of the rink. This meeting was held three years after the municipality promised to run and maintain the hockey rink. Based on the narratives on the hockey rink, it can be said to have a symbolic value for the local community. They built it themselves and, more importantly, it is a symbol of the golden age in the history of the mill town. This collective memory was implicit in the mind-set of local participants during the meeting.

The citizen dialogue meeting

The citizen dialogue meeting took place in the sports center’s cafeteria in the mill town with two civil servants from the municipality and seventeen citizens. When we entered the room, both civil servants were standing in the front and had a PowerPoint presentation loaded on the screen. At the meeting, one of the representatives led the presentation while the other one was quiet the whole meeting. The local community participants consisted of three older women sitting around a table, one of whom was knitting, three older men, three middle-aged men and three middle-aged women. The remaining five citizens, who were of younger ages, were sitting in the back of the room, with their arms crossed over the chest. In addition, we were three researchers sitting at a table together with three other women. The meeting is presented in three sections: the beginning, the middle, and the end.

The beginning of the meeting – what is the problem with the hockey rink?

The meeting began at about 6 p.m. with one of the civil servants welcoming the participants and thanking them for coming. They then introduced themselves and began their presentation. The first part of the meeting focused on framing the status of the hockey rink from the perspective of the municipality. The framing began with the civil servant noting: “everyone knows that the best hockey rink in the area is situated in X (the municipal city center), oh sorry (nervously) I mean the mill town … !” This slip of the tongue or attempt to joke and lighten the tense atmosphere in the meeting led to a loud protest by the local participants, and then they laughed. He then pointed out that the rink in the mill town is generally in good shape but because the ice machine was leaking ammonia, the ammonia tank had to be removed. Two of the older men directly responded by saying that it was only a minor technical problem that could have been fixed easily, a point to which the local citizens in the meeting nodded their heads in agreement. The civil servant responded by claiming that the use of ammonia in ice rinks is an old technology that is no longer used, and pointed out that the hockey rink is situated near a primary school and stressed: “we cannot have a machine leaking ammonia near a school.”

In the opening statements, the civil servant used technical language to frame the current status of the hockey rink and appealed to a sense of responsibility of the local community toward the children attending a school located near the ice rink. The attempt by the civil servants to frame the current status of the hockey rink using technical knowledge was quickly refuted by the local participants. A number of the older men in the meeting had good technical knowledge of the hockey rink and could quickly debunk the technical knowledge of the civil servants on the technology used in the hockey rink.

The second issue the civil servants addressed was the economics of running and maintaining the hockey rink, and the funds required to turn it into a multipurpose sporting arena. They presented a detailed cost analysis and stressed that the hockey rink was expensive to operate and maintain. Turning it into a multipurpose arena would cost around three million Swedish kronor and the estimated cost of running the multisport arena would be 300,000 kronor per year. The civil servant pointed out that the municipality had tried to “think out of the box” regarding the maintenance of the hockey rink. By “thinking out of the box” he meant contacting para-sports associations who organize summer camps for people with different disabilities, but they were not interested. One of the older men, however, raised the criticism that the costs of all the changes that the civil servants identified were a red herring. He commented that they did not have to turn the arena into a multifunctional sports center, and if they did not do so, a new ice machine would not be needed, and then some of the rebuilding costs would not be necessary. Similarly, one of the middle-aged men at the meeting responded by asking how the rink could be too expensive for the municipality when the mill town community had operated it at a much lower cost, crossing his arms over his chest, with other local citizens nodding in agreement.

The above framing of the status of the rink was based on economic rationality – that the hockey rink is not economically viable, and the municipality cannot bear the cost of running two hockey rinks, implying that the municipality cannot pay the cost for running and maintaining the local hockey rink. In addition, they stressed that the municipality has exhausted all the other alternatives that they could think of to maintain and operate the hockey rink. The local participants, however, debunked the economic rationality presented by the civil servants. They stressed that the economic rationality of the presentation by the civil servants was based on the cost of reconstructing the rink but did not think of presenting different scenarios with alternative costs.

The steering techniques used by both the representatives and the citizens were based on both economic and technical rationalities where power is demonstrated by both parties. During the initial phase of the meeting, the municipal representative attempted to frame the “problem” as a technical and economic one to convince the local community that the municipality has done all it can to save the hockey rink but has failed. However, the locals could refute the attempts to frame the problem of the hockey rink as not only unnecessary but also irrational.

The second part of the meeting – who is responsible for the hockey rink?

The second part of the meeting generally focused on the question of responsibility in the past, present and future. The civil servant admitted that he was new in post and was not familiar with the history of the hockey rink. He enquired when the hockey rink was built, and one of the local participants told him that the community had built the rink with financial help from the local industries in 1994. Before the rink was built, the hockey club used to play in a tent. They also pointed out that the local community operated and maintained the rink until a couple of years ago when the community donated it to the municipality.

From the local citizens’ perspective, the hockey rink was donated to the municipality on the condition and promise that the municipality would operate and maintain it, and they pointed out that the municipality had broken its promise. The rink had not been operational for over a year. To counter this argument, the civil servant again argued that the municipality could not afford to maintain two hockey rinks and that the rink in the municipal city center had to be renovated. This information poured salt on an already festering wound and strengthened their suspicion that the municipality did not care for the mill town. The local citizens exploded in anger, saying that the rink in the mill town was in better condition than the one in the municipal city center. The civil servant then responded that it could be hard for people to travel to the mill town to skate. One of the young adults from the mill town, reflecting on the relation between the mill town and municipal city center, said that “it’s a long way from the administrative center to the mill town but very close from the mill town to the administrative centee.” One of the middle-aged women screamed that her children had had to take a bus on bad roads to the town center every day for years and that no one cared about that. Others in the meeting interrupted the civil servant with anger in their voices on how they had to suffer from bad decisions from the municipality, such as closing the local primary school. One of the women said: “the municipality does everything to work against us,” and another counteracted “no that is not true, they have never done anything for us.” The local participants laughed in acknowledgment of the remark. The civil servant, in response to the two women, suddenly admitted that they had not yet investigated what the cost of renovating the hockey rink in the administrative center would be. Then one of the citizens suggested that they should have a meeting when the municipality has calculated the cost of renovating the rink in the administrative center.

To sum up, the second part of the meeting revolved around the question of who is responsible for the hockey rink. The civil servant continued to use economic rationality claiming that they as a municipal authority have the responsibility to use the taxpayers’ money effectively. Furthermore, he argued that the cost of repair and maintenance of the hockey rink in the administrative center needs to be taken into consideration. However, the locals similarly used the same rationality to refute the argument that the municipality is responsible for how best to manage the taxpayers’ money. They argued that as taxpayers, they have the same rights as other citizens to get similar service. To strengthen this argument, they listed several services such as the school, bad roads and limited timetable for buses and, more importantly, underscored the broken promise of the municipality to operate and maintain the hockey rink.

The third part of the meeting – who wants to take care of the hockey rink?

The third part of the meeting focused on local engagement and the possibility of the Mill town running and maintaining the arena. The civil servant began to describe their effort to find alternatives, asking both private actors and actors from civil society in the field of sports to operate the rink, but to no avail. Having underscored their failure to interest other actors within and outside the municipality, they turned to the local citizens and asked if they knew any sports associations that would be interested in running the hockey rink. In the same breath, the civil servant pointed out that it was hard to engage young people to work voluntarily, saying: “Young people want to try new sports and services, but they are not working as volunteers, as we have done (meaning the old generation).” The citizens looked at each other and acknowledged what the civil servant just said. They all had similar experiences. All the local participants in the meeting were over 35 years old, and no young adults were present in the meeting to discuss the fate of the local hockey rink. The lack of engagement was realized by all of the participants as critical for running and maintaining the rink, and without it, it was impossible to keep it running in the long term. This realization argument was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Finally, the civil servant ended the meeting by encouraging the local community to find alternative ways of operating the hockey rink. The message from the municipality to the local community was explicit: the municipality was planning not to pursue their obligation to run the hockey rink. In short, the message to the local citizens in the mill town was that the fate of the rink was in their hands. Three of the middle-aged men added that the hockey rink needs urgent repairs now and that this was the responsibility of the municipality. With that final remark from the local participants, the meeting ended. The civil servant then thanked everyone for their commitment and for coming to the meeting.

An analysis of the meeting

It is apparent in the above description and analysis that the civil servants and the local citizens had similar agendas but desired different outcomes. The municipality’s desired outcome was for the local community to accept the municipality’s plan to retract their promise to run and maintain the rink as a rational decision based on objective facts. At the same time, the local community similarly wanted to convince them that the municipality’s decision was irrational and not based on objective facts and expected them to fulfil their obligation to run and maintain the hockey rink. In the first two parts of the meeting, both the civil servants and the local participants used technical and economic rationales to steer the discussion and attempt to shape each other’s attitudes toward accepting their evaluation and desire/expectation regarding the hockey rink. The local citizens showed that they had good technical knowledge of how to run the ice machine, and were also well versed in the economic aspect of running the rink. Hence, they could easily refute the economic and technical arguments presented by the civil servants. This was done in a tone that bordered on disdain for the municipality’s argument and the rationalities underlying it. However, the tone, disdain and suspicion should be understood against the backdrop of the tense historical relationship between the local community and the municipality.

However, in the third part of the meeting, particularly when the civil servant expressed that there was a lack of engagement by young people in the local associational life, the local citizens’ resistance was broken. This engagement, they implicitly acknowledged, was essential for running and maintaining the rink. They could not refute this argument. Although the rink had a symbolic value to them, it could not function without mobilizing the concern of the whole community rather than only a few engaged local actors.

Discussion

This paper aims to critically examine and discuss how local citizens’ engagement in citizen dialogue impacts local decision-making in a small municipality. The citizen dialogue, as we noted in the introduction of the paper, is an instrument to encourage communities to participate in the authorities’ decision-making regarding plans that affect the lives of citizens. More importantly, it is perceived as a means or an instrument to deepen local democracy by involving citizens or communities in decision-making processes (see e.g. Micheletti, 2017, p. 467; Lindholm et al., 2015). However, as noted earlier, the meeting was colored by the tension between the local community and the municipal civil servants. This tension was the product of a series of actions whereby the municipal authorities closed several services in the municipality using similar rational arguments, as well as the lack of demographic growth in the mill town, as reasons not to maintain certain types of services such as the primary school. In other words, from the outset, the local participants were not a sympathetic audience. For the local participants, this dialogue was another one of the municipality’s attempts to make an excuse, trying once again to avoid fulfilling its responsibilities toward the mill town. This was noted by one participant claiming that “The municipality has never done anything for us,” a perception that all the local citizen agreed upon.

Using the theory of governmentality, it is clear that both parties in the meeting used similar rationalities and facts to paint different “truths” about the state of the hockey rink and its future. To steer, it is necessary to frame expectations in such a way that convinces or leads individuals, or groups of individuals, to act in a specific way (Lövgren, 2000). Although steering can involve deliberation in the form of arguments based on reason, it can have unintended and unforeseen consequences (Hooge et al., 2017, p. 5). The civil servants came prepared with a set of arguments, but what they did not foresee was that the people they were going to meet and attempt to steer were knowledgeable and could easily refute their reasoning.

It also becomes apparent in the interaction between the civil servants and local actors in the meeting that the civil servants did not have a monopoly on knowledge or expertise concerning the technology or the economics of running the rink. Both parties had expert knowledge and in some respects the citizens even had superior knowledge. It could thus be argued that knowledge, which has the power to steer the attitude of the local citizens, was ineffective in this instance. This shows that the power of knowledge is no longer in the possession of the few but flows through society and, as evident in this case, how the possession of knowledge can be used to resist power (Bevir, 2011). To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. Hence, this shows that power is performative and not top-down, or that the locals were not powerless – they resisted the attempt of the civil servants to steer their attitude and behavior in the meeting.

However, the local community actors in the meeting could not deny the poor engagement of the young adults in the local associational life and their lack of voluntary work. One of the participants in the meeting suggested that the attitude among young adults today is “what do I get?” A second set of arguments that the civil servants deployed referred to entrepreneurial spirit and the effective use of the taxpayers’ money. These two rationales were also used to strengthen their economic arguments, particularly the argument that it is their responsibility to ensure that the taxpayers’ money is used most effectively. A substantial portion of welfare provision in Sweden is organized and administered at the municipal level. In the new liberal organization or, put simply, the marketization of service, each welfare service provider – whether in the private or the public sector – is expected to be economically viable, to carry their costs and compete with private actors. In other words, marketization has introduced a new language and rationale in the organization of welfare services (Drechsler, 2009), namely a combination of an ideology of new economic liberalism and new public management (NPM). These ideas underpin and inform municipal governing, which people and citizens today accept as “the truth” and the best way to govern or organize welfare regimes.

In this specific citizen dialogue, it is evident that knowledge and power are not fixed, and do not necessarily emerge from authority, but flow all through society, “producing people as much as controlling them, deployed on oneself as much as on one by others” (Bevir, 2011, p. 461). At the beginning of this paper, we divided research on the role of citizen dialogue into a normative and a critical stream (Soneryd & Lindh, 2019). The normative stream of research (see Syssner & Siebert, 2020), which is based on Habermasian ideas, stresses the participative and deliberative side and includes the innate value of dialogue (Eriksen & Fossum, 2000). Research on citizen dialogs within the normative stream generally focuses on how institutional arrangements can strengthen representative democracy (cf. Abrahamsson, 2013; Fung & Wright, 2003; as cited in Soneryd & Lindh, 2019) and on the conditions under which the citizen dialogue can work (see e.g. Beierle & Konisky, 2000; Rowe & Frewer, 2000) while being aware of the risks and pitfalls of such dialogs.

In this study the focus was not to examine the conditions for an “effective” dialogue to strengthen representative democracy. Our aim instead was to examine the rationale of arguments used by the actors in the meeting and how these in turn were used in an attempt to steer the participants’ attitudes. One can say that the choice of arguments is contingent on the precognition or recognition of the expertise of the other, in our case the expertise of the citizens. Hence, one can conclude that in a citizen dialogue, a strategy of using expert knowledge to steer an individual’s or a group’s behavior is problematic and can fail, which leads the authority to use other types or forms of power. We would like to call this administrative power, which in this case is the power to be the custodian of the taxpayers’ money. This argument gives the authorities the necessary leeway to make the decision that overrides the arguments of local participants in the citizen dialogue. The process and practice of citizen dialogue can thus be perceived as false democracy. The authorities are not interested in listening to reason or to arguments. Although the main argument in favor of the use of citizen dialogue is to democratize the decision-making process, attending such meetings can alienate citizens as they may find them to be pointless.

In addition, there was tension between two conflicting ideologies in the meeting. The local participants challenged the current dominant ideology of privileging economic viability/low cost over other values such as community welfare, solidarity and justice, and providing similar services to the citizens irrespective of whether they live in urban or rural areas. The old “social” tutelage had connotations of disciplinary, “top-down” instruction by accredited civil servants who allegedly knew best (Stenson & Watt, 1999). In other words, the civil servants failed in their attempt to frame the “truth” in the citizen dialogue and define the problem vis-à-vis the hockey rink using NPM and economic liberalism. However, the local actors could not argue against the demographic reality of the mill town, the lack of entrepreneurial spirit and the inability to engage youth in civil society.

Conclusions

At the beginning of this article, we stressed that citizen dialogue could be seen as a tool to deepen local democracy by involving citizens or communities in decision-making processes (see Micheletti, 2017, p. 467; Lindholm et al., 2015; Tahvilzadeh, 2015) and to counteract what is perceived as a democratic deficit. However, as Soneryd and Lindh (2019) stress, the citizen dialogue can risk reproducing exclusion.

Based on the findings in this paper, we suggest that the citizen dialogue that we observed could be perceived as a fake democracy rather than a condition for strengthening local democracy. The citizen dialogue is an important part of the Swedish decentralized welfare system, which is organized and administered on the municipal level to be able to include people in both rural and urban areas in decisions and planning on the local level. However, as we can see in this paper, small municipalities in rural areas with limited resources are left with local decision-making about how to bring welfare to their citizens in the most effective way. From this perspective, there is a risk that people living outside the municipal administrative centers also become outsiders in society.

The dialogue, which aimed to inform the local citizens of the municipality’s position regarding the local hockey rink with the rationale to convince and steer local citizens to accept the position, failed. Even if the presentation was fact-based, the civil servants could not convince the local citizens that closing the hockey rink was in their best interest. The local citizens were knowledgeable and had good arguments based on economic and technical rationales. However, they did not have the power to convince the municipality of its responsibilities toward them as citizens. The reason for this was that from the perspective of the municipal authority, their agenda was to convince the local citizens that their planned decision not to continue funding the rink was based on facts – not to listen to their arguments. The citizen dialogue, however, is an important form of governance in the Swedish decentralized welfare system and is intended to include people in both rural and urban areas in decisions and planning on the local level, but unfortunately it failed.

Epilogue

In May 2021, the municipality once again invited the local citizens of the mill town to a citizen dialogue on the future of the mill town, the “Pearl in the forest.” The municipality pointed out that they had big plans for the mill town, but also informed the participants in the meeting that they planned to sell the hockey rink to a company in Latvia. In this meeting, the same arguments were presented at the meeting described here. The reaction of the participants from mill town was harsh not only in the meeting but also on social media. The citizens stated that the municipality has to reverse their plans for the hockey rink if they are serious about the future of the mill town. A new citizen dialogue meeting was proposed in the near future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2017-00939].