How participation has become a hegemonic discursive resource: towards an interpretivist research agenda

Abstract

Several studies have shown that the impact of participatory practices in policymaking is substantially weak, but that these practices continue to spread. Why are participatory practices spreading despite their weak impact on public policies? The hypothesis is that ‘participation’ is a new hegemonic référentiel, contributing to the stabilization of moderate neoliberalist policies through the framing of two main algorithms: technical and political. The former regards how participation should be developed and affirms the primacy of the technicalization of participation; the latter considers where participation should be developed and affirms the primacy of local democracy. The technical algorithm favors a de-politicization of the stakes, a weakening of the conflict, and a shared responsibility felt by the social actors involved. The political algorithm favors an apparent compensation for a deficit in local democracy, a deflection of the conflict, and a detachment of the problem of local democracy from trans-national economic strategies.

Keywords:

• participation
• neoliberalism
• référentiel

Notes

1. With the recent exception of a symposium reported in 2010 in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (Silver et al. 2010).

2. This concept describes the reconfiguration of the spatial scale of action of the national state. Brenner (2004, p. 260) defines it as a RCSR: ‘rescaled because it rests upon scale-sensitive political strategies intended to position key subnational spaces … optimally within supranational (European or global) circuits of capital accumulation; competition state, because it privileges the goal of economic competition over traditional welfarist priorities such as equity and redistribution; and a regime because represents an unstable, evolving institutional geographical mosaic rather the a fully considered framework of statehood’.

3. Usually in policy analysis the recipients of public policy are defined as ‘policy takers’.

4. Obviously, this passage between the two forms of neoliberalism occurred in a less schematized way. In fact, not only can one note a prolonged co-existence of the two types of neoliberalism, but also the current return to ‘radically’ neoliberal discourses, above all in the US Republican Party. In any case, these elements do not seem capable of denying the passage in the 1990s from radical to moderate forms of neoliberalism, of which at least in Europe, Tony Blair's Third Way or the EU's cohesion policies are good examples.