The participatory democracy turn: an introduction

Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decision-making processes in a variety of sectors of society and of policy domains around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Originally associated with this turn have been a strong critique of liberal and representative democracy, the corollary idea of a ‘real utopia,’ that is, the necessary radicalization of democratic practices (Barber, 1984; Mouffe, 1992), and a rethinking of the public sphere (Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 1962/1989). Participatory mechanisms were thus initially conceived and designed as a way for citizens’ views and input to have some influence on otherwise political and bureaucratic decision-making processes. It was also imagined that they would become tools for making elected leaders accountable for their decisions, and for citizens to become empowered through the participatory process (Fung & Wright, 2003). The idea of participation has also attracted considerable attention in the ‘good governance’ literature (Tendler, 1998), where it is rather understood as a way to make governments (especially local ones) more transparent, responsive, and in turn more efficient with regard to public spending, as well as to make public (and sometimes contested) decisions socially and politically acceptable.

Over the years, the participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups (Bherer & Breux, 2012), as well as by both left- and right-leaning governments around the world. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation, we find examples such as participatory budgeting (PB), citizen councils, public consultations, neighbourhood councils, participatory planning, etc. Participatory processes are thus often associated with the idea of a top-down mechanism implemented to include citizen input in the public sector.

However, participatory practices have also grown in a variety of – sometimes unexpected – public and private spaces. Social movements have adopted participatory strategies in order to (re)mobilize their members and citizens (Occupy, Podemos, for example) (Della Porta, 2013; Nez, 2012; Polletta, 2015); bureaucratic organizations have adopted practical participatory reforms (Nabatchi, 2010); NGOs and community organizations have included participatory elements in their programmes and in the way their own organizations function (Eliasoph, 2011); unions have become more and more interested in a variety of participatory mechanisms in order to mobilize and get in touch with their members; and even private companies are using certain forms of participation as an internal management mechanism, or as a social acceptability tool for economic development projects (Lee, 2015). A whole industry of participatory consultants and experts has emerged, marketing participatory practices among organizations of all sorts and developing participatory ‘blueprints’ (Lee, 2015; Bherer, Gauthier, & Simard, in press). While heterogeneous, this vast array of participatory experiences, however, shares some similarities. All these organizations and groups indeed use participatory tools to engage, mobilize, and consult a variety of publics: citizens, users, targeted publics, rank-and-file, and so on. They also often develop a rhetoric associating participation with empowerment, transparency, accountability, deliberation, civicness, co-governance, and collaborative or citizen-oriented decision-making.

Why are all these quite different organizations – public, private, third-sector – attracted by participatory practices? Scholarship on this question has blossomed in the past 30 years, as the participatory turn evolved and became more and more widespread. From a ‘best practice’ pushed by external funding agencies and international organizations, to a social acceptability tool, a political legitimacy strategy, or an efficient public policy mechanism, there are as many reasons for including citizen participation as there are contexts and types of participatory arrangements. However, one less explored hypothesis is that these participatory arrangements are simply seen as opening up friendly and collaborative spaces of discussion, consultation, and interaction: that is, a non-adversarial, non-conflictual space for reaching consensus or agreement through deliberation. This is seen as a way to get over the old, partisan, and conflicting politics.

However, this objective is far from the initial radical and emancipatory participatory democracy project that gave rise to the turn in the 1960s. As a radical political project, participatory democracy originally involved a transformative dimension: the idea was indeed that participation could transform the inegalitarian relationships between the state and society and that it could help to emancipate and empower citizens in every sphere of their daily lives (work, political institutions, bureaucracy, school and university, family, etc.) (Pateman, 1970). Although there are some participatory examples which, in principle, correspond to this logic, the radical, egalitarian, and emancipatory dimensions of the original proposal are often very difficult to find in most participatory mechanisms as they spread around the world and in a variety of contexts (Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2014). Moreover, even the most radical experiences in theory – that is, in social movements, PB, etc. – can have unexpected effects in practice, and can lead to the reproduction of inequalities within participatory mechanisms (Eliasoph, 2015; Lee, McQuarrie, & Walker, 2015; Montambeault, 2015), and to the blurring of boundaries between institutionalized forms of participation and contentious collective action (Goirand, 2014).

This discussion shows that the frontiers and boundaries of the participatory turn are not easily drawn. More importantly, the field of participatory democracy seems to mean different things for different actors (Polletta, 2015). This makes it hard for both scholars and practitioners to develop a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of participatory democracy’s practices, meanings, and effects. How has this field developed theoretically, but also empirically, over the past 30 years? What is participatory, and what is not? How does participation relate to conflict and contention, and to the question of power?

Our intuition is that, in order to understand the origins and boundaries of the so-called participatory turn, we cannot objectively define what are and what are not participatory arrangements. With the contributions to this special issue, we thus propose to develop a more comprehensive approach to participation and to see how the actors themselves use and talk about participatory initiatives and how they circulate in the political arena and in different areas of political action (Dufour, 2013). In other words, the question of the ‘effects’ of the participatory turn is treated in relation to the actors’ different understandings of participatory democracy and how they affect the entire political system. The changing frontiers of participatory practices not only have an effect on the way that people participate and on the spaces where they participate – or do not participate – (something that the literature on citizen participation has begun to document) but also influence the policy process and the management of institutions. Moreover, these frontiers also have direct and indirect consequences on the way that public and collective actors engage in politics, in formal institutions, and also on the way that they protest and contest outside institutional spaces as well as on the dynamics that they build among themselves.

This special issue thus has four main objectives.¹ The first is to examine and discuss the multiple, and sometimes competing, meanings of participatory practices today. Francesca Polletta’s contribution offers a compelling historical assessment of the so-called participatory turn. She wonders how the dissemination of different models of participatory democracy across very different institutional settings impacts our understanding of participatory democracy. From her point of view, participatory democracy has moved from an egalitarian and citizen power-oriented discourse to practices and justifications based on enthusiasm about citizen input, but without control. Nina Eliasoph is also interested in the meanings of participatory democracy in action. Her essay looks at one of the most powerful discourses of participatory democracy – that is, the hope of empowerment associated with civic volunteering by lay and/or needy people. She discusses how the empowerment project includes hopeful mantras that lead to concrete dilemmas when put into practice, thus explaining some of the disillusionment with the empowerment project.

Second, this special issue grapples with the range of effects that participatory practices can have on the various types of participants. How is the relationship between citizens and power shaped (or reshaped) through participatory practices? More specifically: what does it mean to participate for participants, from the perspective of citizenship building? What types of citizens emerge from and thrive in participatory processes? Héloïse Nez’s and Françoise Montambeault’s contributions directly address these two questions, from two different, yet complementary angles. Nez’s assessment of citizenship learning in Paris’s participatory councils is revealing, in showing how different types of citizens learn during the participatory process. In fact, their involvement is associated with an intense process of transmission of knowledge and exchange of information, which paradoxically lead to the professionalization of citizens. Montambeault ties the question to a larger debate, in looking at the variety of citizens and practices of citizenship developed through PB experiences. Although participatory settings lead some participants to become ‘citizen-agents’ who are fully involved in the process, they can also foster exclusion or favour a type of citizenship centred around individual-demand logics.

The third objective of this special issue is to explore an aspect that is generally overlooked in the literature and that seems to be a growing concern among participatory democracy specialists: the interactions between formal and informal participatory mechanisms, as well as the way that the processes created by the participatory turn have also affected how political representation functions more generally, beyond the microscopic effects of the growing participatory practices. We can indeed suspect that there are divergent effects related to political conflict, contentious politics, and even equal access to political structures for citizens (Nez, 2012). Does the participatory turn mean shifting boundaries and/or new alliances with social movement actors and the protest arena? As Dufour’s article shows, participatory arrangements such as local social forums can become places for global militants to emerge and connect with social movements and global activism. The ways that local social forums plan and design formal and informal participation create conditions that may or may not be favourable to ‘talking’ global politics. In assessing what they call informal participatory spaces in South Africa, von Lieres and Piper’s article pursues this reflection further by looking at the intersections between social movements and participatory politics. Because of the failure of participatory governance, the limited reach of civil society, and the partisan capturing of institutional mechanisms of representation, informal forms of representation are increasingly dominating state–society relations.

The fourth concern is whether the participatory turn also means changing relationships and dynamics among civil servants, political representatives, and citizens. Two contributions look at the relationships between public authorities, citizens, and civil society. They show that although there has been no major democratic transformation, there have been some changes that ‘expand democratic borders,’ as Ganuza, Baiocchi, and Summers effectively indicate in their contribution to this special issue. In their article, they analyse the cases of PB in Córdoba (Spain) and Chicago (US), and show that although local bureaucracies may strongly resist opening up the decision-making process, the contention between civil servants and citizens is productive and leads to certain small adjustments. The overall structure of power is not transformed, but the actors (the bureaucracy, in this case) have to continuously redefine the legitimacy of their actions in the context of PB. In the same way, the article by Bherer, Fernández-Martínez, García Espín, and Jiménez Sánchez shows that participatory processes do not shift the traditional patterns of interaction between public authorities and civil society, but they do introduce small changes and progressively institutionalize new practices that may lead in the future to a new, more democratic way of working.

Overall, this special issue demonstrates the complexity of the participatory turn. Not only does participatory democracy as a political project pursue multiple objectives (restoring public trust, opening up the decision-making process, providing information, fostering social change, including citizens, etc.), but participatory practices are also present in many types of organizations and are supported by different and sometimes opposing ways of framing them. Furthermore, because participatory democracy has produced small-scale changes that are not very spectacular, the overall transformation remains incremental. This political project is clearly difficult to ‘capture.’ The first promoters of this political utopia did not count on the popularity of participatory democracy in several spheres of power or on its rapid dissemination in organizations with different logics of action. The ‘travels’ of this notion have changed the initial project in several ways and have redefined the values associated with participatory democracy (prioritizing citizen inputs and expression is clearly more important than creating equality in the process). The participatory turn now in fact includes several participatory democracy projects, which have different effects on the overall system depending on the principles that they advocate. New research on – and future critiques of – participatory practices will need to take into account this ongoing process of reinterpretation and re-operationalization of the participatory democracy project in order to continue to evaluate its effects and its relevance in the current democratic discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This special issue represents the outcome of earlier discussions between several of the authors during the Centre de recherche sur les politiques et le développement social (CPDS) International Conference, Thirty years later: The participatory turn's mirages and realities, held in Montreal (Canada) on 19–20 February 2015.