Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City (Non-Governmental Public Action)

Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City

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Non-Governmental Public Action

Series Editor: Jude Howell, Professor and Director of the Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Non-governmental public action (NGPA) by and for disadvantaged and margin-alized people has become increasingly signifi cant over the past two decades. This new series is designed to make a fresh and original contribution to the under-standing of NGPA. It presents the fi ndings of innovative and policy-relevant re-search carried out by established and new scholars working in collaboration with researchers across the world. The series is international in scope and includes both theoretical and empirical work.

The series marks a departure from previous studies in this area in at least two important respects. First, it goes beyond a singular focus on developmental NGOs or the voluntary sector to include a range of non-governmental public actors such as advocacy networks, campaigns and coalitions, trades unions, peace groups, rights-based groups, cooperatives and social movements. Second, the series is in-novative in stimulating a new approach to international comparative research that promotes comparison of the so-called developing world with the so-called developed world, thereby querying the conceptual utility and relevance of cate-gories such as North and South.

Titles include:

Jude Howell and Jeremy LindCOUNTER-TERRORISM, AID AND CIVIL SOCIETYBefore and After the War on Terror

Jenny Pearce (editor)PARTICIPATION AND DEMOCRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CITY

Non-Governmental Public Action SeriesSeries Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–22939–6 (hardback) and 978–0–230–22940–2 (paperback)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of diffi culty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above.

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City

Edited by

Jenny PearceProfessor of Latin American Politics, Department of Peace Studies and Director of the International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford, UK

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Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Jenny Pearce 2010All remaining chapters © respective authors 2010

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2010 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN: 978–0–230–22944–0 hardback

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Printed and bound in Great Britain byCPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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v

Contents

List of Tables, Boxes and Photographs vii

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations viii

Preface ix

Notes on Contributors xiii

1. Introduction 1 Jenny Pearce

2. Co-Producing Knowledge: Critical Reflections on Researching Participation 34

Jenny Pearce

3. Porto Alegre: Popular Sovereignty or Dependent Citizens? 51 Sérgio Gregorio Baierle

4. Porto Alegre: From Municipal Innovations to the Culturally Embedded Micro-Politics of (Un)Emancipated Citizens: The Case of Rubbish Recyclers 76

Zander Navarro

5. Caracas: The State and Peoples’ Power in the Barrio 100 Margarita Lopez Maya

6. Medellín: Participatory Creativity in a Conflictive City 127 Omar Uran

7. Manchester: Between the Grassroots and City Hall: Participation in a Global City 154

John Diamond and Jenny Pearce

8. Bradford: Professionalised Participation in a Northern De-industrialised City 180

Heather Blakey

9. Salford: Beyond Parochialism: The Challenge of Participation for Change in a Working Class City 205

Davina Miller

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vi Contents

10. Conclusion: Participation as a Field of Study and Practice: A Modest Contribution 229

Jenny Pearce

Index 255

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vii

Tables, Boxes and Photographs

Tables

1.1 Socioeconomic data for the six case study cities 19 2.1 Innovations and case studies 41 5.1 Antímano and Petare: Socioeconomic data, 2006 103 6.1 Evolution in the homicide rate in Medellín

per 100,000 inhabitants 129

Boxes

4.1 On fields and forms of capital 83 8.1 Participatory budgeting in Keighley 19010.1 Why participate? 24110.2 Participation as a transforming experience 24210.3 Reasons not to participate 244

Photographs

1 Rubbish recycling unit 2 Chácara do Primeiro, community association meeting 3 Feeding back research findings to AEPPA 4 Researchers meet members of the PB council 5 Members of the MTA 6 Members of the OCA and researchers 7 MTA, ‘A Tool of the Revolution’ 8 Landslide in La Pedrera 9 Downtown Medellín 10 ‘What? 798 million were invested in Comuna 1

Popular, so that their people could enter university?’ 11 Comuna 1, Medellín 12 Team social event with HRACA 13 Street poster, Manchester 14 Participatory budgeting, Keighley 15 Latin American researchers meet with Bradford

Resource Centre 16 Media City: Salford’s future vision 17 Salford’s working class terraces

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viii

Acronyms and Abbreviations

AEPPA Popular Educators Association of Porto AlegreCB Bolivarian CirclesCC Community CouncilsCCA Community Water CouncilsCCC Community Consultative CouncilCEN Community Empowerment NetworkCIDADE Urban Studies and Advisory CentreCN4M Community Network for ManchesterCOP Participatory Budgeting CouncilCPI Community Pride InitiativeCTU Urban Land CommissionsGOPNESD General Outline of the Plan for the Nation’s Economic

and Social Development 2001–2007HDI Human Development IndexJAC Community Action CouncilJAL Local Administrative CouncilLSP Local Strategic PartnershipMTA Technical Water RoundtableNA Neighbourhood AssemblyNGO Non-governmental OrganisationOCA Self-Managing Community OrganisationPB Participatory BudgetingPT Workers’ Party, BrazilPSVU Partido Socialista Unida de Venezuela (United Socialist

Party of Venezuela)RU Recycling UnitUSD United States DollarVCS Voluntary and Community Sector

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ix

Preface

This book is the outcome of a 2-year research project, Municipal Innovations in Non-Governmental Public Participation UK/Latin America, funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) under its Non-Governmental Public Action Programme (NGPA). Non-governmental public action was defined by the programme as:

Purposive collective action for public or private ends by a range of actors. The focus of the programme is not just on NGOs but on a broader range of formal and informal non-governmental actors con-cerned with poverty reduction and social transformation. These might include advocacy networks, campaigns and coalitions, trades unions, peace groups, social forums, rights-based groups, social enterprise, fair and ethical trade groups, business in the community initiatives, social movements.1

We would like to thank the ESRC and the NGPA programme, in particu-lar its director, Professor Jude Howell, for making our research possible, as well as linking it to this broader field of inquiry. In the course of our research, we were able to engage with a great variety of related projects, in a series of fascinating workshops and seminars.

Our research set out to explore the way non-governmental public actors made use of new spaces of participation at the municipal level and how they interacted with governmental actors. We aimed to inves-tigate the impact ‘on the ground’ of innovations in the architecture and inclusiveness of public decision making at the local level. We asked: to what extent did these new spaces of participation contribute to more effective approaches to poverty, exclusion and conflict, problems facing many cities in the world today? Did evidence suggest that these inno-vations have enabled citizens who have disengaged from formal pol-itics to engage meaningfully in ways which deepen democracy? Our tacit aim went beyond these focused questions, however. We hoped to generate insights into the future prospects for participatory politics. We wanted to take the debate beyond the rather sterile juxtaposition between ‘participatory’ and ‘representative’ democracy, in which the former is seen as a utopian vision derived from experiences in Athens two and a half thousand years ago, and the latter as an exhausted

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x Preface

Western model, which cynical publics increasingly ignore even when periodically offered the right to choose their government. Above all, we wished to do this through attention to detail and practice rather than repeat the big theoretical debates, although they inevitably lay in the background.

The empirical dimension of our research focused on six cities, three in the UK (Manchester, Bradford and Salford) and three in Latin America (Porto Alegre, Medellín and Caracas). Cities are good places for exploring non-governmental public action. They offer a defined arena, and one which, we noted, had been a place for experimentation and innovation since the end of the Cold War. The aim was not comparative research. The six contexts were diverse in terms of size and location, with three in the global North and three in the global South. However, each was the locus of municipal innovations in participation and experiments in ‘participatory democracy’ and ‘participatory governance’. By focusing on more than one site for our research, we aimed to explore patterns across the North and South of the Western Hemisphere and to draw out new questions from differences as well as similarities in these patterns.

The other empirical aspect of the research was to focus on case studies within each city. Six researchers, with backgrounds in academia, non-governmental organisations or representative politics, chose groups of people to work with who were interested in learning from the research and who would allow us to track with them how they used new oppor-tunities to participate. We devised a methodology of co-producing knowledge with these groups. The research aimed to be interactive not extractive, and to recognise the different forms of knowledge (experien-tial as well as academic) which fed into it. It also involved us in building more horizontal relationships not only amongst the research team, but between each researcher and the research participants. As director of the research, I visited all the research sites several times, and built up my own relationships, provoking discussions from the experiences of all the case studies.

The methodology did not always fulfil all the aspirations we had, as the relevant chapter discusses, and it slowed down the data analysis and other more traditional academic tasks. However, it put an ethical com-mitment at the heart of the project, which mostly enabled us to build a different kind of relationship with the ‘researched’. Emergent ideas were put to them and debated; they constantly fed ideas to us and forced us to rethink; and they had greater ownership, often enabling the find-ings to be taken more seriously. The findings were formally as well as informally returned to all participants in a synthesis document of key

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Preface xi

learning from all the research cases in three languages. Workshops and meetings were held in all the case study sites to discuss this document, and a final conference in Bradford attracted over 100 practitioners, poli-cymakers and academics. The cross-fertilisation of ideas between Latin America and the UK proved particularly popular. I was often quizzed deeply about UK experiences in my field visits in Latin America, while UK practitioners were very anxious to understand what made partici-pation in Latin America different and more ‘political’. Researchers were kept alert by the importance the ‘researched’ often gave to their work, and the need for it to be relevant and helpful. Such ‘soft’ pressure can be as demanding as the ‘hard’ pressure of peer review! However it ensures that the research engages with complex social realities as well as the rig-our of academic conventions.

There are a lot of people to thank in the carrying out of this research. In addition to each field researcher (Lucy Brill, Heather Blakey, Davina Miller, Sergio Baierle, Zander Navarro, Omar Uran and Margarita Lopez), there were a number of people who worked with them. They helped build relationships, attended meetings and events as observers or par-ticipant observers and gathered secondary and primary data: Andrea López L and Ibiscay González of the Central University of Venezuela; Daniela Oliveira Tolfo, Vera Regina and Ignacio Amaro of CIDADE in Porto Alegre; Juan Pablo Clavijo and Sonia Esmeralda Valle in Medellín. Alexandra Abello Colak, of the University of Bradford, played an import-ant support role for the entire research project, and Kathy Holland helped with the final manuscript.

We would also like to thank the Practitioner Fellows, who were indi-viduals and organisations who worked with us at some point in the UK case studies, and were given small grants under the NGPA programme to carry out a piece of work of their choice related in some way to our project. They were Kezia Lavan, who did a study of participatory budg-eting in the UK while working for the Participatory Budget Unit in Manchester, Farzana Haq, Barry Johnson, Gill Payne and Heidi Mujunen from the Hamilton Road Area Community Association (HRACA), and Alan Anderton, Sue Balcombe, Adam Conroy, Laura Harris, Val Harris, Julie Pryke and Dhara Thompson from Sostenga, in Bradford.

There are too many people to name all those who co-researched with us, but we would like to thank a few of them: In Manchester, Anne Stewart and her colleagues at Community Pride, the Whalley Range Forum, Patrick Hanfling, the CN4M team and John Diamond (also for co-authoring the Manchester chapter); in Bradford, John Corbishley, Alan Budge, Caroline Schwaller, Mike Quiggan and Janet Ford; in

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xii Preface

Salford, Councillor John Merry, Leader of Salford Council, Bill Taylor, Sheila Murtagh and members of the community committees; in Porto Alegre, Narciso Freitas Soares from Chácara, and Fernanda dos Santos Paulo from AEPPA; the members of the Rubbish Recyling Unit and Nilton Bueno Fischer, a long-term committed scholar with the unit and Rosemary McGee for comments on the manuscript; in Caracas, members of the Water Round Table of La Pedrera, of the Self Managing Community Organisation (OCA) of Unión-Carpintero and the fed-eration of OCAs, Victor Díaz, Josefina Baldó y Federico Villanueva, Humberto Rojas, Santiago Arconada and Luis E. Lander; in Medellín the community activists and municipal officers: Juan Carlos Posada, Ramón Graciano, Joaquin Padilla, María Eugenia Giraldo K., Gloría Lucia Castro, Orlando García, Nury Macias Ochoa, Henry Arteaga, Adriana Gaviria, Hernán Marìn, Omar Rendón, Luz Elena Ruiz, Estela Mesa, Carlos Bozón, Carlos Giraldo, Alba Marleny Rodriguez, Fernando Cardona; the sociologists, Julio Giraldo y Arlex López, and the Instituto Popular de Capacitación (IPC).

Note

1. http://www.esrc.ac.uk (Accessed 10 May 2009).

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xiii

Contributors

Sérgio Gregorio Baierle has a Masters Degree in Political Science from the University of Campinas. After 10 years working in community theatre, he moved to popular education and sociopolitical research in the 1980s. Since 1991, he has worked for CIDADE in Porto Alegre, with responsibility for action research on participatory budgeting and local public policies. Sergio has published widely on participatory budgeting in Brazil, and some of his recent papers can be found at www. ongcidade.org or at his blog http://baierle.wordpress.com/

Heather Blakey has worked as a researcher with the International Centre for Participation Studies at Bradford University since 2003, mainly in the field of local governance and community engagement, and support-ing ‘self-research’ in the community. She is now undertaking doctoral research into the nature and impact of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in the UK. She is also active in local environmental and community-based organisations in Bradford.

John Diamond is Professor in the Centre for Local Policy Studies at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, UK. He is on the management com-mittee of ARVAC (Association for Research into the Voluntary and Community Sector). John is co-author (with Joyce Liddle) of Management of Regeneration, published by Routledge in 2005, a co-editor of Managing the City (also published by Routledge in 2006), and a co-editor of Urban Regeneration Management: International Perspectives (to be published in 2009 by Routledge).

Margarita Lopez Maya is a historian and doctor of social science from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). She is currently titular professor of the Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo (CENDES) de la UCV and Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC (2008–09). She is author of a number of books on social movements and struggles in Venezuela, including Ideas para debatir el socialismo del siglo XXI, Vol. 1 y 2, editora (Caracas, Grupo Alfa, 2007 y 2009).

Davina Miller is a political scientist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. She previ-ously researched in the area of the arms trade, publishing Export or Die: Britain’s Defence Trade with Iran and Iraq, London: Cassell in 1996. She

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xiv Contributors

went on to publish in the area of Western foreign policy towards the Middle East. Most recently she has developed a field of interest in the politics of participation and representation, building on her experi-ence in Salford City Council, where she was a Councillor from 2000 to 2004.

Zander Navarro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (in Porto Alegre, Brazil) and research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, in England). For many years his main interest was centred on the political economy of agrarian development and he published extensively. In recent times he has extended his research focus to broader issues of participation and political dimensions related to the process of democratization in Brazil, and he has published many articles about participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre.

Jenny Pearce is Professor of Latin American Politics and Director of the International Centre for Participation Studies in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. She was director of the ESRC-funded research project on Municipal Innovation in Non-Governmental Public Participation UK/Latin America. She has published widely on issues of democracy, social change and violence in Latin America and the UK. She is co-convenor of the research group on Participation, Violence and Citizenship at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, DFID-funded Development Research Centre on Participation, Citizenship and Accountability.

Omar Uran is a Sociologist with an MA in Urban-Regional Studies. He is member of the Group of Urban-Regional Research on Democracy, Conflict and Development of the Instituto Popular de Capacitación IPC, Medellín. He was methodological coordinator of the Planning and Participatory Budgeting Program in Medellín between 2004 and 2007, and is now studying for a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of a num-ber of books on Medellín published by the IPC, including La Ciudad en Movimiento: Movimiento Sociales, Democracia y Cultura en Medellín y el Valle de Aburrá Medellín: Instituto Popular de Capacitación, 2000.

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Porto Alegre

Photo 1 Rubbish recycling unit

Photo 2 Chácara do Primeiro, community association meeting

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Photo 3 Feeding back research findings to AEPPA

Photo 4 Researchers meet members of the PB council


Caracas

Photo 5 Members of the MTA

Photo 6 Members of the OCA and researchers


Photo 7 MTA, ‘A Tool of the Revolution’

Photo 8 Landslide in La Pedrera


Medellín

Photo 9 Downtown Medellín

Photo 10 ‘What? 798 million were invested in Comuna 1 Popular, so that their people could enter university?’


Photo 11 Comuna 1, Medellín


Manchester

Photo 12 Team social event with HRACA

Photo 13 Street poster, Manchester


Bradford

Photo 14 Participatory budgeting, Keighley


Photo 15 Latin American researchers meet with Bradford Resource Centre


Salford

Photo 17 Salford’s working class terraces

Photo 16 Media City: Salford’s future vision


1

1IntroductionJenny Pearce

The word ‘participation’ in the mainstream of political science invokes the image of the unsuccessful twin to its triumphant sibling of ‘represen-tation’, the only feasible form of democracy in the modern age. Outside the mainstream, ‘participation’ is the forgotten twin and the one where hopes still reside for ‘real’ democracy. This book argues that participa-tion has, as a result of this dualism, been poorly served by either empir-ical research or theoretical development. It is a modest contribution to both, and a call to others to do the same. The uncertainties of the com-ing age, we argue, require us to explore new ways of thinking about how public decisions are made, who makes them and for whom.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century something had begun to unsettle the juxtaposition, ‘participation or representation?’ On the one hand, representative democracy had extended its triumph and nearly two-thirds of all countries in the world met the basic criteria of this form of democracy: universal suffrage, governments chosen by regular, free and competitive elections and political rights of free speech and association (Stoker, 2006, p. 20). On the other, there was compelling global evidence of a fall in voter turnout, dislike of political parties and cynicism about politicians. As Gerry Stoker expresses it: ‘people appear to like the idea of democracy, but not like the politics that goes along with it’ (Ibid., p. 32). In the two parts of the world covered by this volume, the UK and Latin America, this phenomenon has been amply studied in quantitative and qualitative research (e.g., Corporación Latinobarómetro, 2008; Electoral Commission, 2004; Hansard Society, 2009;PNUD/UNDP, 2004; Pattie, Seyd and Whiteley, 2004; Pharr and Putnam, 2000; Power Inquiry, 2006; Putnam, 2002).

It is in this context that ‘participation’ began to make a tentative come back, albeit in various guises. These involved experiments of

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2 Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City

some kind, mostly at the municipal or city level. There was an oppor-tunity, at last, to go beyond the abstract debates and to assess whether this second twin had, after all, something to contribute to the meaning and practice of democracy in the twenty-first century.

These experiments, or a selection of them, are the subject of this book. It is the outcome of two years of research by a team working in six cities. We set out to learn something about the possibilities and potentialities of a more participative democracy by tracking with participants how they made use of new spaces for participation at the city level and what were the outcomes. Mostly, we worked with non-governmental actors, organisations or individuals outside the state. In a few cases we worked with public servants and politicians. In all cases we observed the interac-tions between these actors. We continuously fed back research findings to these research participants in an interactive research methodology we called ‘co-producing knowledge’, which is critically reviewed in the next chapter. What is new about these experiments is that they mostly originate from the existing status quo, rather than from efforts to fill a power vacuum when the old order breaks down, unlike most participa-tory experiments in modern history.

The book does not start from a prescriptive premise about what ‘par-ticipatory democracy’ might look like, although some of the individual chapter authors did have such a vision in their minds. They do not, however, reflect a consensus within the research or for the volume as a whole. The overall tenor of the volume is exploratory. The aim is to take the debate about participation and democracy forward by learning from practical experimentation. Nevertheless, the book is not without its normative inclinations, and given that it is not a collection of dispar-ate viewpoints, but the outcome of cooperative research, there are some shared elements which reflected the decision to work together as well as the experience of working together. There is an underlying value base, for instance, around the need to seriously tackle inequality, poverty, exploitation and violence. The authors are critical of neoliberal global-isation and its impact on these problems as well as liberal democracy’s record in addressing them. We write from a belief that if poverty is to be overcome, the ‘poor’ must be part of the solution. There was a minimal agreement that there was value to human development and progress in enhancing the participative component in our political arrangements in some way. Some members of the research team have a robust com-mitment to radical democracy and others to enhancing the participa-tory arrangements within existing representative democracy. Some see the struggle for radical democracy as inherently anti-capitalist or at


Introduction 3

least neoliberal capitalism; others see it as compatible with a broad, as yet undefined, agenda of global social, political and economic change. This range of views arguably reflects the debate in wider society and the tension between them is an explicit theme of the book.

The purpose of this introduction is literally to introduce the reader to the background of the research and the case studies; the final chap-ter extracts the learning about ‘participation’, as a field of practice and study, from the empirical material. It will begin with the former. What did the research set out to do and why? Why is it important to look again at the idea of participation in democracy? What were the assump-tions behind the innovations in non-governmental municipal partici-pation that we set out to explore?

The return of the participant citizen?

Representation: ‘The ideal type of a perfect government’

In discussions on participation, size and time become significant issues. Indeed, the arguments against participatory rather than representative democracy often rest on them. Most Greek city-states, apart from Athens itself, had less than 5,000 citizens (Hammond, 1999, p. 3); Athens was estimated to have had 30,000 adult males by the beginning of the fifth century, of which only about one-fifth attended the forty or so assem-blies which met each year (Hornblower, 2002, p. 13). Aristotle himself made the point in the fourth century BC:

both in order to give decisions in matters of disputed rights, and to distribute the offices of government according to the merit of can-didates, the citizens of a city must know one another’s characters. Where this is not the case, the distribution of offices and the giv-ing of decisions will suffer. Both are matters in which it is wrong to operate by guesswork; but that is what obviously happens where the population is over-large. (Aristotle, 1998, p. 262)

Over two thousand years later, in 1861, John Stuart Mill echoed the sentiment:

the only government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social state is one in which the whole people participate; that any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful; that the participation should everywhere be as great as the general degree of improvement of the community will allow; and that nothing less



can be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to a share in the sovereign power of the state. But since all cannot, in a commu-nity exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative. (John Stuart Mill, 1998, pp. 255–6)

Just over a century later, the American political scientist Robert Dahl calculated the ‘high price of participatory democracy’ in terms of time: ‘In an “ideal polis” of ten thousand full citizens, the time required is far beyond all tolerable limits. Ten minutes allotted to each citizen would require more than two hundred eight-hour working days. A half-hour allotment hour would require almost two years of steady meetings’ (Dahl, 1998, p. 107). Dahl went on to argue that larger units offer in any case the greater capacity to deal with the problems important to citizens, although they require citizens to delegate decisions to repre-sentatives. He listed the severe problems with assembly democracy:

Opportunities for participation rapidly diminish with the size of the citizen body; although many more can participate by listening to speakers, the maximum number of participants in a single meet-ing who are likely to be able to express themselves in speech is very small – probably less than a hundred; these fully participant mem-bers become, in effect, representatives of the others, except in vot-ing; thus even in a unit governed by assembly democracy, a kind of de facto representative system is likely to exist; yet nothing insures that the fully participating members are representative of the rest; to provide a satisfactory system for selecting representatives, citizens may reasonably prefer to elect their representatives in free and fair elections. (Ibid., p. 108)

Dahl’s points are certainly serious issues, and will be revisited in the concluding chapter. While Dahl’s views express a broad and global con-sensus, such unanimity can sometimes close avenues of inquiry. For much of modern history, the only efforts to pursue alternative visions of democracy came at moments of disruption in the prevailing polit-ical order, such as during revolutions and uprisings. Even representative government owes something to such a moment. It was the Levellers in England who were the first modern movement to put forward the idea of popular sovereignty in a brief four-year agitation between 1645 and 1649, as the Royalist army faced defeat in the first civil war and


Introduction 5

before Cromwell consolidated power following the execution of the king (Wootton, 1992, p. 72). Since then, democratic experimentation has similarly been short-lived, and participatory democrats can quote only interludes between an old and a new order as examples of what such a form of government might look like. The Paris Commune of 1871 is one example. Despite lasting only two months, it was elevated by Karl Marx in his book The Civil War in France into a prototype of political liberation involving the withering away of the state and gov-ernment by and for the workers. The Soviets, or Workers Councils in revolutionary Russia of 1917, took their cue from the Commune. The Commune was even a reference point for the participatory budget in Porto Alegre explored in this volume, where the idea of ‘delegates’ sub-ject to recall, rather than ‘representatives’ only accountable at election times, as well as direct democracy in assemblies, shaped the original thinking behind the experiment (Interview, Ubiratan de Souza, Porto Alegre, 16 September 2006). In similar vein, the Venezuelans chose to use ‘spokespeople’ or voceros in their Community Councils, distinguish-ing them from representatives (Interview, Martha Harnecker, Caracas, 17 November 2006).

The 1960s was also a moment of crisis in the prevailing order, and it gave rise to many participatory experiments over the next decade, from the ‘community control’ movement in the US (Mansbridge, 1983) to workplace democracy, studied by Carole Pateman in one of few mod-ern classics on participatory theories of democracy (1970). A few years on, Benjamin Barber argued for ‘strong democracy’ and the importance of participation as an educating force in ‘thinking publicly as citizens’ (1984, p. 155). Hilary Wainwright (2003, p. 185) sees the initiatives of these times as a challenge to the ‘dominant assumption on the left that the party, through the state, had a monopoly on the power to bring about social transformation’. There were also interesting experiments in popular self-government in the national liberation struggles of the ‘Third World’ as it was once known, such as Poder Popular or People’s Power during the revolutionary struggle in El Salvador in the 1980s (Pearce, 1985). It is still striking, however, how few examples participa-tory democrats can draw on from modern history.

The experiences of the Ancients therefore still figure prominently for participation advocates, despite their limitations of being based in small city-states rather than nation-states. From Athens between the fourth and fifth centuries, we get a wealth of ideas, albeit from limited sources, many of which remain our main reference points for partici-pative democracy. The role for instance of the polis, the Greek political



community of free men (from which women and slaves were notori-ously excluded), in reconciling personal characteristics and individual desires with civic responsibility to others; of office rotations in order that experience of decision making is spread through the polity; the idea that the polis encourages good judgment from the decision-making people or demos despite the poor judgment of particular individuals; the notion that political power should rest with an assembly of men who ‘were not themselves, as individuals, powerful’, but might well be inexperienced, uneducated and unused to responsibility (Farrar, 1992, p. 20), and that poverty is not a justification for exclusion from decision-making power.

Although the Assembly and the courts were the ultimate decision-making bodies, the Greeks did have a way of selecting officials for administrative and executive tasks and dealing with incompetent ones. Bernard Manin (1997) makes a strong case for taking the mechanism of lot or sortition, as a contrast to selection by election, upon which representational democracy is based. It is not, he argues, the fact that only a few govern that distinguishes that form of democracy from dir-ect democracy, but that they are chosen by election only. In what is known of fourth-century Athens, citizens, but only those who wished to be considered (and satisfied criteria on taxation, military service and conduct towards parents) were drawn by lot for most of the functions not carried out by popular assembly, around six hundred of the seven hundred magistrate posts in the administration of Athens. These mag-istrates, who could only serve one year and not more than once, were monitored by the Assembly and the courts, and had to give account to them on leaving office. In addition, any citizen could demand their sus-pension while in office (Ibid., p. 12). Limited periods in office guaran-teed rotation of experience of government. Aristotle even believed that lot was the democratic way of assigning office while election was the oligarchic way (Aristotle, 1998, p. 154). Lot was also used in the Italian city-republics of the Middle Ages (Skinner, 1992, p. 60). Representative government was in fact a rupture with the republican tradition, when it made election the basis of selection. Sortition offers equal possibility of participating in decision-making spaces to all who want it by rotating positions and diffusing power and experience. It is used today for the UK jury system, and has been suggested as a system for selecting mem-bers of the House of Lords (Barnet and Carty, 1998, reprinted 2008); we will return to it in the final chapter.

The victory of representational democracy from the seventeenth cen-tury onwards was not often questioned, even though the qualification


Introduction 7

of ‘representation’ removed government a long way from ‘rule by the people’, to the extent that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 1762, con-sidered the two mutually incompatible: ‘The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the elec-tion of members of parliament (Rousseau, 1968, pp. 77–8). Manin (1997, p. 92), who has subjected representation to modern-day scrutiny, traces its origins to an abandonment of concern for equality in the allocation of offices to one of equal right to consent to power. People became a source of political legitimacy rather than seeking to hold office themselves.

Representation, self-evidently, introduced a democratic component to politics in the form of the suffrage, but it simultaneously introduced a non-democratic principle of rule on behalf of rather than by the people and removed the expectation and therefore aspiration of people to par-ticipate in decision making. In addition, it was originally based on the principle that those elected would be socially superior. Decades of strug-gle for universal suffrage and a more socially representative system have met with partial success; in the UK, for instance, organised members of the working class (mostly male) gained access to parliament in the course of the twentieth century. However, the UK parliament, and most other houses of representatives, outside Scandinavia perhaps, remains woefully unrepresentative of the social makeup of their country. The poorest of citizens would not recognise any politician as sharing their life experiences. Not only do people no longer see themselves as cap-able of governing, but the governors have remained a largely distinct and distant social group, professionally dedicated to government and largely independent of the people who elect them. In the global South, the distances are often even greater. In Latin America, the way to over-come the alienating effects has traditionally been a system of mediation or brokerage, by which the politicians relate to the citizen as if she was a client, with whom one can trade a favour in exchange for a vote.

Our political systems are not inevitable, however; change is not only possible but maybe necessary. In this book, we argue that we are at one of the watershed moments in which a new political order may be not only desirable, but indeed necessary. A watershed moment may last for many decades, and we are only at the beginning. The challenges ahead for humanity require the diffusion of skills amongst the populations of the world, such as capacity to reason publicly; to understand trade-offs between desirable but incompatible outcomes; to reconcile particular and local interests with the universal; to disagree, even radically, but still live together. Without such diffusion, major decisions around cli-mate change, the distribution of increasingly scarce resources, the role



of the state and of markets, will be made by the very few, with huge implications for peoples in an already profoundly unequal world. In short, we need to develop participatory skills and opportunities to exer-cise them. However, we do not yet have much to go on in terms of what such opportunities might or should look like or of the optimum balance between participation and representation or whether one should pre-vail over or substitute for the other.

A space for new thinking about democracy finally arose in the last two decades of the twentieth century. As the tensions of the Cold War subsided and globalisation accelerated, the centrality of the nation-state came under scrutiny, and with it the top-down form of decision making associated with it. The rise of the large nation-state had been associated with the emergence of representative government as the only form of democracy appropriate to such states; it is not surprising that its partial displacement encouraged new thinking around state-society relations.

The late-twentieth-century democratic awakening

Since the late 1980s, significant new contributions have been made to thinking about democracy. The great battle between liberal democracy and state socialism that had dominated much of the century concealed some convergence between the two systems when it came to tenden-cies to state centralisation and control, even when this was based on competing world views on the relative weight of collective and private ownership. At the same time, the claims that liberal democracy was ‘tri-umphant’ provoked varied reactions from critics and proponents alike. Representative democracy finally came under the microscope, just as the 1980s witnessed the victory of struggles to introduce it. Many in the global South and Eastern Europe had hoped that representative democracy might offer qualitative enhancements to their influence on politics, rather than liberal governments which serve the interests of the newly privatized markets rather than citizens. The first sign of the ‘awakening’ is what we might call the ‘associational turn’.

This became, however, a highly contested new field of democratic thinking. A new fracture line emerged between those committed to market liberalism, who recognised the need for adjustments in the political architecture, and those critical of market liberalism, who saw in the ‘associational’ sphere an opportunity to rethink that architec-ture ‘from below’. However, the normative significance given to what came to be called ‘civil society’ varied widely; the term was at once an empirical description and a conceptualisation of a sphere of social interaction outside the state, the family and the market (Howell and


Introduction 9

Pearce, 2001; Putnam, 1993). For some, it contained all the poten-tial which its origins at the dawn of liberal capitalism had promised: civility and the rule of law; the reconciliation of individual pursuit of self-interest in the market with the ‘common good’; and a mechanism for holding governments to account. Democracy, it was argued, needs civil society. Robert Putnam promoted the concept and, with it, that of ‘social capital’ or values of trust and reciprocity, which emanate from vibrant associational life. Indeed, he famously attributed the malaise in advanced democracies to the decline in associational engagement and hence social capital (Putnam, 2000).

As the importance of civil society won acceptance by the represen-tative state and its institutions, however, it also became subject to the drive to structure, study, quantify, organise and generally enhance its ‘capacity’. The description, ‘Third Sector’, was a recognition of the significance given to not-for-profit, non-governmental and voluntary associations, but also of efforts to give it boundaries and make it subject to legislative, financial and other interventions.

However, the reemergence of the concept of ‘civil society’ in the neo-liberal age brought into relief the participatory implications of distinct forms of collective action and voluntary sociability for a wider spectrum of opinion. While it was accepted in the mainstream as important to revitalising and sustaining representative democracy, there were those who wanted to take the debate much further. They argued that democ-racy based on accountability to the individual citizen meant little if the economy was controlled by large and hierarchical private corporations, and if ‘civil society’ was about marginal groups with little influence over decision makers. (Hirst, 1994, p. 23). These doubts gave rise in the 1990s to discussions on giving associations a stronger place in democ-racy (Cohen and Rogers, 1995; Hirst, 1994). John Dryzek (1996, p. 36) argued for thinking about democracy ‘against and apart’ from the state and there was new interest in the ‘public sphere’. In his case for ‘associ-ational democracy’, Hirst (1994, pp. 25–6) argued:

One reason why liberal democrat theorists have not adopted associa-tive ideas is because they still see the state as the central political com-munity. ... Associationalism ... treats self-governing voluntary bodies not as secondary associations, but as the primary means of both democratic governance and organising social life. A self-governing society thus becomes the primary feature of society. The state becomes a secondary, but vitally necessary, public power that ensures peace between associations and protects the rights of individuals.



Nancy Fraser (1994) explored the role of what she called subaltern ‘counterpublics’. Given that parity of participation in public debate is not achievable without socioeconomic equality, she argued, a plurality of competing publics rather than single ‘public’ was needed to promote such equality. Like Hirst, she challenged the liberal view that such plur-alities are only there in a weak sense, to form opinion and act as a coun-terweight to the state, rather than to make decisions. Strong publics encompass both, she argued; parliaments themselves are examples of a ‘strong public’, where public deliberation culminates in legally binding decisions. The challenge is to think of democratic arrangements which contain elements of direct and representative democracy, and coord-ination between plural, weak and strong publics. Iris Marion Young (2000) argued that state institutions can have a uniquely important role in limiting potential damage from economic power, and saw the pub-lic sphere as the main connector between people and power (p. 173). Systems of representation are most inclusive, she argued, ‘when they encourage the particular perspectives of relatively marginalised or dis-advantaged social groups to receive specific expression’ (p. 8).

The problem is that, while disadvantage and exploitation encouraged working-class associationalism in the heyday of manufacturing, such circumstances were not replicable in the economic conditions of late-twentieth-century capitalism. The way inequality impacts associational dynamics was recognised by Putnam (2002) in a study of the state of social capital in eight advanced democracies. One of the key conclusions was that social capital is distributed unequally; there is ‘more trusting, more joining, more voting, and so on among the better-off segments of society. Citizens who lack access to financial and human capital also lack access to social capital. ... Social capital is accumulated most among those who need it least. Social capital may conceivably be even less equitably distributed than financial and human capital.’ (Ibid., p. 415). In the same volume, Peter Hall surveyed the evolution of social capital in the UK, and concluded that the UK ‘is a nation divided between a well-connected group of citizens with prosperous lives and high levels of civic engagement and other groups whose networks, associational life, and involvement in politics are very limited’ (Hall, 2002, p. 53). He demonstrated that this divide intensified after the 1950s. In 1959, the average member of the working class belonged to almost two-thirds as many associations as someone from the middle class; by 1990, he belonged to half as many. The decline in trade union membership and working men’s clubs has played a big role in this, as these were import-ant forms of association for working-class people, who otherwise tend


Introduction 11

to have fewer networks and friendships, and draw heavily on locality. These conclusions might be different if ethnic minority solidarities are taken into account. Hall’s conclusions are reinforced by the 2009 Audit of Political Engagement in the UK (Hansard Society, 2009, p. 6), which found that ‘social class has more of an impact on political engagement levels than any other factor’.

Even the rise of social movements, protest politics and internet activ-ism, at least in the advanced democracies, tended to be skewed towards the middle class. Pippa Norris (2002, p. 211) noted that as traditional mobilising agencies declined, such as parties, unions and religious bodies, protest politics in the form of petitions, demonstrations and consumer boycotts rose ‘as a channel of political expression and mobil-isation’ (2002, p. 211). However, her review of the evidence suggested that this is concentrated amongst the better educated management and professional classes of older as well as younger generations (2002, p. 221). The rich literature on social movements suggests a more com-plex picture. In many places, particularly in the global South, collective action remains the only vehicle for change for the poor as well as sec-tors of the middle class. The 2008 Corporación Latinobarómetro opin-ion poll (p. 100) found that 63 per cent of those surveyed believed that protests are a normal part of democracy, and 59 per cent that they are an indispensable way for demands to be heard.

However, evidence does suggest that the better-off and better-educated have been able to carve out new roles for themselves in advocacy, lobby-ing, service delivery as well as protest and civic activism. The middle sectors of society, in other words, have tended during the period under discussion to find new channels of participation, either questioning the mainstream political system from outside, or as part of organised lob-bies and voluntary organisations striving to engage with it. Gerry Stoker (2006, p. 116) argued that the ‘high intensity engagement’ of the more professional classes does not in fact foster wider participation:

Parties, citizen groups, and protest organisations have all been neglecting the role of talking directly to the public. The issue becomes one of getting ‘the government’ to do something rather than asking whether their organisation is playing a great enough role in enab-ling the public to understand and engage with issues, and where appropriate, change their own behavior.

Thus, the democratic awakening posed new and important questions for representative democracy, about how and why people engage and



who does and who doesn’t. Inequality has a deep effect on participa-tion, because it impacts on the internalised subjectivities of individuals, capacity to express ideas and even believe you have something to com-municate to the wider world. Before Putnam began talking about social capital, the French philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu, had talked of the structure of capital(s) in a very different way in order to explain inter-nalised and ‘naturalised’ social marginality. He drew attention to how we differentially and unequally absorb and acquire capitals as resources and potentialities in varied forms (social, cultural, linguistic, symbolic, political and economic) and in given ‘fields’ of social interaction and power asymmetries. These are expressed in predispositions, attitudes, values and ways of being that are taken for granted but greatly impact on life chances. One of our case studies (Navarro, 2009, this volume) draws on Bourdieu and the ebb and flow of capitals for explanations of non-participation amongst one of the poorest groups in Brazilian soci-ety, located in the ‘field’ of a rubbish recycling unit. In an essay on polit-ical representation, Bourdieu discussed how the unequal distribution of leisure time and cultural capital explains ‘the silence that weighs on the conditions which force citizens, all the more brutally the more econom-ically and culturally deprived they are, to face the alternative of having to abdicate their rights by abstaining from voting or being dispossessed by the fact that they delegate their power’ (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 171).

Recognition that associational life and ‘civil society’ might not neces-sarily extend participation to the most deprived grew as the concept of ‘civil society’ was conceptually hijacked by funding regimes aiming to ‘strengthen it’ (Howell and Pearce, 2001). In the global North and South, many voluntary and community associations and NGOs came to look upwards to their donors rather than downwards to the rest of society. In the UK, the heterogeneous voluntary and community sector contained powerful national bodies with questionable accountability arrangements, as well as very small-scale non-influential neighbour-hood groups.

The new millennium saw a wave of interest in ‘deepening the deep-ening democracy debate’ (Gaventa, 2006), and a shift beyond ‘civil society’ to the citizen participant: the ‘private’ but ‘responsible’ citizen, striving to balance the public good with self-interest (Ackerman and Fishkin, 2004, p. 174); the citizen as negotiator and deliberator around contentious moral controversies (Macedo, 1999); part of new institu-tional forms for empowered participatory governance ‘from below’ (Fung and Wright, 2003); and a large and growing body of literature around deliberative democracy.


Introduction 13

The importance about the late twentieth century is this fertility of the discursive terrain. The so-called triumph of liberal democracy had in fact exposed its imperfections. No longer in direct competition with state socialism, it could itself be subjected to greater critique and opened up to innovation. This book covers two broad innovation frameworks with practical as well as theoretical implications. On the one hand, that of ‘participatory governance’, and on the other, ‘participatory democ-racy’. The objective is not, however, to counterpose the one to the other. It is to explore the way each experiment helps us understand participa-tory possibilities better. Before explaining the choice of case studies, the following section discusses these frameworks.

Participatory governance and participatory democracy

In the late twentieth century, globalisation reconfigured the spaces and boundaries which had delineated the public policy-making arena. Supra-national entities, such as international financial institutions, and trade blocs, such as the European Union, gained influence and, simul-taneously, power shifted downward to the sub-national level of regions and cities. Decentralisation was a major theme of the 1980s and 1990s. Although an ongoing issue of contention in the UK (Stoker, 2004), in Latin America, new powers and new sources of finance were transferred to the municipalities in many countries of the region, breaking centur-ies of centralised government dominated by executive and presidential power (Burki et al., 1999; Campbell, 2003). Elections were held at the local level for the first time in many countries, and left parties began to win power in important cities.

There was widespread recognition also of the existence of many pri-vate sources of authority, including non-governmental public actors. Not only did multiple levels of policy making emerge, but the actors who might claim to participate in them also multiplied. Challenges to traditional forms of centralised representative government within nation-state boundaries became multi-level and multi-interest. The idea that the state should guide rather than direct and manage these challenges coincided with the neoliberal critique of the interventionist state and the shift to the market as the driver of economic growth and development.

In this context, a policy and intellectual discourse arose, centred around two concepts: governance and participation, which both reflected the new lens on the limitations of representative democracy as well as the acknowledgement of a new set of challenges for effective



government. ‘Participatory governance’ offers a framework for explor-ing some of the experiments in participation at the local level that this research explored (Fung and Wright, 2001, 2003; Grote and Gbikpi, 2002; Newman, 2005).

‘Governance’ has been defined as the ‘complex art of steering mul-tiple agencies, institutions and systems which are both operationally autonomous from one another and structurally coupled through vari-ous forms of reciprocal interdependence’ (Jessop, 1997, p. 95). It is this independence/interdependent character which paved the way for a shift in thinking from vertical decision making towards horizontal forms of consensus seeking. This was accompanied by the recognition of the role of associational life in politics as previously discussed and a shift towards the citizen in a social setting rather than the citizen as individual elector. The idea of governance was even extended to the neighbourhood level under New Labour in the UK (Cox, 2006; Smith, Lepine and Taylor, 2007; Somerville and Haines, 2008). And whereas in the past, dominant thinking stressed that enhanced citizen partici-pation would prejudice effective government as challenges grew more complex and difficult, arguments began to be made that it was essential to effectiveness and that citizen disengagement was the problem.

Many spaces for participation which have opened up over the last two decades or so reflect efforts to bring more people to the table of decision making, particularly the range of stakeholders who might be affected by decisions. Better communications, partnership approaches and wider involvement aimed to make implementation more effective and improve socioeconomic outcomes. Usually, the actors are members of collectivities, of associations and organisations; they are therefore a layer of mediation between citizens and government, but it is under-stood that they will enable government to reach the more ‘excluded’. The rise in varied expressions of mostly middle-class engagement facili-tated incorporation into new governance structures. However, this was accompanied by a range of management tools. Behind this development was a new approach to welfare, where ‘the state moves from (paternal-istic) provider to (participative) enabler, with consequent reductions – it is hoped – in demands on the state for welfare’ (Newman, 2005, p. 123). The newly recognised ‘Third Sector’ became an important player in non-state social delivery, entirely appropriate to the neoliberal age.

Newman (2005, p. 128) suggests that participative governance can in fact be seen ‘as a new political rationality through which citizens, users or communities are constituted as governable subjects’. In other words, participatory governance encourages the formation of a category


Introduction 15

of ‘participant citizen’. However, rather than autonomous and self-driven, it is made subject to a new neoliberal governance regime. In the guise of decentralisation, power is in fact recentralized. ‘New gov-ernance spaces’, argues Marilyn Taylor (2007, p. 314) ‘are still inscribed with a state agenda, with responsibilities pushed down to communities and individuals at the same time that control is retained at the centre, through the imposition and internalisation of performance cultures that require “appropriate” behaviour’. Andrea Cornwall distinguishes between participatory spaces opened up ‘from above’ and by invitation and those ‘from below’ by creative action (Cornwall, 2002).

This volume shares some of this post-structural critique. A feature of the ‘democratic awakening’ has been the appropriation by mainstream institutions of discourses and concepts (amongst them, participation) expressing emancipatory hopes and turning them into new ‘tyrannies’ (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). However, at the same time, even the dis-cursive embrace of participation by governments and global financial bodies cannot be dismissed without also ignoring potential for human agency and action within contingent possibilities. Opportunities to improve services and infrastructure are important to the poor, despite skepticism of the motivations behind them. Many are still brought to politics through immediate needs rather than abstract goals. Capacity to engage in new participatory spaces is about social dynamics amongst associations and between them and the poorest, as much as the role of the state. Our research did not therefore dismiss innovations which corresponded to a logic of participatory governance. Rather we explored how people made use of these spaces, with what expectations of their own and with what outcomes. We also took seriously the possibilities of nuances within such projects at the local level. Nor when these innova-tions were found wanting, did we feel that there was nothing to learn about participation from them.

We did, however, explore contrasting innovations based on principles of popular sovereignty and direct involvement of all citizens, includ-ing and especially the poorest, in decision making, or what could be called ‘participatory democracy’. Porto Alegre merits two chapters in this volume, as it represents a ‘symbolic multiplier’ of a resurgent ideal of participatory democracy which captured attention around the world. Although it is much studied, we tried to throw new light on its contri-bution by working with three groups of poor social actors with different relationships to the innovation in participatory budgeting in the city. We explore the hopes and limitations of this innovation, and ultimately its conversion into a process more akin to participatory governance than



participatory democracy. Caracas is our only case where the national state was committed to ‘popular power’ and radical democracy and we explore what this offers in terms of new forms of participation, again through the lens of participants. Medellín provides another contrast again, and one of the most interesting approaches to empowering citi-zens in the midst of the most adverse of social and political contexts; an innovation with components of participatory democracy within a liberal/civic political regime.

In concluding this section, we might say that the ideal of the par-ticipatory citizen had made some kind of a comeback by the early twenty-first century. However, this must be judged in terms of incipi-ent and contradictory experiments. Our volume calls for critical skep-ticism but also a cautious welcome, as ‘participation’ comes once more back into the frame of democracy alongside its still dominant sibling, ‘ representation’.

The case studies

City visions and city publics: UK and Latin America

The case studies in this book are based in six cities, three in Latin America: Medellín (Colombia), Caracas (Venezuela) and Porto Alegre (Brazil); and three in the UK, Manchester, Bradford and Salford. The expansion of cities in the UK ran parallel with industrialisation. In Latin America, the rise of industries never compensated for the num-bers migrating from the land to its urban centres in search of work, and urban growth was often chaotic; large numbers squatted and built their own houses, working in the ‘informal sector’. Nevertheless, Latin America was also affected by global shifts in the division of labour, which led to the collapse of manufacturing, such as textiles in Medellín, and which also devastated the North of England, where our UK case studies are located.

The focus on inner-city blight shifted, however, in the 1990s, to re-imagined cities, capable of competing in the global market in their own right (Hambleton and Gross, 2007; Imrie and Raco, 2003). Some, such as Manchester and Medellín aspired to global city status within the liberal market economy. Porto Alegre, on the other hand, gained such status for challenging that model, locating itself as a place where the poor helped to drive the city’s priorities and where activists from around the world could believe that ‘another’ (non-neoliberal) ‘world was possible’. Caracas, with its oil wealth, took an even more radical stance against neoliberal capitalism, winning its own global reputation


Introduction 17

for efforts to build ‘people’s power’. Salford straddled the image of a city where de-industrialisation had left its mark on an impoverished white working class to one gradually transforming its economy to meet the post-industrial age, a ‘Media City’ emerging in its renovated docklands. Bradford found it harder to find such a niche, with its inner city con-centrations of poor white and mostly South Asian ethnic minorities, it struggled to develop a shared urban vision.

This is not a comparative study, and therefore the cities were not selected on the basis of similarities beyond the fact that they were sites of experimentation in participation. However, they do share high levels of inequality and multiple deprivation, as shown in Table 1.1. Urban regeneration is one of the policy drivers behind many of the experi-ments in participation in all the cities.

It was the contrasts rather than similarities between the UK and Latin America which were significant to the research design. Despite long his-tories of authoritarian rule, Latin America also has a history of revolu-tionary struggles, social movements and neighbourhood activism. In its study of democracy in Latin America in 2004, the PNUD/UNDP (p. 150) found that one in five Latin Americans (18.9 per cent) are ‘participa-tive democrats’ in that they do more than vote, but intervene in public life through lobbying public officials on behalf of their communities, attending demonstrations and giving voluntary time for their com-munities’. Such statistics do not convey the dynamic and autonomous quality of many expressions of subaltern politics in the region, which has generated extraordinary upsurges ‘from below’, such as indigenous, peasant, neighbourhood, workers and unemployed workers movements. Latin America’s social movements have struggled for political and social rights and even invented new ones (Dagnino, 2005, p. 8).

Recent research in Brazil has linked changing patterns in associational cultures to the design and effectiveness of participatory institutions, such as the participatory budgeting and health councils established in hundreds of Brazilian cities in the 1990s (Avritzer, 2009). Using survey data from the 1960s and 1970s to compare with his own surveys of the 1990s, Avritzer explored the expansion of voluntary associations into ‘participatory publics’ (2002), able to engage the state on their own terms. He argues that the types of social actors brought into politics through associations matters as much as the number of associations. In Brazil, the dynamic forms of participation amongst the poorest enabled them to help shape the participatory institutions which emerged, and poor social actors, argues Avritzer, participate more when institutions are designed taking their needs into account (2009). It is the ‘bottom-up’



culture of Brazil’s participatory experiments which made them effect-ive, coupled with the mass rather than purely electoral character of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), under whose city administrations partici-patory experiments were first set up, although other parties followed.

Latin America thus poses some interesting questions about participa-tion and associational publics when compared to that of the UK. As sug-gested earlier, it is not so much middle-class activism in the UK which has declined, as that of the working class. The idea of ‘civil society’ and recognition of the value of associational life was an important one for the democracy debate; the problem was that once the state recognised its worth for governance and invested in it, it lost some of the very qual-ities which had given it value, such as connection with the poor. Latin American associations faced a similar challenge, though often more from international donors than the state, which mostly lacked the financial and institutional capacity to incorporate them on a grand scale. Many non-governmental organisations which had emerged initially through organic connections between intellectuals and the poor in the 1970s and 1980s in the struggle for democracy became deliverers of services to the poor in the 1990s funded by international non-governmental and governmental donors (Pearce, 1997). Others, it should be acknowledged, have played an important role in holding governments to account and advocating for rights, while some opted to remain independent and con-nected to the poor, at the cost of diminishing resources.

A tradition of contentious politics does not necessarily transform the state. However, in Latin America, it politicised the poor, and fostered self-organisation in the absence of a welfare safety net. This does distin-guish the associational cultures of the UK and Latin America in recent history. The welfare state in the UK was a gain in the UK labour move-ment struggle, but also a source of cultural expectations towards the state and managed by the state, which has, arguably, depoliticised activ-ism and discouraged self-organising. The Labour Party, which was once a mass party, had also become an electoral party in the UK by the end of the twentieth century. It successfully won power in 1997, but it did so with an appeal to the middle class rather than the poor, transforming itself into ‘New Labour’.

These differences between the UK and Latin America highlight varia-bles, which can explain differences to both the institutional design and the outcomes of participatory experiments. They enable us to explore different kinds of relationships between participatory and represen-tative space; the complementary or antagonistic roles of participatory and representative actors; and the debate about whether democracy and


Table 1.1 Socioeconomic data for the six case study cities

Porto Alegre Medellín Caracas Salford Bradford Manchester

Population 1,430,220a 2,223,078b 2,700,000c 216,103d 497,400e 458,136f

Ethnicity 17.2% ethnic minority, 96% of Afro origing

93.4% Mestizo and white, 6.5% Afro-Colombians and 0.1% indigenoush

N/A 3.9% ethnic minorityi 18% ethnic minority; 86% of Asian origin.

23.1% ethnic minority

Poverty Average income is below the average regional metropolitan income. 42% of the population are below the poverty line for the minimum salary.j

46% lived in poverty 2005k

23.3% lived in poverty in 2007l (Venezuela).28.65% (Antímano) 15.97% (Petare)m

24th most deprived local authority in the countryn

25% literacy problems, life expectancy 3% below average

52nd most deprived local authority in the country; 4th most deprived in terms of income; 6th most deprived for employment (Index of Multiple Deprivation).

4th most deprived local authority in 2007 Index of Multiple Deprivation

Inequality Gini index for the Metropolitan Region (MRPA) was 0.42 in 2006.o

Gini index was 53.8 in 2005.The Index of Unsatisfied Basic Needs (NBI) was 12.17% in the same year.p

Gini index for Venezuela was 0.42 in 2007q

67 of Salford’s 144 Super Output Areasr (46.5% of the population) are within 20% most deprived.s

29.3% of Super Output Areas (SOAs) are ranked in the 10% most deprived in England; over 6% are in the 10% least deprived.

21 Super Output Areas (17.8%) within the city fall into the worst 1% in England; none come into the top 80%.

Continued

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Table 1.1 Continued

Porto Alegre Medellín Caracas Salford Bradford Manchester

Unemployment 9.5%t 13.5% 6.8%u 5.9% 6.5% 3.7%

Violence and Crime

28.53 homicides per 100,000 inhabitantsv

Medellín had the highest homicide rate in any city in the world in 1991 (381). By 2007 it had one of the smallest rates of violence in a major contemporary urban settlement (26).

37 homicides per 100,000 (Venezuela).71 homicides per 100,000 (Antímano).55 homicides per 100,000 (Petare).w

26,425 crimes recorded;8,559 violent crimes recorded.x

58,897 crimes recorded 2005–06; 10,976 violent crime offences excluding robbery and 13,276 incidents of criminal damage 2007–08: 8,780 violence against the person offences (above the national average)

89,112 crimes recorded 2005–06, 3,650 of which were robberies and 13,654 involving violence.y

Political Makeup 2009

Center-Right coalition since 2005, after 16 years of Workers’ Party administration

The mayor represents a civic coalition. The Municipal Council is dominated by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties.

The National government, the Mayor’s Office in Caracas and the municipalities of Libertador and Sucre are in the hands of President Hugo Chávez Frías (Fifth Republic Movement and other political allies).

Labour-controlled; cabinet-style government; Labour Group elects some councillors to head directorates.

No overall Majority (Hung Council); Conservative Leader

Labour controlled Local Authority

Notes:a Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), 2008.b www.dane.gov.co/files/censo2005/resultados_am_municipios.pdf

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c Census 2001. Unofficial sources indicate that Caracas Metropolitan Area currently has more than five million inhabitants.d www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/00br.aspe Latest population estimate 2007. Statistics, unless otherwise stated, come from the Office of National Statistics website: www.nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lmp/la/2038432028/report.aspx; consulted April 2009.

f All figures for Manchester are from the Manchester Fact sheet.g IBGE, 2000.h DANE, 2005.i www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/00br.aspj Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, “Poverty: from insufficient revenue to privation of capacities: an application for the city of Porto Alegre through a multidimensional indicator”, copy, November 2006.

k Lopez Castaño, H. and Nuñez Méndez, J. 2007. Pobreza y Desigualdad en Colombia Diagnóstico y Estrategias Colombia, Bogotá: Departamento Nacional de Planeación p. 60l Instituto Nacional de Estadistica de Venezuela (INE), www.ine.gov.ve; consulted April 2009.m Ibid.n Indices of Multiple Deprivation, 2007, www.communities.gov.uk/documents/communities/xls/576504.xlso PED-RMPA (Research of Employment and Unemployment – Metropolitan Region of Porto Alegre) – FEE (Foundation for Economics and Statistics), FGTAS/SINE-RS (Guacha Foundation for Work and Social Action/Sine- Rio Grande do Sul), SEADE-SP (State System Foundation for the Analysis of Data), DIEESE (Inter-trade union Department of Statistics and Socio-economic studies) Convention and supported by PMPA (Porto Alegre Municipal Town Hall).

p DANE, 2005.q Instituto Nacional de Estadistica de Venezuela (INE). A lower Gini coefficient indicates more equal income or wealth distribution, and a high Gini coefficient indicates more unequal distribution. The Gini Coefficient has values between 0 and 1.

r The Super Output Area (SOA) measure of deprivation uses seven domains of measurement: Income, barriers to housing and services, employment, health and disability, education, training and skills, lived environment and crime.

s North West Regional Development Agency, Regional Intelligence Unit, www.nwriu.co.uk/publicationsandreports/documents/Greater_Manchester.pdf

t Informe PED, 2008, lproweb.procempa.com.br/pmpa/prefpoa/observatorio/usu_doc/informepedpoaano2008.pdfu Instituto Nacional de Estadistica de Venezuela (INE), www.ine.gov.ve; consulted April 2009.v Secretaria de Segurança Publica do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, 2008 www.ssp.rs.gov.br/portal/principal.php?action=estatisticaw Based on 2004 statistics.x www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination and www.salford.gov.uk/living/yourcom/crimereduction/crimeanddisorderpartnershipintro/ cs-howareweperforming.htm

y Home Office Crime Statistics. www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/soti.html

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participation can be ‘engineered’, or depend for their vitality on autono-mous and critical publics. Ricardo Blaug (2002, p. 112), for instance, has argued for a distinction between ‘incumbent’ and ‘critical democ-racy’ and explored the deleterious effect of engineering efforts by the former:

Democratic engineering swamps critical associations with an organisational paradigm in which solutions to problems of action co-ordination inevitably involve the progressive reduction, and domestication, of critical participation. Now, moments of insti-tutionalisation within the target association increasingly result in structures primarily designed to protect the decision-making cap-acity of the few. By so alienating themselves from their wider critical community, activists themselves become incumbent democrats.

Stoker (2004, p. 124), on the other hand, maintains that ‘sensitive intervention from local government can make a difference. It can pro-vide a framework in which individual and group participation can be enhanced’. A third view suggests that participants can bring about change if they have prior histories of activism, and maintain alternative discursive spaces through which to develop their own social theories. Barnes, Newman and Sullivan (2007, p. 202), studied 17 examples of public participation in two UK cities, and concluded that ‘where groups with a prior existence (formed around community activism, social movement politics or in other alternative public spaces) were invited to participate as stakeholders in a particular policy or service area, deliber-ation was more likely to produce challenges to the status quo and some element of transformation – if not in terms of quantifiable outcomes, then at least in terms of attitudes and orientations of public officials’. A fourth variation on this theme emerges in this volume, which is the alternative of direct democracy rather than participation via organised groups, who can facilitate participation but can also block it.

From ‘people’s power’ to ‘democratic renewal’

The participatory experiments included in this volume reflect distinct approaches to democratic renewal as well as neighbourhood regener-ation in poor communities. The experiments are at one and the same time about new political formations (ranging from ‘transformation’ of the old order to its ‘renewal’), and addressing poverty and inequality. Equally, they assume various configurations around power and (co)


Introduction 23

governance at the national, local and sub-local or neighbourhood and barrio levels.

In Latin America, we are discussing only 3 of 21 republics, and too much generalisation across the subcontinent must be avoided. There are, however, some common features to politics, which the experiments aimed to tackle, such as the role of political brokers, who construct people as clients rather than citizens. Another persist-ent political variant in Latin America’s history has been mobilisation of the ‘people’ by the state against old elites, known as populism. Chavez’ Venezuela is seen by some as an example of such populism, and by others as democratisation and inclusion. Participatory inno-vations have undoubtedly given voice to the excluded majorities in Venezuela, where Corporación Latinobarómetro (2008, p. 96) records the highest percentage in Latin America (36 per cent) who believe that inequality has diminished, compared to 24 per cent in Brazil. Latin America is going through a transition between discourses of ‘people’ or ‘citizen’, with distinct ways of imagining the ‘participatory subject’ across our case studies.

Our case studies build upon many experiments in the 1990s, when left-wing parties were increasingly winning control of municipal gov-ernments, and testing the capacity for change within representative democracy (Chavez and Goldfrank, 2004). They often also tried to challenge the global domination of neoliberalism. In this sense Porto Alegre, under the Workers’ Party administration (1989–2004), offered a radical vision which went much deeper than participatory budg-eting and tried to reshape education, for instance, not only to resist market forces but to become in itself a source of democratic learning focused on building a participatory culture and society. Limiting such experiments was the shift, amongst other factors, to electoral priorities within the PT, which won national elections in 2002 and 2006 and compromised with the global neoliberal project; participation ceased to be a prime focus of the PT in central government. Medellín was under a liberal-minded civic leadership during our research, within a national context of an authoritarian government anxious to open up the war-torn country of Colombia to global markets. Unlike the other two cities, there was no challenge to the overall neoliberal pro-ject of the national government, despite political differences with it; nevertheless, its experiment was more akin to participatory democ-racy than governance. It is only in Caracas, therefore, that the national government challenged neoliberalism and capitalism, but which also re-centralised power in order to do this.



In the UK, the national state played a pivotal role in promoting most of the experiments in participatory governance which we studied. The exception is Salford, where the original experiment was an effort to politicise and engage the population against cuts in public services under the conservative governments of 1979 to 1997. During these years, the government created ‘the environment for a shift from local government to local governance’ (Stoker, 2004, p. 29), in which local government lost many powers and duties, and came under unprece-dented central control. Partnerships and unelected bodies or ‘quan-gos’ sprang up alongside the elected state. Autonomous social activism, which had intensified in the struggles against Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic policies, declined and dissipated, alongside more traditional forms of working-class self-organising. Radical community development practice, which had flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, was also gradually lost, in a pattern not dissimilar to the fate of popular education in Latin America.

In the vacuum, new kinds of experiments in participation emerged in the 1990s, driven from ‘above’ rather than ‘below’, but from local authorities rather than central government. Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker (2001a; 2001b; Stoker, 2004, p. 115) drew up a typology of five different kinds of participation: consumerist (mostly concerned with service delivery, such as complaints/suggestions boxes and customer satisfaction surveys); traditional (public meetings, consultation docu-ments); forums (bringing together residents, service users, interest groups); consultative innovations (focus groups, interactive websites, citizens’ panels) and deliberative innovations (citizens’ juries, vision-ing, community planning). They found a surprising number of local authorities using innovative methods, and these expanded consider-ably under New Labour, according to a second study (Birch, 2002).

This readiness to experiment in the 1990s was not part of a sub-stantive shift in understanding of democracy, however, or an under-standing of the distinction between ‘consultation’ and ‘participation’. Only a third of respondents in the 1998 study (Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker, 2001a, p. 214) suggested that there had been a strong influence on local decisions from the experiments and this fell to a quarter in the second study of the 1997–2002 period. Local authorities in both studies also felt that there was little public interest in participation and this, together with resource and time restrictions, limited their wish to experiment more. Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker (2001b) contrast this with the viewpoints of participants, who pointed out that lack of council response after consultations was the biggest deterrent to


Introduction 25

participation (Ibid., p. 452); and the more ‘socially excluded’ felt that participation was not for ‘them’.

The early years of the New Labour government were marked by an enthusiastic agenda of democratic renewal. In 2001, the government faced the largest gap between local and national voter turnout amongst Western democracies, alongside the lowest national turnout in a UK national election of under 60 per cent in 2001 (Stoker, 2004, p. 112). New Labour also confronted the legacy of its predecessor of increased poverty and deprivation, which was particularly acute in the northern de-industrialising cities discussed in this book. New Labour rejected Thatcherite liberal individualism as a value base, and turned towards another set of ideas which tried to reconcile the atomisation of the mar-ket through the building of other kinds of bonds, those of community and associationalism, articulated by the gurus of ‘communitarianism’ (Etzioni, 1996) and ‘civil society’ (Putnam, 1993). These meshed with what we later learnt were Prime Minister Blair’s own religious and moral principles, leading to a discourse which paradoxically coupled mod-ernisation with social conservatism (Newman, 2001). Tony Blair saw in the realm of enhanced civic interaction the source of redemption, empowerment and entrepreneurialism, which could liberate the indi-vidual, maintain personal choice but within a collectively constructed moral setting. In this way, the market economy could be reconciled with the principles of social democracy reconfigured in the New Labour project.

However, even within New Labour there were variations and dis-tinct dispositions towards the market economy. Many local author-ities continued to be part of ‘Old Labour’. There was deep ambiguity about the role of local government. New Labour talked about devolu-tion, but the ‘postcode lottery’ justified, they argued, ongoing central control. Top-down central prescription was combined with a shift to horizontal, partnership-based forms of local governance and a raft of measures aimed at promoting neighbourhood renewal, a ‘new deal for communities’, urban regeneration, active citizenship, public participa-tion, community cohesion, Third Sector service delivery, community empowerment and neighbourhood ‘governance’. Some of these initia-tives seemed, at least in the beginning, intent on bypassing or pressuring councils, such as the Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs), which brought stakeholders together, including the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) for the first time. The emphasis on neighbourhood and commu-nity empowerment was viewed by some as a bid to foster challenges to the local representative state; the reality was more complex.



The discourse around participation deepened in the course of the New Labour governments. David Blunkett had launched the civil renewal agenda in 2003 with a description of Athenian concepts of the ‘free citi-zen’ (Blunkett, 2003). David Miliband called in 2006 for ‘double devo-lution’ of power from Whitehall to the town hall and from the town hall to citizens and local communities (Guardian, 21 February 2006). A new White Paper, Communities in Control: Real People, Real Power was published in 2008, when Hazel Blears took over the Department of Communities and Local Government. Prefaced by a quote from Aristotle, the White Paper made statements which would satisfy the most radical participatory democrat; the government aimed:

To pass power into the hands of local communities so as to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country and give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens ... our reforms are designed to shift power, influence and respon-sibility away from existing centres of power and into the hands of communities and citizens. These are the people who ultimately must hold power in a mature democracy. ... We believe that citizens and communities are capable of taking difficult decisions, balancing com-peting demands and solving complex problems themselves, given the right support and resources. ... Representative democracy remains central to local democracy but we believe it can be reinforced, not undermined, by direct participation of citizens – each requires the other. (DCLG, 2008, pp 12–13; emphasis in original)

A ‘duty to promote democracy’ (Ibid., p. 24) was placed on local authorities through a statutory ‘duty to inform, consult and involve’ from April 2009; a national indicator (NI4) would measure progress in this as part of Local Area Agreements, which came in force in 2008, and were the result of partnership deliberations in the LSPs. A participatory budgeting strategy was announced in September 2008.

There was passion to act within New Labour, but a countervailing impetus to manage. This simultaneously generated hopeful expectation and frustrated disillusionment. Good ideas became managed targets in their implementation. This favoured bureaucratic mentalities at the local level, who could argue that delivery and outputs were the only measurable and hence valid goals, backed up by central government’s own insistence on performance reviews and targets. This left little room for the difficulties encountered as people unused to political engage-ment of any kind are given ‘voice’. In the early years of New Labour,


Introduction 27

recognition of the importance of nurturing participation, and particu-larly that of smaller community organisations, led to the establishment of Community Empowerment Networks (CENs) in the most deprived authorities. Flexible community chests were made available to fund small projects. This was often resisted not only by local authorities (and some CENs began with very challenging agendas), but also by some existing infrastructure support organisations to the VCS. The initiative had real democratic potential, as it might bring new actors into the partnership spaces, which, in turn, were intended to challenge the old centralising mode of decision making. These Networks figure prominently in two of our case study cities, precisely because in these instances, they did try to facilitate a process rather than engineer an outcome.

However, the more innovative in participatory terms often had to accommodate to local structures of power and governance, especially after government funding ended in 2006. At this time, government shifted emphasis towards locally agreed delivery targets selected from a central government list; local government regained some flexibil-ity but central government retained control of assessing effectiveness. Only those CENs with clear agendas and that were able to negotiate their own funding survived. In the meantime, the language of ‘Third Sector’ and the significance accorded it in service delivery tenders and partnership spaces favoured (through ChangeUp and CapacityBuilders programmes) the large voluntary-sector bodies rather than fragile com-munity groups, focused on micro-scale local improvements. It also favoured those willing to accept the rules implicit in the invitation to sit around the table.

There were many local authorities who would not have embraced a participatory agenda without government prodding and pressure. The problems described do not emanate entirely from national gov-ernment. Many in local Labour and Conservative Parties had political and philosophical objections to the participatory discourse of cen-tral government, which some felt could undermine the authority of the elected representative. Local authorities are diverse, and our cases illustrate that at times it was only national government pressure which opened the space for new actors to participate, although there are some innovatory local authorities also. A partnership culture was embedded, but not independent of the local authorities. Reaching those who were not around the table was an ongoing challenge. The innovations were designed, however, without the input from the poor and excluded, des-pite the fact that they were the ‘participatory subject’ of the discourse of democratic renewal.



The 2009 Audit of Public Engagement highlighted levels of public dis-engagement (pp 3–5; 35–7) 11 years after New Labour began its efforts to address it:

An overwhelming majority of the public feel they have ‘not very much influence’ or ‘no influence at all’ over decision-making in both their local area (73 per cent) and the country as a whole (85 per cent). ... The most commonly cited reasons for not feeling influential in decision-making point to a belief that politicians and the political system overlook the public’s views. ... Half the public do not actually want to be involved in decision-making in their local area. Even more – 55 per cent – do not wish to be involved in decision-making in the country as a whole. People who do not currently feel that they have an influence in decision-making – but who say they would like to be involved – were asked what factors, if any, prevent them from doing so. Nearly half (40 per cent) cite lack of time as the main rea-son. ... Voting is seen as being for everyone but getting involved in ‘politics’ or ‘decision making’ is not for ‘people like me’. ... Once again, those with at least a university degree are particularly likely to want to get involved in decision-making at the local level. (63 per cent)

This snapshot of public attitudes conveys the ongoing disaffection with representative democracy, but does not necessarily confirm an unwill-ingness to get involved. Nor will the reader find in our case studies from the UK and Latin America heartening outcomes that confirm a global shift to participatory democracy. There are some very positive stories. However, mostly they are stories of all the problems which accompany experiments. It is the learning from these experiments which is the core of this book. They illustrate the deficits in representative democracy, but they capture the difficult journey of building an alternative. It is a journey which at least began in the twenty-first-century city. As glo-bal challenges mount in the first decade of the new century, this book argues that learning from participatory experiments becomes a critical task; engaging all human beings in the art of decision making, even at the most local level, may prove essential if we are to find a democratic solution to those challenges.

Our book also has another task. How do we recognise ‘real’ participa-tion, as some vaguely describe it? The context in which participation is fostered greatly shapes who takes part and to what ends. Populism and fascism all foster participation, but they do so from above and for an agenda already set by the state. In the UK, a new discourse has emerged


Introduction 29

around ‘devolving power’ to the ‘community’ and the ‘responsibilised citizen’, shared in many respects by New Labour (particularly those close to former Prime Minister Tony Blair), and by David Cameron’s Conservative Party. As the financial crisis of 2009 revealed the greed and recklessness which neoliberalism had fostered, efforts to redeem market capitalism against demands for greater state regulation began. Individual responsibility and new forms of state, citizen and commu-nity relationships can be entirely compatible with such a goal, build-ing on previous epoch-shaping government discourses of free markets and modernised institutions. Our contrasts with experiments in par-ticipatory democracy in Latin America allow us to explore critically the potential discursive trap in the new as well as old language, and to clarify the diverse meanings of participation. Our effort to learn how people make use of participatory space within a range of overarching constructions of the ‘participatory subject’ enables us to distinguish between meanings. In particular, we are able to distinguish between commitment to inclusive participation as a driver of change in all its complexity and managed participation within a model of market, state and citizen relationships, which neither generates new imaginations of our global future nor new voices to shape them.

Conclusion

Case studies do not necessarily tell you anything beyond the cases. However, they do suggest patterns. We have a weak and a strong aim with this research. The former is to document how people engage with new participatory spaces and to identify these patterns. The latter is to go beyond description and ask whether the patterns sufficiently super-sede the particularities of our six distinct contexts and our micro cases to tell us something more conceptual about the prospects for ‘participa-tion’ in the twenty-first-century democratic city. Something, in other words, which might encourage and guide future practice until more sophisticated theorising is possible.

The prospects of participatory democracy are still widely disputed and doubted. This research did not aim to avoid the difficulties. Vivien Lowndes (1998, p. 169) offers a useful update of Dahl’s own list:

direct democracy may threaten citizen’s rights as well as increase citi-zen’s voice. Direct democracy presents difficult questions in terms of the practice and principle of urban politics. How can the interests of minorities be protected in the face of vociferous majorities? How can



long-term strategies be developed in the face of short-term demands? How can the needs of the city as a whole be balanced against the interests of particular neighbourhoods, and the demands of one neighbourhood evaluated against another? How can elite manipula-tion of direct democracy devices be avoided, given the costs involved in organising petitions and campaigns?

This Introduction has concentrated on the meta-concepts around dem-ocracy and participation and contextual parameters which informed our study. However, it is the detail that is the focus of the book chapters, although detail informed by these wider debates. The chapters in this book are based on micro cases selected by each member of the research team and the next chapter outlines the methodology of this research.

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Introduction 33

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Press.


34

2Co-Producing KnowledgeCritical Reflections on Researching ParticipationJenny Pearce

Participation is not just about democracy. It is also about how we relate to each other in all our spaces of encounter. Do we give space to the other person to have an equal part in the encounter, or do we begin from the premise of a one-way communication? Our research could not study participation and fail to ask how we intended to relate to research participants. We could not reconcile our subject matter with a research process which extracted their experience, turned it into academic know-ledge and published it only in inaccessible academic formats. We sought a way of acknowledging the contribution of our research participants to the production of knowledge, to involve them in ongoing discussions about emergent ideas and to feedback what came out of the research in a form which was useful to their activities. We called this ‘ co-producing knowledge’. Inevitably, our aspirations did not match up with reality. We had to reconcile the methodology with conventional demands for evidence in qualitative enquiry and for outputs, such as this book, which satisfy peer review rather than that of our research participants. However, through our sincere efforts to interact rather than extract from the ‘researched’, we consider that all participants deepened their knowledge by exchanging it. This chapter explains what we did and did not achieve. It begins by locating co-producing knowledge meth-odology within a ‘family’ of participatory research methodologies and efforts to clarify their philosophical premises and validity claims.

Co-producing knowledge and the participatory research methods family1

The idea of generating ‘knowledge about a social system while at the same time, attempting to change it’ (Lewin, 1945, quoted in Drummond


Co-Producing Knowledge 35

and Themessl-Huber, 2007, p. 432); and research where ‘the subjects of the research contribute not only to the content of the research, for example the activity that is being researched, but also to the creative thinking that generates, manages, and draws conclusions from the research’ (Heron, 1981a, p. 153) gained ground in the 1960s and 1970s. Such ideas have undergone a revival since the 1990s, but mostly with-out the background political activism of the earlier decades.

The ‘family’ of methodologies includes Action Research, Cooperative Inquiry, Feminist Transformatory Research and those which have largely emerged from the global South and development thinkers and practi-tioners: Participative Action Research, Participatory Rural Appraisal and Participatory Learning and Action (PAR/PRA/PLA). Latin America has made a strong contribution to this field, alongside India; places where social mobilisation traditions have forged close relationships between intellectuals and activists, challenging the tendency of the former to become professionalised and contained within academic institutions. This tendency has undoubtedly generated some extraordinary contri-butions to our understanding of the natural and social world. At the same time it has enveloped the process of knowledge creation in dis-tancing conventions. Such conventions establish standards for claims to knowledge, but tend to simultaneously invalidate other forms of knowledge. This impedes exchanges between different forms, and leads those outside academia to devalue their own knowledge and/or resent academic knowledge.

In historical moments where people have struggled for rights and against oppressive regimes and capitalist exploitation, these distancing conventions are often challenged. Many intellectuals move out of the confines of academic institutions as well as the many non-academic spaces of knowledge creation, and reconvene in the public sphere of practice and action. Knowledge of all kinds is then applied to the strug-gle for social and political change and generated from it. These moments are often particularly creative, artistically, socially and politically.

This ‘family’ of methodologies has tried to capture the significance of these critical ‘breakout’ moments to the process of knowledge pro-duction, in the form of research methods for generating change as well as knowledge, even when activism has declined. However, methods and tools for conducting research do not make sense without a broader methodological framework, a theory of knowledge or epistemology which guides them. The ‘family’ shares the rejection of positivist social science and the premise that truth is only found through standing out-side the object of knowledge. Instead they posit that truth, as far as it is



possible to make claims to it, springs from the quality of the relation-ships built with the ‘researched’, that is, from deeper engagement with rather than distance from the ‘object’ of knowledge. They also chal-lenge methodologies which have sought to get closer to the lived reality of the researched, such as anthropological ‘participant observation’, but which do not aim to give the ‘observed’ a role in the research process (Wright and Nelson, 1995, p. 51).

Most of these methodologies derive from non-positivist, interpret-ative philosophy, in particular hermeneutics and phenomenology, which emphasise the social construction of reality rather than its objective existence, and the role of language, consciousness and shared meanings:

It is clear that we must distinguish between some notion of an ‘objective’ understanding or interpretation which is unattainable and meaningless, and reach for an interpretation which is ‘intersub-jectively valid for all the people who share the same world at a given time in history’. Understanding can be seen as a fusion of two per-spectives: that of the phenomenon itself, whether it be an ancient text, the life of an historical figure, or a current social or psycho-logical event or process; and that of the interpreter, located in his or her own life, in a larger culture, and in an historical point in time. (Reason and Rowan, 1981, p. 133; emphasis in original)

Cooperative Inquiry has arguably gone furthest in thinking through the philosophical underpinnings of its approach, as well as confront-ing some of the challenges from other methodological world views. In reflecting on our research process, the philosophical clarifications by the cooperative inquiry school act as a ‘benchmark’ against which we can assess our own aspiration to co-produce knowledge with our research participants and contribute to their change agendas.

Cooperative Inquiry: Deepening the philosophical basis for participatory research

Cooperative and participatory approaches break with linear conventions of academic research, which begin with the design by the researcher and end with conventional outputs in recognised published outlets. Instead, they stress research cycles and circularity, the ‘moving to and fro between experience and reflection’ (Heron, 1996, p. 4) or a ‘recipro-cal dialectic of continuous becoming’ (Drummond & Themessl-Huber,



2007, p. 444); processes summarised more prosaically in our research as: ‘making progress by being lost’ (Molano, quoted in Pearce, 2008, p. 1). There is a process of acknowledging prior (assumed) knowledge of the whole, and then allowing this to be corrected and deepened by knowledge of the parts, as further knowledge is generated and wider contexts of knowledge are revealed. The researcher is willing to go with this ‘flow’, get lost in complexity and recognise ‘unthought’ possibil-ities and contingent potentialities, generating moments of creative and unexpected leaps in mindsets.

Cooperative Inquirers and Action Researchers think a great deal about their own subjectivity in the research process and the subjectivity of the ‘researched’. John Heron in his early attempt to build a philosophical basis for this new paradigm research, as it was known, invoked the iden-tity of the ‘researcher’ as his starting point. The researcher recognises him or herself as an intelligent and self-directing agent, within relatively determining conditions of inner needs and environmental factors. The researcher, argues Heron, cannot apply to research subjects a model which is logically distinct to explanations for his or her own research behaviour: ‘Hence my subjects become my co-researchers: together we decide what possibilities for intelligent self-determination are to be investigated through action. If the subjects are not privy to the research thinking, they will not be functioning fully as intelligent agents. For a self-determining person is one who generates, or takes up freely as his own, the thinking that determines his action’ (Heron, 1981b, p. 22; emphasis in original). This establishes one of the guiding principles of cooperative inquiry: a valid science of persons must engage with human beings as persons. The separation between the researchers who do the thinking and the subjects who do the behaving is simply inconsistent with such a premise. This means acceptance of unpredictability and fallibility:

In a science of persons, all those engaged in the inquiry process enter the process as persons, bringing with them their intelligence, their intentionality, and their ability to reflect on experience and to enter relations with others – and, of course, also their capacity for self-deception, for consensus collusion, for rationalisation, and for refusal to see the obvious that also characterises human beings. (Reason, 2003, p. 205)

Critical subjectivity and self-reflection are closely related to crit-ical inter-subjectivity between human persons who create language together, something which in itself symbolises shared vision and



experience. Traditional researchers generated not a shared view of per-sons from their encounter, but statements ‘about their subjects’ who do not contribute to the statements: ‘For a science of persons as agents, my considered view of your reality without consulting you is a very dif-ferent matter from our considered view of our reality’ (Heron, 1981b, p. 27). Feminists have argued that these considerations require a differ-ent vocabulary of the research process:

I like to avoid terms like the ‘researched’, ‘informants’, respondents’, and ‘interviewees’. We need terms which do not create dichotom-ous, hierarchical oppositions between an active subject and a pas-sive object. The term participants perhaps best expresses the more egalitarian relations between researcher and those with whom the research takes place. (Schrijvers, 1995, reprinted 1997, p. 22)

Cooperative Inquiry seeks to address the questions of truth and val-idity in research through what has become known as the ‘extended epistemology’. In other words, the form of knowing most associated with science, which Heron calls ‘propositional’ knowledge, is extended to include at least three other forms: ‘experiential’, which encompasses knowing a person, place or process in face-to-face encounter and inter-action; ‘practical’ knowledge, which includes the skills and what Heron (1981b, p. 27) calls ‘knack’ or proficiencies which cannot be fully acquired from written instructions. There is a fourth non-linguistic form of knowledge which Heron (Ibid., p. 28) calls presentational. This is linked to imagination and the way humans orient themselves in space and time to coordinate perception and action in their environment, just as animals who have no linguistic capacity have to do all the time. Empirical knowledge of persons for the cooperative inquirer is most adequate when interdependence evolves between propositional, prac-tical and experiential knowledge combined with the fullest kind of presentational construing.

Knowledge is validated when each of the four kinds of knowledge is validated by its own internal criteria for preventing distortion and in the skills required for that, and by its interdependence and congruence with all the other forms of knowing (Heron, 1996, p. 33). Cooperative Inquiry seeks to fully distinguish ideas of validity and truth from positivism, even critiquing non-positivist social science which nevertheless seeks to assess validity in reassuring terms of quality, trustworthiness, credibil-ity and transferability etc., including a version of truth as corresponding ‘with facts’ (Heron, 1981a, p. 160). It has developed validity procedures



which address the problems which can arise through ‘uncritical subject-ivity’ (Heron, 1996, pp. 131–57), both in informative and transformative inquiry. These procedures include the idea of inquiry cycles of interaction between reflection and action (Heron, 1988). While not questioning the terms ‘truth’ and validity’ it seeks to re-ground them in acknowledge-ment of the different ways of knowing and the human mind’s creative capacity, rather than the existence of an objective truth waiting to be discovered by one form of propositional knowledge. Recognition that knowledge comes through ‘mutual awakening’ (Heron, 1996, p. 14), or participatory knowing which recognises that truth claims rest on subject-ivity, is critical to the undermining of the positivist claim of the research-er’s objectivity as a reliable and often categorical claim to truth.

Cooperative inquiry not only distinguishes between traditional forms of research, where the subjects of the research ‘are kept naïve about the research propositions and make no contribution at all to formulation as the stage of hypothesis-making, at the stage of final conclusions, or any-where in between’ (Heron, 1981b, p. 19), but also between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ forms of cooperative inquiry. In its ‘strong’ form, the subject actively contributes to creative thinking at all the stages of the research process. In its ‘weak’ form, the subject is merely informed of the research propositions and invited to assent or dissent. Another aspect of this dis-tinction is that between democratising content of the research so that co-researchers take part in all decisions about the research, and democ-ratising method, which goes beyond this and includes operational deci-sions, such as what methods are to be used to democratise the content (Heron, 1981b, p. 9).

Cooperative inquiry thus has produced an exacting set of criteria for what constitutes participatory research, summed up by Reason and Rowan (1981, p. 133):

A true human inquiry needs to be based firmly in the experi-ence of those it purports to understand, to involve a collaboration between ‘researcher’ and ‘subjects’ so that they may work together as co-researchers, and to be intimately involved in the lives and praxis of these co-researchers.

Co-producing knowledge in practice

A ‘weak’ version of Cooperative Inquiry

The benchmarks of cooperative inquiry challenge academic institu-tions to radically rethink the endeavour of research. The high standards



which are set are also a permanent reference against which to assess claims about involving the ‘researched’ in a research process. They help us avoid rhetorical claim-making to impress funders and audiences. They help reflect on the power dynamics in research spaces where aca-demics bring privileged access to resources of time and money with them, as well as benefits of education and access to institutions and platforms. It is incumbent upon all of us who aspire to conduct rigor-ous research which is driven by ethics and principles of social change and social justice, to take these benchmarks seriously. In the process of discovering their limitations in practice, they can also be refined, and theory and practice reconciled more fully.

We worked with a range of social actors in varying positions to power and authority and access to resources, in 13 cases chosen by the field researchers as exemplifying local dynamics as well as the agreed goals of the research (see Table 2.1). The project is much more complex in its demands than is common to the participatory research methods fam-ily, which are more often based on single site projects and micro proc-esses. We could assess our methodological approach at each sub-local case study level. However, the project also aimed to transcend the sub-local and contribute to local city-level learning, trans-city/ transnational learning and ultimately theoretical insight grounded in the knowledge co-produced from these multiple layers about whether and in what contexts new spaces of participation offer meaningful opportunities to transform policy or redirect it towards the (differentiated) needs of participants. To complicate the picture further, this grounded theoret-ical knowledge was intended also to offer practical guidance in the pol-icy field, that is, we hoped that the research would feed into practical thinking about participation and participatory institutions.

Our research endeavour was on the ‘weak’ side of participatory inquiry. The original research design was drawn up by one person, due to the logic of the research funding process. The field researchers were chosen for their known commitment to a progressive sociopolitical agenda of challenge to inequality and poverty, for a rigorous approach to social research and a critical position towards positivist inquiry. However, they did not all have a conscious option for co-producing knowledge; two at least were closer to the ‘critical individual’ intellectual model. The methodology was discussed with all field researchers and refined in our two team meetings and two subsequent visits to each of the field sites by the research director. However, it was never going to be a uni-form approach. Some field researchers were less connected to the social activists and participants they were to research with than others. Travel


Table 2.1 Innovations and case studies

Medellín Porto Alegre Caracas Manchester Bradford Salford

Innovation Planning and Participatory Budgeting Programme (PP)

Participatory Budget (PB)

Bolivarian Participatory Innovations

Community Empowerment and Community and Voluntary Sector Network

Participatory Budget and Voluntary and Community Sector Representation

Community Committees/devolved budgeting

Case Study 1 Zona 1 community representatives to PP Consultation Council (CC)

Community Association of Chácara do Primeiro

The Technical Water Table in La Pedrera

CN4M (Community Network for Manchester);Hamilton Road Area Community Association, Whalley Range Forum

Bradford Vision’s Participatory Budget Team

Salford City Council

Case Study 2 Comuna 11 reps to CC

The Association of Popular Educators of Porto Alegre, AEPPA

The Autonomous Community Organization in Carpintero-Barrio Union/Federation of Autonomous Community Organisations (OCA)

Community Pride Initiative

Voluntary and Community Sector Leaders

Case Study 3 Council Officers in charge of running, controlling and monitoring PP

The Rubbish Recylers Collective

CN4M and community participation in Urban Regeneration

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and logistical difficulties often got in the way of building greater con-nectedness. The very size of the cities made it difficult to reach some of the field sites, and nightfall brought dangers (Lopez, 2009, this vol-ume). Researchers trained in the separating and distancing logic of the academy do not find the transition to a more horizontal logic that easy. It is counter-cultural as far as the academy is concerned. Equally, the accumulated history of research used in extractive ways and the result-ing distance between the intellectual and the lived world meant that building relationships between academics and non-academics, and in particular with poor and disadvantaged people has many preconcep-tions to overcome on both sides. This is also true where we worked with decision makers, who often viewed academics as overly ‘theoretical’. Sometimes there is animosity or cynicism, but more often and particu-larly amongst the poor, simply no recognition that they could contrib-ute to ‘knowledge’.

Our main premise was that research participants would agree to col-laborate with the field researchers because the research would help them to reflect on their social reality and practice. However, given that the key framing propositions of the research did not include the par-ticipation of the researched, this premise had to be tested. The first stage of the research was to see how far different groups would be inter-ested in such collaboration and then to work with them on whether the research questions we had outlined without their participation cohered with issues of concern to them. We developed a methodology which would involve continuous dialogue with participants around emerging issues, and we aimed to ‘democratise the content’ of the research when-ever we could by changing our pathway according to responses. We did not, however, include our research participants in the operational deci-sions. The extent to which we shifted direction was the decision of the researchers, not the researched participants.

Nor were we able to develop a process which involved our research participants in the collection of data, something which injects a par-ticipatory component into information gathering. The latter would have been very time consuming for the scale of our project, and is an example of sacrificed participatory components to funding and time logics. Our research data collection took the form of participant obser-vation and field diaries. Participant observation often meant taking part in participatory activities with our research participants, rather than classical anthropological distanced observation. In Porto Alegre, the field researchers worked with one of the research partners to help them produce information about their activities and gave them training



(Baierle, 2009, this volume). Indeed, the aim was to support reflection and encourage analysis amongst participants in a way which would strengthen their change agendas. This took slightly different forms in all of our case studies. We also conducted interviews with participants and other informants and made use of primary documents in a conven-tional effort at some kind of triangulation of evidence. We used NVivo software to add rigour to the analysis of qualitative data without the research participants, generating a division of labour between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in terms of processing the knowledge which we all produced.

The compensation for these weaknesses in the design of the research was in the feedback processes, which aimed to ensure that analysis was shared with research participants in ways which enabled their know-ledge to reshape the propositions of the field researchers. This feedback was expected to be continuous as researchers and participants built their relationships and knowledge flowed ‘to and fro’ between them. There was also cross-site knowledge sharing and iteration through the presentation and discussion of a document in all three languages which summarised the key findings of the research (ICPS, 2008). This docu-ment aspired to be an accessible, visual interim summary of key issues, which would be subjected to critical discussion with research partici-pants, who in this way would feed into the analytical development of the research. In reality, it turned out to be a booklet of nearly 70 pages, which was in no way accessible to the least literate of our participants. However it was appreciated by most participants; it served as a focus point of discussion in feedback events and led to revisions of conclu-sions presented in the chapters of this volume. More importantly, it was a clear message that we had prioritised research participants when it came to the ‘outputs’ of the research.

The idea of co-producing knowledge recognises that knowledge is plu-ral and that our research participants input their forms of knowledge which is turned into propositional knowledge – by the researchers – for dissemination to academic and policy audiences. It is the recognition of the value of experiential knowledge which propositional knowledge draws on that formed a core element in the methodology and which encouraged field researchers to work with their participants not to merely extract from them, but to value how they articulated their inter-actions in whatever ways they expressed them. Experiential knowledge does not always, however, include critical self-reflection on experience for various reasons. There was a difference even within our Porto Alegre cases. The group of popular educators with whom we worked, AEPPA, were from a poor region of the city, but one where local women had



been through a long process of self-reflection and had reached the point where they could progress claims outside the locality. The research iden-tified issues such as the dangers of concentration of leadership and the feedback resulted in a serious discussion in which it was clear that the women had already taken steps to address this and the research only stimulated further discussion and reflection. They saw the local field researcher as a real partner. In the case of the (mostly female) rubbish recyclers, various factors had ‘resulted in an inward movement towards the daily routines of the unit’ (Navarro, 2009, this volume), and co-production of knowledge proved very difficult.

Our research did not include presentational, imaginal knowledge forms, though art, media and other expressions of social experience might in hindsight have been fruitful. The research rested on ‘knack’ or practical skills, which in the case of our field researchers was often the ability to build horizontal and transparent relationships with research participants. This is not easy when academics are viewed by the ‘researched’ as privileged or founts of all valid knowledge or a potential source of resources in a few instances. Such attitudes are an ongoing leg-acy of our narrow view of knowledge, which is also mirrored in academ-ics’ views of themselves. Co-production of knowledge, to be successful, requires self-challenge on these assumptions, something which often takes place in hindsight rather than in the process itself.

A premise for this research was maximum transparency about aims and objectives and our own capacities. This ethics was a fundamen-tal ingredient of the methodology; however it does not guide research-ers when dealing with specific difficulties arising between researchers and research participants. The relationship between the two is based mostly on a verbal agreement, or sometimes a written compact. One of our researchers used the latter. Questions of anonymity in citation are agreed and what information can be used for which purposes. However, the participatory inquiry family does not discuss enough the conflicts and difficulties which can arise in cooperative research methodolo-gies. There is a very thorough discussion of power and knowledge (e.g., Gaventa and Cornwall, 2008). However, inequalities and differences generate resentments, anger and resistance to learning new things and sharing knowledge. Research participants are embedded in com-plex situations and these often generate hard questions about power relationships amongst each other. How far does the researcher chal-lenge participants (the reverse should also be possible, of course)? If the research generates knowledge and understanding about problematic questions, what is the responsibility of the field researcher towards the



research participants? These questions are relevant to a number of our case study settings, but were not as clear as they might have been when we embarked on the fieldwork.

Co-production of knowledge is a less certain and controlled method-ology than traditional research. This is a strength. It celebrates contin-gency and the unexpected, as these are indicative of a robust, sincere and democratic engagement between researcher and research partici-pants. It is not always comfortable, as planning and certainty are much more reassuring methodologies for the researcher who needs to reach a conclusion about an issue and draw – often unnaturally – a process to closure through the propositional knowledge generated at the end of a certain time frame. However, co-production retains the freshness of messy social reality. Researcher and research participants embark on a journey together in which knowledge is continuously exchanged and practice developed along new lines. Our aim with this research was to value and support any unexpected and emergent new areas of thinking and practice.

Given that the research team had very different experiences, some much more embedded in formal academic discourse and practice and others much more in action and praxis, a minimal set of principles was better than a fully elaborated plan. We shared a set of guiding questions, but we did not all answer all of them and field researchers added new ones and adapted the questions to context. The research did not start with a template, and therefore the conclusions do not offer a comparative synthesis of findings against such a template. We aimed at coherence rather than uniformity in the application of our method-ology across such different urban spaces.

Implementation challenges

Our 13 cases studies have thrown up a vast range of issues with respect to the implementation of the research method in practice. It helps a great deal when researchers have an organic relationship with the research participants, prior histories and prior trust. Academics step-ping out of the university have to overcome years of academic training, career incentives and reputation risks in deciding to work in collab-oration with non-academics and particularly poor communities who are very used to thinking of themselves as ‘ignorant’. In our Bradford case study, the researcher found that assumptions about how academics work had to be overcome in order to build the relationships required for co-production to work. She found an expectation amongst people that research only exists to further the careers of academics, and that



she was expected to guard her ‘data’ (Blakey, 2009, this volume). Our research showed that in the cases where the researchers were embedded in histories of action research with the researched participants or other relationships, the fluidity and sustainability of the relationships were strongest and such suspicions did not have to be overcome. Where the relationships had to be built from scratch, trust had to be gained, and given that we had not built the research project with our chosen part-ners, the challenge of ownership was greater.

In Caracas, the research was greatly enriched by the relationship of trust the researcher built, although she did not have prior rela-tionships. However it is not clear how much the research findings subsequently benefited the groups we worked with. This was due to objective circumstances and contingent events, however, as much as researcher/’researched’ relationship history. In one case, government policy shifts left the project partners in limbo over the future; in this case the research findings generated critical discussion and a contextual understanding of what had happened, but was not able to strengthen the progress of the group. But in the other, a landslide destroyed the houses and water pipes which were being laid as part of the participa-tory water delivery process which was our case study. This meant that the research findings could only be handed over rather than discussed in depth. A spin off from this work, however, was the audiovisual arch-ive with photos and videos of the two-year participatory water improve-ment process which the field researcher created and made available to the research participants (Lopez Maya, 2009, this volume).

Prior relationships with the researched can, however, also lead to dilemmas around what kind of support a researcher should give. In one of the Manchester case studies, the partner organisation, which was known to the researcher, entered a funding crisis as the research began and the activities the research would have focused on could not be taken forward. This led to a challenge for the researcher who did not wish to abandon the group. In the end, the case study was used to reflect with the group some of the reasons why their particular approach to grass-roots work had become difficult to fund.

The assumption we had made was that the non-governmental actors we would work with had a clear agenda of what they wanted to achieve and would happily recognise the value of engagement with academ-ics. This was not the case in all of our case studies. We mostly avoided the temptation to step into this vacuum, and tried instead to support the group’s agenda construction through the research. However, it did mean that our aims were not necessarily clear to the people we were



working with. Every effort was made to explain that this research was about mutual learning, but if only the academics understand this, it is not a very equitable and meaningful process in the end. Nevertheless, where this was a problem, it did not mean that no learning took place on the side of the research participants. Our field researchers did not wait until the formal feedback sessions before sharing insights and reflections and the ongoing dialogues often helped participants articu-late agendas more clearly. In Porto Alegre, it helped a group new to par-ticipatory budgets to access this space more effectively.

Another set of issues which emerged centred on whether the researcher should share the specific agendas of the participants they were working with. In the Bradford case, the researcher took the view that co-producing knowledge requires ‘a level of trust that is based on a sense of shared objectives ... which allows the researcher to become a partner and a fellow actor, rather than an outside observer. I sug-gest that research premised on co-production of knowledge with the “researched” precludes the possibility of neutrality. It does not preclude disagreement’ (Blakey, 2009, this volume). This researcher argued that rather than make it difficult to challenge and question research par-ticipants, agenda sharing and convergence enabled her to be taken ser-iously when she raised some difficult issues. In this case, the researcher was able to feedback observations on the participatory budgeting pro-cess which at first created some unease, but which later was seen to have helped the practitioners consider other angles on the process. At the same time, the researcher learnt about the real challenges practitioners face when they have to balance demands from different political and institutional actors.

In our Medellín case, the researcher was part of the strategic munici-pal team implementing the participatory planning and budgeting pro-cess (albeit with a background in non-governmental public action). In that sense he was an ‘insider’ (researching with neighbourhood groups involved in the process) but also an ‘outsider’ (a municipal employee) to the groups he was working with. While this position enabled him to work with complete understanding of the process, it introduced some ambiguities in terms of whether he shared objectives with the groups he worked with. In this case, the researcher did not find it easy to tackle directly the controversial question of ‘community oligarchs’ (Uran, 2009, this volume) which he observed in the neighbourhoods, although in feedback sessions the issue was raised. In terms of learn-ing from the research process, the final feedback session in the city suggested that public employees rather than grassroots participants



had the most changed their mindset through participation in the research.

Conclusion

Although a ‘weak’ variant of cooperative inquiry, we consider that our research method gained hugely from its efforts to produce knowledge with our research participants. At the very least, it ensured respect-ful engagement rather than objectification. It promoted ethically based relationships. It aspired, with partial success, to extract know-ledge which returned to those who helped generate it. The feedback and field visits of the research director linked the multiple sites and gave some potential for global learning at the local level as well as our global team level. We gained insights which we would not have done by standing ‘outside’ in an observational mode, and we were able to ensure that something was left behind from the research which might encourage more critical reflection on practice amongst research participants.

Hindsight tells us that if the research participants are not involved from the beginning in designing a process, which they have actively demanded and wanted, there will never be a complete understanding of the significance of the methodology. If the research participants do not have a clear agenda of their own, the researcher may be tempted to step in more deeply; we mostly avoided this, but nevertheless learnt to recog-nise the risk. Our efforts demonstrate that when working with poor and deprived communities in complex environments, the ‘ self-determining agency’ of the research participants may be limited by objective con-ditions, by gatekeepers within groups, by divisive and fragile funding regimes and other factors. This generates power imbalances which undoubtedly weaken the horizontality of the co-researching ethos. These imbalances and pitfalls of real research processes are not always captured in the conceptual literature, partly because the range of possi-bilities is very diverse.

The limited timetable of funded research means that researchers end up exiting from situations they create, and potentially contributing to the cynicism felt by non-governmental actors when outside actors enter and leave. In at least leaving behind the preliminary findings, there is a sense of a physical reminder which could one day find itself being re-read and re-applied in new circumstances. And as explained previ-ously, in at least one case we left visual material as well. Our continu-ous dialogue with our participants showed something of our sincerity



in trying to give back as well as take from. Undoubtedly, the level of participation, of engagement and of real understanding of the meth-odology varied. Social positioning played a key role. The poorest in the Recycling Unit in Porto Alegre did not grasp what we meant, and our researcher reminds us of the dangers of thinking that people who have to focus on survival could easily prioritise a research process of the kind we proposed.

Co-producing knowledge is a methodology in construction and will always be in construction. It is a challenge, like all participatory meth-ods, to the traditions and conventions of the academic mainstream. The trials and tribulations of our methodology suggest that an experimental mindset is needed to embark on a shared journey between researchers and activist/practitioners. Participatory inquiry has not yet managed to challenge the dominant positivist approach in our mainstream institu-tions. Nor, we argue, should it become an equally reified, hegemonic research methodology. It has many problems of its own to resolve. One criticism is that it leaves outside a range of voices and actors who are not in the inner group of the inquiry. However, the values of co-producing knowledge include a constant awareness of such boundaries and exclu-sions, and these exist in some form in most methodologies. The argu-ment for participatory forms of inquiry lies ultimately in their potential to work with knowledge-producing agents of change, ensuring that ideas about the social world are informed by and return to those who can best use them.

The building of a shared methodology based on our ‘weak’ meth-odology of co-producing knowledge provided coherence to the project and enabled us to be clear about the parameters of our claims: a mod-est contribution to a deepened understanding of participatory action within innovative opportunities, based on in-depth cases, tracked for-mally over a year (but given the extended feedback process, over nearly two years in most cases) and through continuous interactions between researchers and research participants. Significance is given to how these research participants gave meanings to their actions and situated prac-tice, in an effort to illuminate aspects which can escape shorter, extract-ive quantitative and qualitative inquiry. The final chapter of the book asks what further claims we might make about the contribution of this research to the field of participation studies.

Note

1. An extended version of this discussion can be found in J. Pearce (2008).



Bibliography

Drummond, J.S., and Themessl-Huber, M. 2007. The cyclical process of action research: The contribution of Gilles Deleuze. Action Research 5 no. 4: 430–48.

Gaventa, J., and Cornwall, A. 2008. Power and Knowledge. In The Sage Handbook of Action Research, Participative Inquiry and Practice 2nd ed., eds. P. Reason and H. Bradbury, 172–89. London: Sage.

Heron, J. 1981a. Experiential Research Methodology. In Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research, eds. P. Reason and J. Rowan, 153–66. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Heron, J. 1981b. Philosophical basis for a new paradigm. In Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research, eds. P. Reason and J. Rowan, 19–35. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

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Heron, J. 1996, reprinted 1998. Co-operative Inquiry. London: Sage Publications.International Centre for Participation Studies. 2008. ‘Here, the People Decide?’

New Forms of Participation in The City. Bradford: ICPS Research Briefing.Pearce, J. 2008. ‘Making Progress Because we are Lost’ Critical Reflections on the

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51

3Porto AlegrePopular Sovereignty or Dependent Citizens?Sérgio Gregorio Baierle

Introduction

This chapter is about participatory budgeting (PB), a municipal innov-ation pioneered in Porto Alegre and multiplied in diverse forms across the world. Its focus is a delicate transition (2005–09) between two dis-tinct political projects: democratic radicalisation (in crisis) and local solidarity governance (in ascendance and backed by the World Bank). It is not a historical overview of the participatory budget in Porto Alegre. This is the subject of numerous studies. Participatory budgeting has passed through different phases across its existence, and has also been the object of varied theoretical-practical appropriations. For the study in this text, we are taking as a starting point the more-or-less official principles adopted to characterise PB since the Tarso Genro adminis-tration (1993–96) and discussed in the book Orçamento Participativo: a Experiência de Porto Alegre (Genro and de Souza, 1997): direct, voluntary and universal participation; self-regulation; discussion of the budget in its entirety; and social control over the execution of the investment plan. It is the practice of these principles that have made PB more than a simple governmental programme. We are dealing with a proposed social contract built from the bottom up, aiming to invert the priorities of the municipal budget through direct citizen participation (above all from the poor and working class) and based on the criteria of social justice. This vision is significantly different from the analysis of com-mentators linked to the World Bank, for example, for whom PB is a tool for good governance:

It is a tool for educating, engaging, and empowering citizens and strengthening demand for good governance. The enhanced



transparency and accountability that participatory budgeting cre-ates can help reduce government inefficiency and curb clientelism, patronage and corruption. (Shah, 2007, p. 1)

For this chapter, we worked with two groups of people, one formed through historic participation in PB and one new to PB, and recorded how they experienced the transition from one vision to the other. The former is a movement for education by and for the poor; the latter is a newly formed neighbourhood association. We trace how these col-lective actors adapted to the participatory opportunities of PB, the increasing significance of contracts to community organisations and the gradual return of instrumental party politics, for example, trading favours for votes. Over time, and notably with the shift towards partici-patory governance, contracts and clientelism became sources of a resur-gent ‘dependent citizenship’, weakening the acquisition of autonomous and strategic intelligence amongst the poorest groups of the city and the foundation of PB in a democratic ideal of popular sovereignty.

Porto Alegre: Two decades of municipal innovation

The grassroots struggle for democracy in Brazil

Brazil is no longer a society organised as an oligarchy, however, the simple adoption of republican practices in the selection of new elites did not alter the social standing of the poor. The popular classes are not characterised by poverty in and of itself, but rather the social rela-tionship of exclusion and exploitation, which is presented as natural. It becomes even more difficult to perceive when economic activities required for survival became more informalised, outsourced and indi-vidualised. It is our hypothesis that this difficulty of perception is one of the variables that helps explain the ‘smooth’ transition between the democratic management project carried out by the administrations of the left alliance, or Popular Front, presided over by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) in Porto Alegre (1989–2004), and the new local solidarity governance project based on corporate social responsibility brought about under the centre-right alliance presided over by Mayor José Fogaça (since 2005).

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre emerged in 1989 in very spe-cific circumstances. The PT sought to construct a wider base of sup-port than its original union membership. It also faced a fiscal crisis and a lack of majority in the City Council. This necessity led to the construction of a partnership between the government and community


Porto Alegre: Dependent Citizens? 53

movements, in which the local administration opened up to projects brought by working-class communities and between 30 and 50 per cent of municipal government investment was allocated for them to imple-ment the decisions which they took.

Community movements were particularly strong in Porto Alegre at the time. Neighbourhood assocations emerged in great numbers in the 1970s under the military dictatorship, to demand access to city ser-vices. By 1985–86, 22 per cent of the population of Porto Alegre were affiliated to 240 associations (Baiocchi, 2005, p. 42), making it the best organised of the six biggest Brazilian cities. In addition, by 1983 they had formed an umbrella body, the UAMPA, which went on to pro-pose the participation of neighbourhood associations in budget issues (Avritzer, 2009). The early associations were also supported by progres-sive clergy and NGOs, middle-class activists who aimed to politicise the local struggles (Baiocchi, 2005, p.29) and this associational energy was closely linked to the struggle for democracy between 1974 and 1988. The survival of the military dictatorship for so many years educated the social movements in micro-political struggle. Health centres, public schools, mothers’ clubs, religious, cultural and sport groups, neighbour-hood associations and community centres became strategic places for political resistance in most large Brazilian cities. In 1988 a new consti-tution, the ‘civic constitution’, was introduced which reflected some of the demands of these movements, promoting both decentralisation, fiscal deconcentration and local tax reform and new forms of participa-tion, such as sector-based (e.g., health) public councils. This heralded a new moment in democratic innovation in Brazil at the local level.

However, at the national level, the first presidential elections since 1960 were won by a truly neoliberal government in 1989. The negative image of the State from the years of military dictatorship led to a gen-eric portrayal of the State as representing waste, incompetence and inef-ficiency, whose opposite would lie in the market. President Fernando Collor, however, would not finish his term, resigning amid corruption scandals. The gap between society and economics would be healed as of 1994, with the adoption of the Real Plan and the later reelection of sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso as president (1995–2002). However, over the ensuing years, the unions of the automobile sector, which had played such an important role in the formation of the PT and the struggles for democracy in the factory and the political sphere in the 1970s and 1980s, were much weakened. The progressive Catholic Church suffered intervention from Rome. Thus, the role of base eccle-siastical communities, which had played a central role in the grassroots



democracy movement, was gradually reduced. These and other factors explain why, upon winning the presidency in 2002, the PT under Lula took a conciliatory approach to the market and gradually moved away from the strong participatory commitment of its earlier years.

Direct participation and the participatory budget process

Nevertheless, in the post-dictatorship years of the 1990s, participation opportunities had multiplied with the right to elect muncipal govern-ments. The PT was increasingly successful in these elections, with 32 mayors in 1988, rising to 53 in 1992, to 115 in 1996 to 187 in 2000 (Souza, 2001, p. 164). Participatory budgeting was gradually adopted by many cities in Brazil; between 2002 and 2004, 43 per cent of the population from cities with more than 100 thousand inhabitants lived in cities with a PB (Marquetti, 2003). However, it was the experience of Porto Alegre which became the main national and international ref-erence in this regard, especially after the World Social Forums (2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005).

When the PB began in 1989 in Porto Alegre, it was impossible to fore-see the scenario of neoliberal governance which emerged in the new millennium. The singularity of the PB lay in the opening of a space for direct participation with deliberative power, that is, on the principle of the ‘individual as a subject of citizenship’. The new PT administration found itself facing demands and criticisms from organised groups and supporters just as it was getting to grips with the challenges of managing a city. The strength of organised sectors was important for mobilising the poorest, but at the same time could distort the needs of people who were not organised. By 1991, the decision had been made that societal demands should emerge through participants themselves rather than arbitration between their demands by the administration (Baiocchi, 2005, p. 39), that is, direct participation. This had not been the demand of the neighbourhood organisations; they had sought only decentral-isation of the administrative management of budget planning.

The shift to the idea of the individual as the participatory subject was about reconnecting the link between the material reproduction of life and civic participation through direct participation of each individual citizen in both spheres. Direct participation meant extending the mass nature of participatory democracy. This was not intended as a blow against organised social movements, nor a strategy to pit communi-ties against each other in a dispute for diminished resources. Quite the opposite; it was a bid to promote a form of social mobilisation which could foster deliberation about how budgetary resources could best



meet the needs of the popular classes. Civil society organisations con-tinued to play an important role as catalysts for collective action, but direct participation reached out to those who had never been involved in such action.

In the dominant tradition of democratic political theory, this ‘direct link’ between the masses (mobilisation of masses) and civility (political participation) was always associated with times of ‘revolutionary chaos’ (armed insurrections, hegemony crises, economic collapse, etc.). It would be impossible, according to this vision, to maintain the ‘Pandora’s box’ permanently open. It is precisely this point of view that surprised the Greek/French philosopher, Cornelius Castoriadis, in his visit to Porto Alegre in 1991, when he said: ‘I always saw organisations and popular leaderships mobilising against the State. Never had I seen them mobil-ise to orient it. It is the first time I see this’ (Genro, 1995, p. 165). In fact, contrary to the dominant paradigm, chaos did not ensue. Instead of fighting against each other for private interests, the participants of the PB had the opportunity to develop the public parameters themselves to process the proposals that they brought from their own reality. The methodology for prioritising the works and services to be carried out grew out of the acknowledgement of potential conflicts and their trans-formation into an investment plan.

In a nutshell, PB is composed of a series of meetings – preparatory, decision making and monitoring – that take place at different levels and in a fixed annual cycle. Regional (the region in Porto Alegre refers to the 16, now 17, administrative divisions of the city) and thematic assem-blies establish priorities, elect councillors to the Participatory Budgeting Council (Conselho do Orçamento Participativo, COP), choose the number of delegates (1 for every 10 people present) to the prioritisa-tion meetings and review the budget for the preceding year at the local level. Participation is universal at these basic decision-making meet-ings. Subsequent meetings of regional and thematic delegates determine concrete investment proposals within prioritised areas. The final result forms the Investment Plan of the Council, which is arrived at through weighting priorities, technical criteria (feasibility) and social justice criteria (level of deprivation, size of the population). Members of the Participatory Budgeting Council can have their mandate revoked by the regional or thematic assemblies at any time. Rules are decided by par-ticipants themselves through a process in which the government par-ticipates but does not have a vote. The government submits the Council budget – not only the investments – for discussion. The Investment Plan agreed to after the city councillors pass the Annual Budgetary Law



is published and made available to participants and interested parties to monitor its execution. This can also be done through the Council’s website, although figures for actual execution are not made available.

PB not only attracted existing neighbourhood organisations, it stim-ulated participation amongst those who had never previously been organised. The number of participants grew rapidly, from 628 people in 1990 to over 6,000 in 1992, stabilising at around 7,000 between 1993 and 1996 and expanding again to reach a peak of 17,000 in 2002, after which there has been a decline to around 11,500 in 2006 (World Bank, 2008, p. 22). Although the very poor were underrepresented (see Navarro, this book), the general profile of participants is that they are from lower income households, are older and have low to medium lev-els of education. Participation between the genders is fairly equal at the community assembly level, but women are underrepresented in the COP and delegates forum, something which began to change in 2005 (Ibid.). Around one-fifth of the population has participated in the COP at some point in their lives (Ibid., p. 2).

In its ‘golden years’ (1993–2000), PB became the backbone of a vast participatory process, including other direct and indirect forms of participation and attracting other actors (unions, business entities, professional associations, religious and cultural groups). PB had some significant redistributive effects. As Marquetti (2003) points out, thanks to the PB it was possible to reverse priorities and prioritise the poor-est regions of the city. There was a dramatic reduction in the lack of basic services (water, public transport, waste collection, schooling etc.) as well as in the areas of housing, agricultural regularisation and urbanisation.

The monopoly of representation by residency, which some more conservative neighbourhood associations wanted, was challenged by almost a decade of leadership renovation. The openness to direct par-ticipation also encouraged an alliance between community movements and certain categories of workers, such as primary education teachers and health professionals, among others. This alliance made it possible, in certain situations, to compensate for asymmetries of power and facil-itated, for instance, the training of participants for dialogue with the government. The PB is based on a goal of equality between government agents and city residents, particularly the poorest. However, it is obvi-ous that if the relevant information for the discussion is monopolised by the government, it does not even need to have a right to vote at the meetings to be able to control the process. These alliances, where they were possible, helped the poorest to learn to use participatory



opportunities more effectively. One example is the introduction of the topic of land regularisation within the PB. In the early 1990s, the gov-ernment had no intention of extending the possible range of propos-als for inclusion in PB. However, the capacity for pressure developed through the articulation between movements, NGOs and professionals from the areas of law and urban planning, both from inside and out-side the government, ended up forcing the inclusion of this issue in the PB. As of the end of the 1990s, however, as each new challenge shifted to a new arena, a new council or a new commission, a gap would arise between articulate and nonarticulate actors, new participants and ‘pro-fessional citizens’. Little by little, the ‘cacique’ (boss/gatekeeper) culture of the presidents of neighbourhood associations, which was supposed to have been buried, returned.

At the beginning, the increase in the number of councils, forums, con-ferences and congresses was able to generate a vast participatory energy. However, contradictions started to arise between various interests and administrative groups over the implementation of guidelines, projects and actions. Despite all the effort to form a participatory sphere, the process only went half the way. It did not achieve a reform of the State and a planning and development model effectively able to underpin and nurture the new participatory dimension. That is, the participa-tion expansion in Porto Alegre in the 1990s was possible thanks to the infinite increase in the number of participatory arenas rather than to structural transformations of the administrative machinery.

From direct popular participation to neoliberal governance

Latin American history is full of stories of the mobilisation of masses by the State to support specific political projects (such as the populist state and the national-development project). This is, as a matter of fact, the typical way to build citizenship in the main countries of the continent. The unprecedented feature of Porto Alegre and other Brazilian cities in the early 1990s was the openness of the State towards the projects that came from society, in a situation where the group that was in power, the Workers’ Party, was a movement in itself and not the new political class.

However, by the new millenium, fiscal limits affecting large urban projects and regional PB proposals coincided with tensions between participatory arenas and increasing intra- and extra-government dis-putes. The basic causes included the negative repercussion on Council tax revenue of State-imposed tax exemption policies on plots of land; the end of the ‘two-month’ rule which corrected Council taxes and



the salaries of Council officers according to the price index, and the partial reversal of the decentralisation of tax revenues that had taken place after the Constitution of 1988. By the end of the 1990s, the share of Councils in the national tax cake had fallen from 16.2 per cent in 1995 to 15 per cent in 2000 (Vitali Bordin, 2005). Despite the decentral-isation of many social services, such as health, housing, social welfare, among others, locally imposed tax increases were politically impossible. The fiscal situation forced the Council Executive to take traditional adjustment measures: salary freezing, cost cutting, intra-government loans and strict cash-flow control.

The government tried to hide the fiscal situation from the public until 2002. However, with the increased delay in the execution of pro-posals and the decision to end the two-month rule, the crisis came to light, generating a wave of claims for more budgetary transparency that ended up breaking the relationship of trust in government information, even among members of the government themselves. The Workers’ Party would end 16 years of administration with 3 years of fiscal deficit and 966 PB proposals pending execution. Politically, heightened elect-oral contention pushed the PB management towards the re-building of hierarchies inside communities. This was triggered by the expansion of contracts with community bodies for the outsourcing of services. Through these agreements (community nurseries, extra classes, adult literacy programmes, cultural, sport etc.), the gap between PB coun-cillors and delegates grew. There was a progressive transformation of community movements into ‘Third Sector’ bodies, emphasising their service delivery role.

It was not PB that was rejected when the PT lost control of the admin-istration in 2004. PB was an important part of the incoming adminis-tration’s campaign, and was still solidly supported in the city. But the slogan of the Fogaça administration, ‘building changes, maintaining achievements’, heralded a very different set of assumptions about the meaning and purpose of PB. The World Bank’s analysis of the limits of PB had provided a rationale for ‘building changes’. The World Bank (2008, p. 5) acknowledged that PB is a mechanism with significant potential for pro-poor distributive impacts that in the long run result in poverty reduction. However, its positive impact on fiscal performance was less evident, even though the World Bank’s research did not suggest that the increase in operational expenses after 1996 in Porto Alegre and the resulting fiscal problem was connected to PB itself. These views led the new administration to question the sustainability of PB, and to argue that it needed to be more socially and politicaly pluralist, less focused on



the popular classes and to foster social and human capital amongst par-ticipants, who, it argued, had become too dependent on resources from the State (Interview, Municipal Secretary for Political Coordination and Local Governance, Porto Alegre, 18 September 2006).

The administration was in fact reversing the logic upon which PB was built. The capitalist development of the ‘global city’ was now the driving force of municipal policies. The information from popular par-ticipation becomes almost irrelevant when effective priorities for the city must respond to capitalist development needs of the city, not those from the poor. Thus, although the main PB demand for the last eight years has been popular housing, the main need for the city from the perspective of capitalist development is the underground. The idea of PB as a source of planning was abandoned. The remodelling of the urban centre, essential in a ‘global city’ project, called for the removal from the central areas of all ‘decapitalised’ sectors or sectors that ‘do not add any value’ to the project. Police officers and organisations of the ‘Third Sector’ are hired to ‘rescue’ the ‘nonprofitable’ from the streets. A dual-speed society is on the horizon: the super-rich connected people and the slow mass of poor people. In this scenario, PB becomes a wel-fare sub-sphere.

Co-producing knowledge

The research was carried out by the Urban Studies and Advisory Centre (Centro de Assessoria e Estudos Urbanos, henceforth CIDADE). CIDADE is an NGO founded in 1988 by university students and young profes-sionals specialising in architecture, engineering, law and social sciences, as well as a group of community leaders. It focuses on strengthening processes of participatory democracy, civic rights and urban reform. Its principal activities include research on local public policies and the experiences of community-based grassroots organisations and partici-pants in PB. CIDADE has followed PB since its inception, with more active involvement since 1993. Through the Municipal Innovations Project we had the opportunity to construct an updated evaluation of PB in Porto Alegre on two levels. The first through dialogue with PB councillors and delegates and the second through building a rela-tionship with two grassroots experiences: the Popular Educators Association of Porto Alegre (Associação de Educadores Populares de Porto Alegre – AEPPA) and the Residents’ Association of Chácara do Primeiro. Co-producing knowledge in Porto Alegre was about the inter-action of CIDADE with these experiences, and we consider ourselves



an actor as well as researcher in the municipal innovations of Porto Alegre.

We crossed paths with AEPPA and Chácara do Primeiro at a critical moment. The two grassroots experiences were chosen for both their exemplary nature and their uniqueness. AEPPA is one of the most developed expressions of PB in its various phases. Unlike Chácara, the members of AEPPA have been deeply involved in PB since the begin-ning. They are social activists who have focused on the struggle for child-centred education in the city’s poorest areas and for formal rec-ognition and training of popular educators. AEPPA itself was set up in 1996, and officially recognised in 2000 when it won the struggle to get professional recognition for popular ‘lay’ educators in infant education, socio-educational support programmes, youth work and adult educa-tion. AEPPA has been able to guarantee formal education at the second-ary school and university level to more than 200 popular educators. CIDADE met with the organisation’s directors, did participant observa-tion of assemblies and meetings, and interviews with people working outside the organisation, but who have a central role in the progress of popular educators in Porto Alegre.

Chácara do Primeiro is an area that was occupied by military police-men whose reaction to progressive impoverishment led them to occupy urban land belonging to the very entity for which they work, the Brigada Militar (Military Brigade). In other words, military policemen, frequently called upon by the judiciary to carry out favela (slum) removal opera-tions, decided to risk breaking the legal order, although with the con-sent of their superiors. The community got involved only very recently in PB, allowing us to evaluate how far the ethical-pedagogical character of PB has been preserved in the recent political context. The Chácara do Primeiro Association came into the PB to demand improvements for the more than 300 families living in the area and they were seeking allies. CIDADE became one of these in the course of this research, carrying out training activities, producing a newsletter for the Association and supporting their efforts, while tracking the difficulties and possibilities they encountered.

In Porto Alegre, co-producing knowledge meant – ideally – the effort of creating a language of mutual understanding. Our work with Chácara do Primeiro and AEPPA involved an effective agenda of dialogue from the beginning, defining guiding questions, tasks and flexible targets, but it produced a different learning agenda in each case. While with Chácara we needed to provoke people to react against our role as men-tors; with AEPPA this vision was unsurprisingly refused and an equal to



equal dialogue was claimed, leading to a productive pedagogy in which research findings could be discussed.

From social movement to social delivery: AEPPA and the struggle for popular education

Dreams and challenges are instruments that we, popular educators, have to form a break with common sense logic, that the poor are born poor and die poor, no, this cannot be conceded, and neither can it be an excuse to accept this situation of oppression as a ‘nor-mal’ fact. (Dos Santos Paula, 2007, p. 19)

The AEPPA emerged from a context of the 1980s in which it was pos-sible for working-class communities to conceive of training their own organic intellectuals, based on principles developed by Paulo Freire, the renowned Brazilian popular educationalist. The process contains, however, multiple paradoxes. One of these is that the conquest of a professional training establishes individual distinctions and distan-cing. This is a different situation, for example, from the 1980s, when a political-pedagogical space of mutual learning, action and indi-vidual and collective affirmation existed, involving diverse social movements. At that time it was understood that access to individual knowledge gained by the working classes would not alter the logic of the division of labour, nor necessarily imply an empowerment of these classes in and of itself. For this, a collective project was necessary, involving not just access to, but also the management and content of, the learning process.

The trajectory of AEPPA must be contextualised, therefore, as part of a wider movement, known as Escola Cidadã (Civic School), which brought all those involved in education together – teachers, parents, university lecturers and students – and was launched by a constitutive congress of some 500 delegates, which met in 1994 and 1995. It aimed to transform the nature of learning and assessment by creating an inclusive educa-tion, a curriculum based on knowledge as a tool for discovering the world as well as the moral autonomy of the individual. The prerequis-ite of PB is the existence or emergence of communities that are either active or could be mobilised. The Civic School intended to further the process of decentralisation, not just the participation of communities in the co-management of schools, but also in the co-management of the wider pedagogical project. Municipal schools would become permanent centres of civic mobilisation for activities directly related to education



as much as for activities of wider interest to the communities – among others, participatory budgeting.

The AEPPA has been caught in the midst of this emancipatory vision and the everyday struggle to guarantee early child education for the poorest communities and a living wage and employment stability for the educators. As the original space for rethinking the learning experi-ence amongst the poor was lost, AEPPA, too, found itself increasingly seduced to be part of the ‘community oligarchy’ of service providers. After winning the right of popular educators to formal professional qualifications, they neglected to defend them as workers; nor did the original aims of the Civic School progress. As a formal project within the work of the Municipal Department of Education, the Civic School was ended in 2004. It continues, however, to inspire the action of many educators still working in municipal education units. The emphasis on community participation as a policy requirement dictated by the Department has meanwhile been replaced by a focus on test perform-ance and cost efficiency.

The popular educators and PB

The AEPPA grew out of the experience of activists from some of the poorest communities of Porto Alegre in PB. Maria Leonice de Deus da Silva, nicknamed Nice, president of AEPPA until 2008, remembers its impact:

I remember that at the end of the 1980s my husband said to me: “You are a dreamer.” I responded: “Although I may be a dreamer, the things that I dream of are becoming possible.” And this did actually happen, it was a sequence of things that were taking place. We changed the face of Porto Alegre. Today, the person that lives in your neighborhood has the same quality of life that is possible even in Restinga, on the North Side, or in Belem Novo [traditionally working-class regions of Porto Alegre]. When I refer to quality of life, I am speaking in terms of access to services and benefits, paved roads, social programs. It is tranquil: people leave their houses, walk a short distance, and arrive at a health clinic where they can have access to a good doctor. They will wait a while before being attended to, this is true, but this happens in all cities. A citizen of Restinga, Lomba do Pinheiro, Humaitá or Vila Dique is treated with the same consideration as the citizen of Bom Fim or of Protásio. They are worth the same. (Quintanilha Gomes and Vianna Amaral, 2003 pp. 34–5 and 60)



The movement for professional recognition of popular educators reflected the contribution that women made to and learnt from the par-ticipatory budget process. As they began to participate more, they influ-enced the priorities of the budget, as Tamar, an AEPPA coordinator told us (Interview, 10 May 2006): ‘At the beginning, what people wanted a lot was street paving, because we didn’t have asphalt here. But before having asphalt, we have to have crèches for our children. Every time that people managed to get social services in Gloria and, mainly here in this community, it was a lot of this work of talking, calling mothers of my students and saying: Look , in order to have more of a voice, so that we can improve public services for your children’.

From 1992–93, around four dozen community-run day-care centres existing at the time in Porto Alegre were maintained by a federal agency, the Brazilian Relief Legion (Legião Brasileira de Assistência – LBA). As the Collor administration (1990–92) came to a close, a new regulatory paradigm was brought in for services for the 0–7 age range and the LBA centres began to close. Public, private and community services only reached a third of this age group at the time.

The first epic moment in the history of AEPPA was the panelaço (pro-test marked by the banging of pots and pans) promoted by day-care parents, teachers and staff in 1993 in front of City Hall to pressure the municipal government to take on the responsibility of maintaining the day-care centres after the end of the LBA. Nice remembers the early struggles:

The point that really got us stirred up, here in the region (1991–92), were the ‘so-called’ day-care centres of the LBA, the neighborhood hearths. One was being closed every other day, so there was nowhere to place the children. At the time, the First Lady [Rosane Collor] was building a lake for her carp in Brasília, and she needed to feed her carp, but we could not even feed our children. Things like this increasingly agitated us. And what did we find out? That alongside the issue of having a day-care centre, being able to educate and instruct, we also discovered our abilities, our different talents, and we began to organ-ise ourselves. Thus, in this region a group mobilised themselves to fight for education. Community leaders, resident associations’ presi-dents, women from groups of mothers, women linked to the Pastoral do Menor [Youth Ministry of the Catholic Church] ... it wasn’t just a problem for mothers, it was terrible for the girls too [the popu-lar educators], because every time that something was missing and things had to be distributed, they would give up their food so that



the children could eat. ... We made a lot of noise because we under-stood that this was not right. They had just signed the Statute of the Child and the Adolescent, so we thought that something was wrong, “it didn’t reach us”. The law said one thing and we lived another. (Interview, 14 September 2006)

As a result of the movement, AEPPA began their work informally in 1996 based on principles of popular self-organisation. The main object-ives of the organisation were to seek training for workers in the field of popular education, to help them achieve the qualifications required under the 1996 National Education Law of Guidelines and Bases, seek-ing the growth and respect of the worker and of popular education.

The result of the struggle over early school provision was not just the formation of outsourcing contracts between the city government and 33 day-care centres (later seven more), but also the progressive use of these types of community-run contracts to extend the reach of pub-lic services. The selection of institutions for contracts moved to the regional PB forums where anyone could participate. For AEPPA’s move-ment, the contracts meant a great opportunity and gave a certain degree of freedom. Before the work of AEPPA, popular educators were mostly lay educators lacking formal qualification. They saw in the offer of pro-fessional training a double opportunity. First, they had an opportunity to exchange experiences among equals. Second, they had a guarantee of continued employment once they achieved the minimum level of education required under the 1996 law.

The second epic moment in the construction of AEPPA was the ‘Strike of 98’ where the issue of remuneration came to the fore, along with the demand for professional training and improved working conditions, as Nice explains:

In this evolution we went through with the first day-care contracts, we began to have this mass of professionals not identified as such, the ‘aunts’ of the country. We began to reflect on the fact that we could grow much larger and this would produce much more. We perceived also the evolution of children in the learning spaces, in the schools, through our own methodologies that are ours, our knowledge. The marriage of our knowledge with theoretical know-ledge, reinterpreted, was placed at the service of our methodology. We evolved to the point that, in 1998, we carried out the first work stoppage in the day-care centres of the city, in this neighborhood. We discovered the following: there was a law that said, starting in



2007, those who work with children and adolescents must have a certain level of formal education. The problem is that our salaries were always ‘so large’ (ironically), less than the minimum wage, and the majority of the women have families to take care of. (Interview, 14 September 2006)

The movement was once again victorious, in theory. It won an increase in the amount of funds given monthly to contracted day-care centres and the creation of a secondary school-level teacher training course to formally qualify educators beginning in 2000. But there was a catch, in that the increase in government funding did not lead to increased salaries. The educators, meanwhile, became more questioning, not only with regards to the work done with the children but also with the way the contracted institutions were managed. They were also more sensi-tive to the way they were treated. They resented the assumption that as popular educators they did not need further professional training at the university, or that with a higher level of education, they might leave in search of higher salaries at private schools and enter the middle class.

Nevertheless, access to university courses was won in various uni-versities in 2005 and 2006 and a programme of scholarships and even the first post-graduate course in 2007 with the aim of ‘training of crit-ical, questioning popular educators who understand teaching as a way to transform both the world and social reality’ (Brave People Social Development Institute, Bravagente, 2008). Today there are more than 2,500 popular educators in the city acting in various programmes funded through community outsourcing of public services.

However, this process would also impact on the nature of AEPPA as a movement, as it did on other grassroots organisations in the city. With the availability of these university-level courses, the routine of AEPPA began to involve an increasing amount of bureaucratic control work. The organisation is responsible for both the selection of potential can-didates for scholarships as well as the fulfillment of the obligation of these students to give some of their time as volunteers. None of the contracts signed give any compensation to AEPPA for this work. The director of AEPPA seeks other sources for funding through projects, but without success, ending up sustaining the work of the organisation through the monthly contributions of the popular educators currently with scholarships. Given the salary level of the educators, as we have seen, arguments over delays in the payment of these monthly contribu-tions constantly occupy a large part of the time of the organisations’ meetings, with members calling attention to those who did not pay,



progressively draining the legitimacy of the leadership of the organ-isation. AEPPA had become trapped between the legal-bureaucratic demands of the education ministry and universities and the increasing questions by scholarship holders of AEPPA’s management (Interview, former member of the management of the Municipal Department of Education, 24 April 2007).

The contract culture

Neighbourhood associations had aspired from the beginning of PB to a monopoly of representation. Gradually, it was a ‘market solution’ which had this impact. The existence of low salaries makes community out-sourcing economically viable, permitting a progressive expansion of services. At the same time, it empowers a virtual ‘community oligarchy’ in the management of contracts with the government for public wel-fare services, education and culture. This ‘community oligarchy’ could then elect and reelect most of the PB delegates and councillors using the resources provided by contracts. The leadership of contracted neigh-bourhood associations could also distance themselves eventually from the regional forums of PB. Or they could create NGOs to separate the contract from the original community-based institution as a way also to guarantee their freedom as managers of the contract, independent of any eventual change in the elected leadership of the association.

For example, the manager of a nursery that has an agreement with the Council controls the positions (the personnel to be hired), pur-chases (the shops where supplies will be bought), vacancies (the chil-dren who will have access to nursery vacancies through the agreement), exceptions (the children who will not have to pay the supplement of around 50 reais that families usually have to pay), his own salary (his own wages, within the limits of the agreement) as well as other ben-efits, such as privileged relationship with party political operators. The democratisation of community associations had, in fact, never been part of the struggle agenda of most of the PB participants. The outcome has been a progressive conversion of community organisations into the ‘Third Sector’, that is, private providers of outsourced public services. AEPPA was not able to resist this tendency. The idea of sharing man-agement power in day-care centres or running them through workers cooperatives, for example, was not even discussed.

From education for participation to education for results

The opening of new graduate opportunities for AEPPA associates dur-ing the Lula Administration was fruit of the network around the Civic



School in Porto Alegre. Many were connected to the Workers’ Party and part of the Municipal Council on Education. The Workers’ Party in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, of which Porto Alegre is the capital, however, is characterised by intense disputes between internal tendencies. The most radical perspective did not control the central management of the Municipal Council on Education.

The defeat of the PT administration in 2004 did not mean the imme-diate termination of the Civic School project of education for partici-pation, but its gradual dismantlement. As was the case with PB, the strategy adopted was to avoid direct confrontation. The apparent peda-gogical pluralism of the new administration (post-2004) – Mayor Fogaça liked to think of himself as a peacemaker – did not imply the absence of a new educational project. To the contrary, inspired by the idea of New Public Management, the aim was to govern based on management of results. In other words, it does not matter how the schools act; what interests the government are the results, the performance of students according to national standardised testing.

For community-run day-care centres, the new administration built on the legal-institutional framework already constructed in Porto Alegre by previous Workers’ Party administrations (income tax exemp-tions for individuals and businesses of donations to the Municipal Fund for Children and Adolescents, with the right to select the benefiting organisation). It then removed from PB the exclusive right to put for-ward new community organisations to receive day-care centres and other contracts. No longer would the community be required to mobil-ise to pressure the government through PB to sign a contract with com-munity organisations. Now all that community organisations must do, after registering themselves as potential recipients of donations, is construct projects and present them directly to private foundations and businesses. The managers of community organisations were given permanent training in ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘social management’. Between 2006 and 2007, 517 people were trained, involving 234 ‘Third Sector’ organisations. As Fogaça often says, the ideal citizen today is the ‘citizen-manager’, the one who is able to read statistics (Fogaça, 2004).

Rights not favours: The search for neighbourhood improvements through PB in Chácara do Primeiro

Chácara do Primeiro is a land occupation of a public area owned by the military brigade. The initial occupants were workers from the bat-talions of the military brigade and of the fire department (the name of



the community comes from this: Primeiro Batalhão da Brigada Militar – First Battalion of the Military Brigade). Currently, around 2,000 people live in 305 households. The area is large, with a view of the entire city, and the houses have patios, a significant difference in relation to many other poor vilas in Porto Alegre. A majority of residents have lived in the region for less than 12 years. They consider themselves a relatively tranquil community, where almost all adults have steady jobs, although there are increasing problems involving ‘juvenile delinquency’ and precarious urban infrastructure. The community lacks many public services, in particular rubbish collection, basic sanitation, asphalted road pavement and transport. It has seven roads (none paved), with two entries for cars, bordered by two streams. Asphalting pavement is a necessity because during days of intense rain the area becomes practically inaccessible, and currently it is impossible to provide pub-lic transport to the region in its present condition. The only gains of the residents in the 13 years of the neighbourhood association (from 1996 to 2008) have been water and electricity and, more recently, a few metres of drain pipes on the main roads, along with the illumination of a spot to allow for a pedestrian crossing. The office of the Association is also under construction, using resources of the residents and of some third parties, and will enable community outsourced public services to take place such as day care, adult literacy training and youth activities.

A number of road asphalting schemes decided on in PB between 2004 and 2005 are expected to begin in 2009; those proposals agreed in the 2007 PB will only start in 2011, and then only if the ever-increasing queue of delayed projects does not end up interrupted for some political or technical reason, a frequent occurrence since 2005.

What most impressed us in our first visits to Chácara do Primeiro was the unique combination of order and precariousness. On the one hand, there was an almost complete absence of infrastructure beyond electricity and water. On the other, the occupation had been planned according to the formal urban pattern. In Porto Alegre, water and elec-tricity are guaranteed in practically all of the popular vilas, formally or informally. In the majority of vilas, however, the road network is irregu-lar, the houses are clumped together and there is practically no space for sidewalks, plazas and areas for social purposes, something which greatly complicates the access of fire trucks, trash collectors and public transport. In the case of Chácara, this is different. The streets are large, there is space reserved for sidewalks and pavement, the plots of land are large, the houses are not stuck together but instead have open land sur-rounding them. Another distinguishing characteristic of Chácara is that



space is reserved for a plaza, a neighbourhood or residents association and other social purposes. The neighbourhood association centre only began construction in 2007, but by the end of that year it was possible to hold meetings there. The plaza also does not yet exist; the space is currently being used in part to grow horse feed and in part as an impro-vised football field. Next to the plaza is an Evangelical Church, which was offered for our use to carry out training activities in 2006–07.

In 2006, when we began to work with Chácara, the Neighbourhood Association carried out its monthly meetings in the clay earth part of the plaza, outside. The meetings followed a routine. Somebody brought a small collapsible table and one chair, where the secretary sat. It was her responsibility to read the minutes of the previous meeting and other documents, when necessary, as well as to account for the funds in the Association’s coffers and receive the eventual payment of monthly fees, as well as take the minutes of that day’s meeting. A circle would be formed and after the Association president performed a few formal-ities, the meeting moved to general reports, where the floor was opened to all participants. The majority of those present were women, some of whom came with their children or even pets. After the reports, the president, Narciso Freitas Soares, made proposals and at the end a raffle was held for a basket of basic goods. During the month, every member contributed something (a kilogram of rice, beans, flour, a box of milk or canned goods). To facilitate the collection of this basket as well as the monthly payments of 2 reais (approximately 60 pence) from house to house, an image of a saint was circulated. This basket was to be raffled only among those present at the meeting (or at least those who had sent a representative). It was possible to see that, for certain people, the pos-sibility of winning this basket was significant.

At this time (2006), the Association depended on the contribution and mobilisation of the residents themselves. The money raised at the time was not sufficient to pay for copying documents or bus fares to visit government departments or the City Council, or even to make official inquiries or register the Association. One of the conflicts that we viewed had to do with people forgetting their contribution with the passing of the saint. Soon thereafter, Narciso complained about having to use his own resources to carry out activities for the good of the com-munity. He began to think that this type of community work should merit public remuneration.

The Association had lain dormant for ten years, and its resuscita-tion was due mainly to the efforts of Narciso, who ended up elected president twice consecutively: 2005–07 and 2007–09. For Narciso, the



partnership with CIDADE had a specific objective: to give visibility to Chácara’s problems and help the Association get the most out of PB, placing its’ requests among the top priorities of the Partenon Region (which includes Chácara). Both objectives would be achieved. However, the much-awaited road-paving works (included in PB in 2006 and part of the 2007 investment plan), have still not taken place, remaining in limbo amongst hundreds of others. With strong mobilisation for PB par-ticipation, along with the circulation of an informative periodical bul-letin denouncing Chácara’s conditions and posted on CIDADE’s website, and with the creation of an Association blog, the problems of Chácara gained great visibility to the government departments and members of the City Council. The new administration of the Association managed to mobilise almost 200 people for the PB assembly of 2006.

Before this, the Association tried, unsuccessfully, the traditional method of presenting requests written in the name of the entity to the government departments responsible for roads and basic sanitation. It was political visibility measured in the number of potential votes that attracted the political class to the area. Through this intense mobilisa-tion, Narciso gained a new importance to different Council members, representing parties of the government as well as the opposition, and he sought support for the community’s needs.

However, following this ‘success’ came frustration. By 2007 it was already clear that the implementation of PB proposals was threatened by something more than the two-year delay of some 900 propos-als bequeathed by the previous administration of the Workers’ Party (2001–04). The administration alleged that it inherited a city govern-ment in fiscal crisis, but the situation in hindsight was temporary and surpluses resumed in 2005. Now, apart from inclusion in the invest-ment plans through PB, political lobbying became necessary to guar-antee the implementation of proposals. The technical criteria for the distribution of resources had been abandoned (level of need, popula-tion, priority level voted upon in PB). This left those decisions in the hands of government departments and the legal and financial argu-ments of the administration.

Rather than add to pressure to implement plans agreed through PB, the ‘support’ of the political class focused on the president of the Association. He was contacted personally by representatives of various political parties, either from Council members or government advisors or departments. The Secretary of Public Works, for example, sought to compensate for the non-execution of PB works with small benefits for Chácara, such as street lighting, a small pedestrian crossing and a few



metres of drain pipe for the principal street, although it was not yet paved. He took advantage of a request for materials for the construction of the Association’s centre, to link the donation of light posts no longer being used by the State Electrical Company, to a donation to his campaign for City Council. In 2008, he was the candidate with the most votes in Porto Alegre, running as part of the PTB (Brazilian Labour Party – Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro). Advisors to the Municipal Secretary of Political Coordination and Governance, whose Secretariat was linked to another member party of the administration’s alliance (Socialist Popular Party – Partido Popular Socialista), offered to help with a proposed crèche, although this never materialised. A candidate for City Council linked to the Workers’ Party offered resources for the Association centre building in exchange for political support. When asked to do the work first, the candidate did not return (and was also not elected).

In the case of Chácara (and AEPPA), the antidotes to these instrumen-tal relations with the political class and the ‘contamination’ of com-munity and popular leadership, lies in the effective democratisation of their organisations. It is against this background, of erosion of the prin-ciples that oriented community-government relations through PB, that the elections for a new administration in the Chácara Association were held at the end of 2007. With the Association building almost habitable, the interest of other vila residents in controlling the space grew. Once the building was ready, it could be used to raise funds through contracts with the government involving community outsourcing of services, or through the holding of social events in a community that currently lacks spaces for social interaction (parties, dances, dinners, etc.). To avoid the Association being taken over by ‘adventurers’, Narciso ended up passing a reform of the statutes, which included limiting the right to vote to members up-to-date on the payment of Association dues, pro-hibition on the inclusion of relatives to the candidates for president on the voting lists and possible suspension and exclusion of members who fail to obey the collectively agreed-upon rules. With these intimidating measures in place, only the current administration presented a voting list, which was approved by 20 of the 22 persons present for the voting (out of 305 members).

In the 2007 round of PB, Narciso was elected to be substitute coun-cillor for the Partenon Region, taking advantage of the prestige he had accumulated in past years of PB. At the beginning of 2009, however, Narciso resigned from the presidency of the Association, arguing that he no longer had time as he had taken a job to supplement his pen-sion, but also because, given the reelection of Mayor Fogaça, someone



with better relations with the government administration should take on the task. In an informal conversation back in March 2007, while still feeling betrayed about what was taking place with PB, Narciso said that, with the way things were going: ‘PB is no longer necessary, it is possible to resolve things directly with the relevant secretaries. I even have the mobile number of the head of the Public Works Department to call when I need something’. However, after all the seductive promises made, practically nothing actually occurred beyond the light posts, the metres of drainage pipe and the regularisation of the water registry (in practice, the regularisation of billing for water).

The recent community history of Chácara gained impetus in 2005 due to the commitment of one man. The decision to enter into PB came about as a result of the inadequacy of the traditional protocols required by government departments. This decision required, however, the con-stitution of active delegates and a minimal socialisation and circula-tion of power within the Association and the community in general. The training work of CIDADE was centred exactly on this: collective analysis of difficulties and opportunities; ranking priorities; sharing responsibilities and building goals and coherent partnerships for the short, medium, and long term. Simple things were proposed, such as convening commissions for making contracts when necessary, avoid-ing personalised commitments and strengthening the Association as a social movement. The search to involve government officers, not just politicians, in negotiations was encouraged, but to claim rights rather than seek political favours.

Conclusion

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre today is only a faint memory of a promise of democratic transformation that astonished the world, inspiring social activists, governments and international cooperation agencies. The number of delayed proposals reached more than 1,500 at the end of 2008. That year the PB was allocated only a tenth of the total investment forecast for the city; that is, 1 per cent of what was estimated by the Annual Organic Law. In 2007, the resources spent on publicity were three times higher than the ones spent on the execution of works and services foreseen by the PB Investment Plan for the respective year. The absence of government secretaries at the regional and thematic meetings was a significant shift from the past. Community leaders are increasingly harassed for political support, reminiscent of the former pattern of clientelism. The annual renewal of councillors has reduced



to a third, whereas at the beginning it was three quarters (in addition, the rule limiting reelection was abolished in 2008). The educational and income level of elected delegates and councillors is now higher than those at the grassroots (Fedozzi, 2007). The expansion of contracts between the government and community associations for the outsour-cing of services establishes hierarchies inside communities, transform-ing citizens into clients. Services such as community nurseries need families to pay a supplement besides what is financed by the govern-ment. The loss of autonomous spaces for community movements leads to a naked and dependent citizenship, as if the poor are a naïve crowd, allowing each government to recognise, give visibility and even prod-uce a civil society that is convenient to them.

The tenets of PB reside in the democratic-republican ideals of popu-lar sovereignty. Free citizens decide their collective destiny in the pub-lic sphere. Citizenship and popular sovereignty imply the existence of a subject imbued with free will, whether the individual of ‘rational choice’ and ‘social capital’ or of collective actors and actions, such as political parties, unions, communes, revolts, revolutions, insurrections, movements, commissions, councils, forums, conferences, networks or other examples. The republican ideal presupposes an identity between individual and citizen, between the collective and the national state, between citizenship and public interest/common good/general desire. The typical ideal individual of the republican public sphere is the purely civic, altruistic citizen, incapable of confusing particular personal inter-est with the public interest. In conclusion, a pure abstraction, given that real citizens are people engaged in the struggle for life, whose social sur-vival is linked to determined social relations.

The two case studies here reveal profound fissures in the ideals of citizenship, as much in the case of AEPPA as in that of Chácara. The fragility of popular community organisations in being able to act when confronted with the opportunities and threats brought by changes in state-society relations is evident. The production of subjectivities exists even when not explicitly stated by the changing state and government logics, involving other social and economic relationships outside the control of the subjects themselves. The two cases reveal two extremely strong figures, Nice and Narciso. Both were quixotic in the struggle to make their rights matter, and to realise the promise of a more demo-cratic and effective relationship with public institutions. Both coinci-dentally ended this historic cycle exhausted and weakened. It could have been different, and certainly the coincidence of their struggles with the deconstitution of PB played its role.



However, greater fragilities are revealed than we had suspected. How can sustainable processes of participatory democracy be constructed with a base of citizen support, given that this is composed of people in such vulnerable social conditions? There is an ample consensus that trad-itional representative institutions find themselves in a serious legitimacy crisis. There is also an increase in the number of people who believe that only through the devolution of power to the citizenry will it be possible to reconstruct politics as the sphere of subjects, persons endowed with free will and masters of their own destinies. The attempts that we devel-oped with the idea of collective production of knowledge alongside our two cases shows, however, the existence of a fissure between what the citizen says and what people do. There is a moral or ethical ideal of what should be democratic management, whether it be in a government, in a community association or in an NGO such as CIDADE. However, this idea has a serious problem. Unless it is embedded in everyday life, people will continue to act on their real interests from behind the scenes. Or they will follow the community leader just because they have been told they should do it, in order to benefit from the services they need. The utopia here would be to bring this problem into open discussion and then process it publicly. It is a question of either opening room for the emergence of people as protagonist subjects or training them like Pavlov’s dogs to play the citizen in exchange for a candy.

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chamado AEPPA – Associação de Educadores Populares de Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, produced as a contribution to the Municipal Innovations Project, p. 26. http://dc146.4shared.com/download/144409362/ef10ebd5/Fernanda_Paulo_A_Historia_da_Aeppa.pdf

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76

4Porto AlegreFrom Municipal Innovations to the Culturally Embedded Micro-Politics of (Un)Emancipated Citizens: The Case of Rubbish RecyclersZander Navarro

Some people have wondered why the dominated have not revolted more often. You only have to bear in mind the social conditions of the production of the agents and the durable effects that they exercise by inscribing themselves in dispositions, to understand that people who are the product of revolting social conditions are not necessarily as revolted as they would be if they were the product of less revolting conditions (like most intellectuals) and were then placed in those conditions. (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 47)

Introduction

This chapter discusses an innovation which brought together ideas and pilot projects put forward in the mid-1980s by progressive groups of the Catholic Church and sectors of the Workers’ Party in an attempt to rem-edy the dire living conditions experienced by a significant part of the local unemployed population of Porto Alegre living off recyclable rubbish. After the PT came into power, this innovation thrived with government support. By the late 1990s, however, with growing financial difficulties faced by the local municipality and also a visible disinterest by many seg-ments of those in power (still in the hands of the PT), the recycling units entered a much more challenging new phase and are nowadays facing threatening trends. To analyse this innovation and its development since its inception, research was conducted in one of the most emblematic sites existing in Porto Alegre: a rubbish recycling unit (RU).


Porto Alegre: The Case of Rubbish Recyclers 77

From a theoretical perspective, this research was largely inspired by the cultural theory of power proposed by the French sociolo-gist Pierre Bourdieu. His central argument, after a famous formulae (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101), is that social practices are grounded expres-sions of habitus, rooted in given fields, thus establishing forms of capital whose asymmetric distribution are seen to be the expression of power dynamics and forms of social domination. Habitus mainly refers to regularities immanent in practice. Actors are socially formed with durable ways of acting expressed in habitus. Social embedding materialises in ways of moving, gesturing and orienting in different spaces. The stable nature of habitus is not translated into rules, but ‘in habits, dispositions to act in certain ways, and schemes of percep-tion that order individuals’ perspectives along socially defined lines. Through the habitus, society is impressed on the individual’ (Hanks, 2005, p. 69). This framework is appropriate to explain changes expe-rienced by recyclers (mainly women) in the unit that served as a case study for this research.

The core hypothesis of this article is that political capital, transferred to members of the recycling unit at its start as part of a political gam-ble by the party in power, evaporated with the passing of time. This weakened their relative position in relation to other agents competing for capital in the same field. Empirical evidence suggests that there was a political expectation in the city which members of the RU ignored, that is, political loyalty and active social participation in spaces domi-nated by the party (in particular, participatory budgeting) in exchange for that transferred political capital. As a result, the initially substantial political capital bestowed by the local government was dissipated and members of the unit have not been able to rely on government support anymore in the recent period.

This change in the power structure derived from alterations in the distribution and positionality of political capital resulted in an inward movement towards the daily routines of the unit. Various expressions of habitus, not controlled anymore by political imperatives as in the first years of the experience, gained prevalence. Gradually a different set of relations prevailed out of the internal micro-politics inside the recyc-ling space. The main conclusions of this research are twofold. First, the initial goal of political operators commanding the coalition in govern-ment, driven partly by ideology, was unable to grasp (and work with) micro-social processes within innovations like the recycling units. The warnings of social movements, specialists such as the late Alberto Melucci (1996b, pp. 18–23), gain salience. He wisely drew attention to



the different time perspectives of individuals, determined by micro-social processes and shaped by subjectivities vis-à-vis macro-political rationalities derived from models of social transformation. A second conclusion underlines the weight of structural barriers to social par-ticipation when citizens are under situations of extreme poverty, which is the case of most recyclers in the RU. There is here a lesson that per-haps could be extended to similar contexts, demonstrating that the pos-sibilities of social participation may be extremely limited, if extreme material deprivation is a facet of those who are supposed to engage in participatory spaces.

Setting the scene: Porto Alegre’s cycles of innovation

The city of Porto Alegre, the capital of the southernmost Brazilian state (Rio Grande do Sul), has been hailed in the last 15 years or so as one of the most innovative urban settings in the world. Interest in the city grew in the mid-1990s, when its most famous social experi-ment, ‘participatory budgeting’ (henceforth, PB), was acclaimed in the UN-sponsored international conference on cities – ‘Habitat II’ (Istanbul, 1996). In those years local citizens were living through a period of unprecedented and quasi-tangible optimism not only stemming from creative government action but also resulting from citizens’ participation in several spaces, notably PB meetings. This vibrant development was stimulated by national trends following the end of the military regime (in 1985) and the ensuing promulgation of the new Constitution in 1988 (see also Baierle, 2009, this volume). Brazil was finally entering its own ‘wave of democratisation’, after two decades of authoritarian rule. As a result of these major changes, the country embarked on a vigorous and unrivalled process of political innovations that invited citizens to participate in all spheres of social life (Sader, 1988). Perhaps for that reason Dagnino (2002) refers to an ‘emergent notion of citizenship’ understood as ‘the right to have rights’ as a trademark of political behaviour in the country in the recent period.

Municipal innovations mushroomed in many areas of the city in those years. Municipal schools changed their curricula and levels of educational failure fell dramatically; teachers became accustomed to fre-quent events to improve their pedagogic expertise, and new programs to eradicate illiteracy were implemented. Health services improved sub-stantially and after some years infant mortality was the lowest among Brazilian capitals. Since 1988, when the political coalition led by the



Workers’ Party (PT) won the municipal election, four successive govern-ments spanning 16 years of local administration (1989 to 2005) made ample efforts to reorganise the structure of governance, for example, with the creation of regional councils in different parts of the city aimed at engaging citizens and also several initiatives to disseminate new means of communication in order to offer greater access to infor-mation. Some lesser-known decisions are also worth mentioning, such as the implementation of affirmative action in order to guarantee jobs for segments of the black population associated with the construction of a huge supermarket in the northern part of the city. This decision also forced the French chain Carrefour to offer support to local small busi-nesses affected by its arrival in that neighbourhood. The same scheme, some years later, was also used in favour of poor families living in favelas in the southern part of Porto Alegre when Brazilian investors decided to build another big supermarket. Official permission was granted only after they finally bowed to financial commitments to help the muni-cipal government to re-settle displaced poor families in another region (Tendler, 2000, pp. 48–54).

Participatory budgeting, however, was by far the most acclaimed innovation. Launched in 1989, it generated a permanent movement of interested visitors, like pilgrims travelling to the new holy place. PB has usually received favourable evaluations and has indeed trans-formed the urban setting, after reorienting public investments towards the poorer regions (Wampler, 2007; Marquetti, 2008; Navarro, 1996; 2003; 2005). A plethora of demands were discussed and recommended within PB in favour of poor social groups, who either benefited from new re-settlements, like the emblematic case of Vila Planetário (Freitas, 2003), or saw numerous smaller improvements approved for their communities. However, not only small works were decided under this experiment but also major works, like the biggest construction ever made in the city; that is, the so-called Perimetral, a long six-lane avenue that stretches over more than 50 neighbourhoods which revolutionised the flow of traffic in Porto Alegre.

As a symbolic culmination of the city’s renewal and its worldwide prestige as a paragon of ‘deepening democracy’ (Fung and Wright, 2001, pp. 13–14), a sequence of annual meetings under the banner of the World Social Forum was held in the city after 2001. These events publicised Porto Alegre as an ‘alternative pole’ where a somewhat utopian model was being made concrete, thus suggesting that ‘another world was pos-sible’ (Navarro and Silva, 2007). Although a more in-depth and critical research is still to be made about this period of progressive municipal



administrations, the creativity in the connection between government initiatives and large sectors of society is indisputable.

An estimated population of 1.5 million inhabitants live in Porto Alegre, and the city’s social indicators are among the best when com-paring Brazil’s biggest cities. With no relevant industrial sector worth the name, it does not attract many migrants from rural areas or poorer regions and so government is not under a dramatic social pressure. Its total population, unlike most Brazilian capitals, has grown slowly. The main economic focus of the city is a concentration on major service sectors and large educational institutions, apart from state agencies and departments. As a result, most probably, Porto Alegre is the state capital with the largest segment of typical middle classes as a proportion of the total population.

Life expectancy in the city averages 71.4 years and illiteracy is now-adays around a bare 3 per cent of the total population. Living condi-tions are reasonable where public services are concerned: virtually all households have permanent access to water distribution, 98 per cent have electricity and all corners of the city have rubbish collected at least once a week. Most streets are paved and Porto Alegre has per-haps the best public bus service in the country. It is also important to highlight that it enjoys the highest proportion of sewage collected and treated among all capitals in the country, a fact that has important positive reverberations in health indicators and environmental aspects. Another important aspect is that government services, in general, were already quite satisfactory even before the Workers’ Party came into power – the municipal agency responsible for water distribution and sewage collection (most probably the best in the country), for example, is a notable case to illustrate the good quality of public services since at least the late 1970s. These positive aspects notwithstanding, it is also relevant to note that no government innovation has so far touched the structural aspects of social inequality, which makes Brazil one of the most unequal countries in the world. Income concentration and the proliferation of urban slums or favelas, for example, are striking facets of Porto Alegre, when contrasted with the rosy picture painted by some commentators.

The city also has a solid tradition of social organisation that goes back to the 1950s (Baierle, 1992), especially neighbourhood associations in low income peripheral regions. History shows a distinct tradition of political organisation inspired by reformist and left-wing political par-ties and movements, which erupted at different moments. One such moment was when the military regime was forced to ease its controls in



the early 1980s; a strong neighbourhood movement developed demand-ing better government services and, in particular, more housing projects for the poorer regions. By the end of that decade, those organisations were also fighting for a greater say in decision-making processes, espe-cially on investments planned for the city. Unsurprisingly, PB was in full swing after 1989 as a social experiment that reaped benefits from the collective history of social mobilisation and regular cycles of social pressure and forms of protest.

The multifaceted results of participatory budgeting are well researched and will not be discussed here. Important, however, is to call attention to distinct evaluations by several commentators about this process in Porto Alegre. There are those who argue that patterns of new social behaviour gradually materialised in the city and transformed political accountability, emphasising that ‘Porto Alegre’s citizens are privy to a broader range of rights. The efforts and activities of these PB delegates not only have transformed their communities by bringing in millions of dollars of infrastructure to poor neighbourhoods, but also have shifted the balance of power. All new investment spending decisions are made by citizens and PB delegates in public meetings (Wampler, 2007, pp. 143–4). Others, notably Sérgio Baierle, perhaps the most expe-rienced researcher of PB, have argued that social participation has been reversed following the years after the Workers’ Party lost power, if not in numbers, at least in its political intent (Baierle, 2009, this volume). But there are those who are more cautious, emphasising that figures of par-ticipation are in fact not so extraordinary when compared to the adult population eligible to enter those participatory spaces (Navarro, 2003) and, also, that this experiment still faces several challenges. Fedozzi (2007), who is a renowned analyst of PB in Porto Alegre, has listed some of these still unresolved impasses. After his most recent research about the levels of participation and profiles of PB attendees, he concluded that among the existing difficulties still obstructing PB’s development, one is crucial to the findings of this case study:

Social asymmetries reproduced under the PB’s dynamics (of educa-tion, gender and income), which go unacknowledged under its struc-ture and hinder the egalitarian opportunities for potential learning by citizens – this fact calls into question the ‘spontaneous pedagogy’ (explicit in the process) and charges us to critically analyse the qual-ity of participation, which is in detriment to the current emphasis on quantitative participation and the ‘assembly myth’. (Fedozzi, 2007, p. 45)



The innovation discussed in this article was part of this ‘cycle of innova-tions’ that marked municipal administrations in the 1990s. Two trends converged: on the one hand, efforts to develop a new and broader envir-onmental logic in the city and, on the other, political relations shared by some sectors of the Catholic Church and factions of the Workers’ Party. As a result of the former, several decisions were enforced under the ban-ner of environmental recuperation of the city, from new engagements with environmental organisations to the implementation of ‘selective collection’ of rubbish in the city; from participatory meetings to imple-ment a new environmental plan for Porto Alegre to the publication of the extraordinary Atlas Ambiental de Porto Alegre, a state-of-the-art detailed description and analysis of the ‘environmental history’ of Porto Alegre, first published in 1998. The second trend linked former pilot projects developed by progressive Catholic sectors in poor communities on the fringes of the city and those factions inside the party working with them. Foremost amongst these was the group led by the first mayor of Porto Alegre, Olivio Dutra, who rapidly transformed those former experiments into a government policy. As a result, after some time, this innovation was in fact part of a broader action pursued by the municipal govern-ment, that is, an integrated chain of initiatives, from environmental edu-cation in schools to selective collection of recyclable rubbish; from new depots to collect them to the establishment of recycling units where poor families would find a new form of living. It was assumed that after a strong campaign to stimulate householders, firms and public institutions to separate recyclable materials (plastic, glass, paper and metals), a weekly collection would be implemented and accumulated materials disposed in distribution centres and, from there, proportional loads forwarded to the units to be established. Those in charge of this innovation would then regularly evaluate the amount collected and decide how many RUs could be formed so that their corresponding share would produce satisfactory payments for the RU members. In short, a combination of an emergent concern with environmental needs and a vigorous social policy aimed at supporting families in extreme poverty.

At the moment there are 10 recycling units in Porto Alegre and 6 smaller ones are said to be in the process of formation. Some associations estab-lished a unified and centralised form of selling their products and there are plans to build a small industry to process plastic – all these actions are aimed at boosting revenues. An estimated 600 members work in the units, though there is a great variation in numbers and turnover is usu-ally high. Also, there are approximately 3,000 horse-drawn vehicles (car-roceiros) and an unknown number of man-drawn vehicles (carrinheiros)



in the city, mainly collecting rubbish that is not distributed to the gov-ernment RUs but is sold to private firms. If these workers and their fam-ilies are included, the total population living off rubbish in Porto Alegre might be around 1 per cent of the total population (approximately 15,000 people). It is estimated that after this innovation, 70 private firms were established to collect recyclable materials in the city over the years. Porto Alegre spends an estimated 10 per cent of its budget on ‘public cleaning’. Selective collection absorbs 0.18 per cent of the budget and it was origin-ally proposed and approved under PB. Approximately 20 per cent of all rubbish collected in the city is recycled nowadays, making this a very significant social and environmental innovation.

Co-producing knowledge: The barrier of poverty

This study, in accordance with the project’s rationale, aimed to engage workers in the recycling unit in a process of co-production of know-ledge. Broadly speaking, it meant that initial ideas and objectives of this study should be shared with all participants and their own knowledge about the history of the recycling unit and personal worldviews would be brought into the group’s collective memory. A process of sharing findings, cumulative discoveries, empirical evidence and the members’ opinions would gradually build a broader understanding about internal trends, outside challenges, initiatives to be taken, problems and difficul-ties in administration, plans for the future and so on. More important, findings would be regularly discussed with the group and be refined over time. This attempt was made from the beginning and soon trust linked the researcher and members of the association. It did not take long for reserved and hidden reflections to be recorded during personal interviews. Most of the members were open (or even outspoken) to dis-cuss all possible issues. Only in the field of gender relations did the author find, as expected, difficulties to discuss gender dimensions as a multifaceted category. Though a clear relation of trust was built over time, most women would not be prepared to discuss issues related, for example, to domestic violence or forms of gender domination which eventually is a significant part of symbolic capital (see Box 4.1).

Box 4.1 On fields and forms of capital

According to Bourdieu (1986, 1990), within a given social structure there exist different fields where social practices develop. Most agents are active partici-pants in distinct fields, and in each field forms of capital do materialise. Insofar



as they are meta-concepts, however, their actual manifestation in a given space of relations will vary – in fact, the expression of capital may be specific to a given field and does not express itself in other fields. Capitals do not exist per se but presuppose a relation – they exist only in relation to other manifestations of capitals, and the whole set of capitals determine hierarchies and power dis-tribution. Capitals are resources and opportunities. Given all these specificities, a ‘law of conversion of all capitals’ does not inform all forms of capital. In fact, the same capital may have very distinct values in different fields.

Symbolic capital has greater prominence than other expressions of capital and it reflects symbolic power. It is crucial because it results from natural-ised relations among agents and its implied domination is not perceived but accepted as legitimate. Many times symbolic capital originates in prestige or good reputation ascribed to a given person, though more commonly it is associated with the possession of other forms of capital.

Cultural capital is especially associated with knowledge and forms of under-standing, but also concerns mores, habits and several manifestations of cul-ture. Its starting point is education, especially formal education – in short, the whole intellectual qualifications one may command. Social capital is the result of social relations (friendships, family ties, and professional contacts) that an agent commands. The more social capital (in quantity and, in par-ticular, in quality), the more the agent is capable of mobilizing others in his/her favour. This is a meta-concept entirely different from mainstream notions of social capital: for Bourdieu, it refers mainly to forms of domin-ation also exacerbated by the agent in the face of his/her greater social cap-ital. The volume of social capital, as a consequence, is usually hidden by the agent using various mechanisms, such as various forms of illusio. Social capital connects directly to habitus and social networks and is a resource that may be mobilised to realise the power exerted by a given agent. It is, as a result, intangible and cannot be converted, although it can be accumulated.

Economic capital does not have any different meaning to the usual under-standings and is manifested in material goods, wealth, property and so on. Political capital is a meta-concept that Bourdieu discussed only in his late writ-ings and is not so clear when compared to other forms of capital. It appears to be associated to a large extent with symbolic capital, a sort of social credit given to someone. It is concentrated in the hands of some agents who have their public existence recognised by others and who help to rescue individuals who are in some degree isolated, as if they do not exist in their condition of social actors. In the famous Hobbesian expression, these agents then help them to become ‘only one man’; that is, to reach a condition of social recognition.

However, the turbulence in the administration of the recycling unit and the problematic relationships amongst a significant number of members made it virtually impossible to develop a more consistent strategy of co-producing knowledge. In particular, most ‘participa-tory’ techniques proved to be virtually impossible in those conditions. The planned methodological strategy was a combination of structured



interviews with all members, open interviews with selected recyclers, participant observation, reconstitution of life and family stories of some participants and collection of data in the unit and also from existing literature in the field. Findings would then be shared and discussed in regular collective exchanges. The main barrier, in fact, to building the process of co-production was the slow constitution of sub-groups in the unit, which created a wall of silence when trying to connect versions from different sub-groups. It put into relief goals of members as essen-tially individual and motivated primarily by survival. Under this con-text, where there is not much sense of collectiveness and even threads of identity are hardly found, to build initiatives for the group is a strat-egy perhaps feasible only in the long run.

The initial attempt in the unit was similar to that proposed by Melucci: ‘in order to reach the level where causal connections can be assigned within an explanatory framework, we must thus first assume a “phenom-enological” attitude: it is necessary to explicate and bring out into the open our vantage point, our specific location within the field of relations constituting the research practice, and raise it to self-awareness” (1996a, p. 389). It thus enables a potential interaction between researcher and those researched. But if this dialogue is to materialise ‘the partners of the research practice must show capability for self-reflection, for locat-ing themselves in a field that includes them all, and for self-justifying their respective perspective; only then can the space for establishing such a meta-level emerge in which a dialogue transcending each par-ticular situation becomes possible’ (Ibid., p. 389).

Although all recycling workers maintain cordial relations, many are suspicious of how the unit has been managed. As one recycler stated: ‘we work and work; we bring (materials) and put our hands in the rub-bish, always, always, when the end of the month comes, one expects to earn a lot and is taken aback because it is not what we expected. Then I think that there is something wrong in this [the unit]’ (Interview, 17 December 2006). As a result, they were not prepared to open discus-sions and debates in assemblies or meetings organised by this research. Many members clearly insisted that internal differences would not allow them to openly discuss several themes: ‘Not all of them we can speak to, there are small groups and then not all play the same tune, these groups have different modes of thought’, a member that was inter-viewed quickly retorted, when asked about the possibilities of open meetings (Interview, 29 December 2006).

A possible lesson here in methodological terms highlights the limita-tions for research in specific contexts where subjects live in extreme



poverty. In particular, when those who are supposed to be participants in co-production of knowledge exist in fields where symbolic power is ostensibly the main expression of domination. In these cases, expres-sions of habitus create stronger barriers to stimulate a process of shared production of knowledge. It is so because the combination of imme-diate needs for survival and the rigidity of forms of social domination develop a formidable obstacle to enhance spaces of reflection about their daily lives.

The recycling unit

The collection of rubbish for the purpose of recycling (coleta sele-tiva) was implemented as a pilot test in the second year of the first PT administration, in 1990, initially in only one small and typically middle-class neighbourhood. In the following years it was extended to the rest of the city. By 1996, all areas of Porto Alegre were covered by the service (150 neighbourhoods or bairros). Catholic activists were involved from its inception and the first association was established in the first half of 1990 (Associação de Mulheres Papeleiras e Trabalhadoras em Geral), under the support of one local church that helped to build a rudimentary warehouse in one of the islands alongside Lake Guaíba, which bathes Porto Alegre. It received all recyclable materials collected in the city during 1991. Later on new associations were formed and gradually some rules for proportional distribution were also approved. To date, the distribution is basically related to the number of partici-pants working in each association. The total rubbish collected in the city increased from 147,000 tonnes in 1988 to 255,000 tonnes in 2005 (Huergo et al., 2001).

By the time of our research there were 10 associations in different parts of the city and approximately 60 tonnes of materials were col-lected each day and distributed to them. They are autonomous organisa-tions legally registered and after receiving recyclable rubbish contained in plastic bags, members classify and prepare different materials to be sold to private buyers. The areas where these units exist and the build-ings they use formally belong to the local government and there are formal permissions that granted all associations free leasehold of those premises.

This study was conducted with the Rubem Berta Recycling Association (Associação Ecológica de Reciclagem Rubem Berta), which was set up in 1993. At the beginning, most of its members came from Vila Tripa, where a group of families living off rubbish collection occupied a



narrow edge of a road separating the city’s international airport and one of its busiest avenues. The government resettled those families in another neighbourhood (Rubem Berta), also offering them materials to build small houses. A modest kindergarten and a municipal school were also installed.

However, it was the strong presence of priests linked to the Catholic Church who made the project more visible. They gave financial help to build the first premises of the future recycling unit and the chapel, the building which most shines in the area. Inspired by the ideas of Theology of Liberation, these religious collaborators made efforts from the beginning to stimulate those working in the RU to organise them-selves in an association and to participate in the new spaces existing in the city – notably in meetings of participatory budgeting. Literacy courses were also offered, initially by the government but they were later taken over by a project under the auspices of the local Federal University.

Most of those now working in the RU Rubem Berta live in the sur-rounding area. Under the Association’s rules, it is expected that a monthly meeting be held to discuss overall performance. In 1998 the existing associations of recyclers formed a state-wide association and its headquarters, for some years, were at the RU Rubem Berta. In the late 1990s, as a result of investments decided under PB, the main building existing in the RU was built and the unit acquired new equipment.

In the mid-1990s the number of members working in the RU reached a peak of 85 and a night shift even existed at one point. Nowadays the association has only 22 members (19 women and 3 men). For most of its existence, only women participated and only recently have men been accepted. The average age is 40.6 years, the youngest being 26 years old and the oldest member is 63 years old. Approximately half of them are between 40 and 45 years old. They are all either married or single-headed householders and have had on average 4.3 children (the largest family with 12 siblings and the smallest one with 2 chil-dren). Ten members are divorced, though it means in practice that their former partners abandoned the house. Only five members were born in Porto Alegre; the others migrated from the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, usually from rural areas – this trend being an exception because the city does not attract migrants, as emphasised earlier. All women worked previously in different, sometimes several, low-paying jobs (usually house cleaning) and all of them mentioned that their mothers had (or have) the same work. Twenty members live near the RU and this is an



important factor emphasised by many of them for staying attached to the work, despite the low incomes. All but one live in their own house, due to efforts by the government to settle them in the region using existing public lands. Almost none of them participate in any neigh-bourhood organisation or other collective organisations of any type in the region. In the Association formed in the unit, they have worked on average 5.9 years (the newest member working only 4 months at the time of the fieldwork and the oldest one being a member for 11 years). Currently, only one member participates in PB meetings in the region, but 12 had regular presence in meetings in the past, especially in the times of the first leader of the Association.

From ideals of ‘active citizens’ to the realities of micro-politics

In spite of its promising initial period, this innovation involving poor recyclers of Associação Rubem Berta (and the innovation as a whole, in fact) has faced mounting problems over the last 10 years, with dimin-ishing job opportunities in the unit and meagre monetary results. Empirical findings have proved that one of the main reasons for this reversal of fortunes was a change of ‘field’ (see Box 4.1) and its impact on the structure of capitals, also resulting in a weaker position held by members with the passing of time. In recent years, a visible and apparently irreversible inward movement is noticeable, or a growing incapacity to work within the original field, when members were more proactive and interacting with a multitude of external agents. Roughly speaking, the best moment for the unit was the first two PT mandates (1989–96), but relations of recyclers and government officers became gradually more distant during the last two administrations (1997–2004). There has been a concomitant repositioning in the relations enjoyed by the group. This fact has meant their increasingly marginal position, if not an invisibility in the original field, and power relations were also altered. After their dislocation in the original field to an almost insignificant position with no accumulated capitals anymore (polit-ical or other expressions), members became predominantly enmeshed in almost exclusively internal relations entrenched inside the unit. In Bourdieu’s concepts, agents (recyclers) shifted their position in the ori-ginal field of ‘politics’ and that meant that they lost power. A second field, also part of their practices from the beginning (their interaction in the recycling unit), then became more prominent and dominant in order to define decisions and the general logic of the RU. The most influential member of the unit, reflecting about the previous leader and



the current conjuncture, indicates the change of direction, suggesting that the former leader ‘had her defects, but she was a person that used to put someone in charge of the association and went away to look for things. She would hand in letters [requesting materials], she would talk with others, and participate in meetings. But today we do not have this anymore. Today things are only here inside [the unit] and stay here within four walls. Hence, everything is more complicated’ (Interview, 28 December 2006).

In short, 15 years after the foundation of the Associação, the original capital amassed by members as a group, that is, a combination of reli-gious capital in association with political capital transferred by external agents, was slowly dissipated. Only detailed empirical research would illuminate the extent of that political capital, but all indications are that the first two PT governments, moved by their strong pro-poor orientation, did offer ample support and opened their doors to repre-sentatives of the recycling units that were then established. That capital accumulated at the beginning (as a collective body) guaranteed privi-leged dispositions in the field, thus forging an open interest and sup-port by government officers and several initiatives. In that first period, there were many mediators in the field working in association with the RU, from religious cadre to different government officers, but also trade unionists, representatives of social movements and private buyers. In their daily relations, representatives of the unit had open access to government officers, often supported by religious mediators capable of mobilising resources and influence. On their side, political figures regularly visited the unit and established personal connections with recycling workers. In recent years, however, this former web of relations has been eroded and political operators visit the unit only in specific moments: according to a member interviewed ‘[they] come when it is the moment of political decisions. They visit us a lot only when it is a year of elections. Seldom has someone come. The only one who visited us, even when it was not a year of elections, was Tarso Genro; he always visited us’ (Interview, 28 December 2006). Genro was the mayor from 1993 to 1996, and 1999 to 2000. Another city councillor, also a mem-ber of the Workers’ Party, who used to visit the unit on a regular basis in the past, proposed and approved a law in 2000 establishing the ‘Day of the recycler and of rubbish recycling’ (which is to be celebrated on 22 December), this fact being a telling illustration of how capitals are exchanged in a given field.

In recent years, that positionality was strongly affected by this inward movement and the original capital held by participants almost



evaporated. Religious mediators gradually left the unit and are not pre-sent anymore to create bridges with the municipal government or bring either religious or material support (Fischer, 2004c, p. 10). Relations with the political operators, in turn, suffered a gradual transformation in the second part of that decade for two main reasons. First, the incap-acity of participants in the unit to develop a visible political presence outside the unit in accordance with the ‘grand aspirations’ of political mediators linked to the municipal government – meaning an active role in participatory spaces like PB meetings or political allegiance in electoral periods. In the first years political agents certainly expected electoral loyalty from the group and one member interviewed put it clearly when mentioning their presence in PB meetings: ‘there was always party politics ... but many PB participants were not sympathis-ers of the PT and disagreements appeared most of the time. When we had elections, they [government officers in charge of PB] prepared their political leaflets ... when the elections were approaching they favoured their candidates’ (Interview, 21 October 2006). However, this assumed political relationship suffered a setback when the original leader of the unit was forced to leave due to illness. According to several interviews, she was rather authoritarian, but also someone who fought hard for the success of the RU and had an intense involvement with outside agents, especially politicians linked to the Workers’ Party and government officers. She also stimulated members to attend PB spaces to present their demands. ‘She always attended meetings, she was looking after us, she visited firms [to ask for recyclable materials], she was prepared to confront DMLU [the municipal agency in charge of rubbish collec-tion] she put us to learn all the time’, one member reminisced about the original leader (Interview, 28 December 2006). Since her death in 2002, her successors have been unable to secure the same contacts and links with government officers (or religious groups).

A second reason that explains this inward movement has a curious external origin, that is, a revised political orientation that was gradually in place after 1997 when the third mayor elected under the coalition took office (Raul Pont). The new mayor represented another faction that was not so favorable to this social experiment. Adopting a sort of ‘par-ticipatory fundamentalism’, this dominant (Trotskyite) faction in gov-ernment did not favor specific direct support to the recycling units, but would accept their demands exclusively through participatory spaces, notably PB meetings. As a result, in the face of these convergent factors, the members of the Rubem Berta Association soon experienced growing difficulties, especially in the new millennium.



As a consequence of both trends, from the late 1990s onwards a grad-ual dislocation of these agents was observed in their position in the ori-ginal field, which had mixed party political action, social assistance, religious interests and environmental concerns, resulting in a field that could be called ‘rubbish collection for the poor’. After the changes, mem-bers of the unit were inserted into a marginal corner within a new and broader ‘environmental field’ without many allies anymore and facing enormous challenges to convert their now reduced capital. A combin-ation, therefore, of lack of leadership in the unit with a growing dis-interest in government circles about the fate of these units (especially if not transformed into electoral allegiance) meant with the passing of years that many doors were closed and access to services and resources became more problematic. This inward encroachment and the resulting scanty external relations amplified the importance of internal differ-ences, and also the stronger weight of forms of habitus, especially those anchored in patriarchal domination by a small group coordinating the unit, not to mention the fear of most members of losing their job in the unit because of the establishment of this new internal set of relations. As mentioned before, habitus reflects several modes of gesturing, acting or orienting in fields, thus configuring social practices. Symbolic power (see Box 4.1) came to the forefront, thus gradually dominating the activ-ity and internal fragmentation soon ensued. Formerly, ‘it was a more united group, [today] it is quite divided’ (Interview, 29 December 2006), a member noted and the coordinator reinforced this: ‘It is true, the fact is that as a group we do not exist’ (Interview, 28 December 2006).

As an illustration of this trend, even if it is an association of equals according to its founding statute, most workers are nowadays fearful of open discussions, especially in assemblies with the whole group. One member interviewed noted that the majority stays quiet in general meet-ings ‘because if this person speaks [critically he or she] may be kicked off from the unit’ (Interview, 17 December 2006) and another added that ‘[members] think they will be sent off and thus lose their job; this is the reason that the majority keeps in silence, the majority is fearful of this, of his reaction [the man elected as leader], he may dismiss us’ (Interview, 27 December 2006). Another member, even more emphat-ically, insisted that ‘if we raise our voice [in the assemblies], God, they [the leaders] become enraged. No one may say anything’ (Interview, 29 December 2006).

Curiously enough from a superficial observation, but not surprising from a sociological perspective, the vast majority of members, who are women, elected in recent years as their coordinator one of the three



men working in the RU, and someone with a controversial personal record. According to one of the workers, he: ‘does not have day to work and does not have an hour to arrive [in the unit]. He comes only when there is a problem and then he decides alone and does not consult any-one. Being a man he has advantages inside the unit’. A rationale of individual-driven internal development has prevailed in the unit since then, thus making this innovation rather like a private firm working in the field of rubbish collection. With the ascendancy of symbolic cap-ital as the main social force in the new field, members, in fact, classify themselves and others by objects they possess and by forms of capital distributed in the group. The dominant agent is someone who has the means to force the dominated agent to see him/her as he/she wants to be seen (Bourdieu, 1995, pp. 55–6). In the face of patriarchal values so ingrained in Brazilian society, it would be expected that symbolic power by a male participant would prevail at one point when the unit turned into itself and no external agent is so strong as yet to intervene in an opposite direction. However, why do agents (members) stay in the field in such disadvantageous position? A field is the social space where individuals find their social raison d´être and for that reason all agents in the field have an interest in maintaining the field; it is where they acquire social intelligibility. In particular, for all workers living in extreme poverty with no visible option in hand, those internal develop-ments found their social justification. Moreover, a new political econ-omy of rubbish collection was being nurtured and RU members would soon confront even bigger obstacles for their development.

Another worrying development was materialising after the initial success of this innovation and soon exacerbated disputes for resources with other agents in the field. In the first half of the 1990s there was not a private sector worth the name collecting recyclable materials in the city. In those years only a handful of small firms were working in down-town Porto Alegre, collecting waste papers from commercial firms and administrative offices in that part of the city. After the establishment of the RUs and successive public campaigns to select recyclable mate-rials and their collection by government, a growing market in recyc-ling products was formed, now offering valuable materials like metals and plastic of all sorts, thus promising more profits for new entrants. As noted before, from 1988 to 2005 the total volume of rubbish col-lected in the city grew 73 per cent and also increased its value as new waste materials appeared, reflecting higher levels of per capita income in Porto Alegre. In the same period, the total population increased only an estimated 10 per cent.



As a consequence of these developments, by the late 1990s, with many new firms entering this field, an emerging cycle of perverse com-petition pitting ‘the poor against the poor’ was in place. In other words, private firms were hiring carroceiros and carrinheiros not linked to the recycling units or the coleta seletiva promoted by government. These poor collectors would check rubbish in all neighbourhoods on collec-tion days (announced by the local government) and grab the ‘best rub-bish’, that is, the most valued pieces that could be recycled, just hours before the government trucks were supposed to come for the regular collection. They would then select and sell it to private firms, whereas ‘the rubbish of the rubbish’, of lower potential in recycling terms (and less value), was all that was left for the distribution centres and destined to the RUs. The final result was loads of ‘low quality rubbish’ for the newly formed units, and their members could not select materials in the quantity and quality to generate satisfactory levels of income. This trend of ‘poor rubbish collectors against poor rubbish recyclers’ eventu-ally produced lower financial results thus eroding interest and motiv-ation within this innovation. One participant argued that ‘the unit should be more strict, we earned much more in the past’ (Interview, 12 December 2006), and many emphasised that they would quickly leave the unit in exchange for a paid job outside the unit if something came up in the formal labour market. Government inaction also played a crucial role in deepening difficulties in this period, and its disinterest coincided with a distinct vision about this innovation shared by those who came into power in the late 1990s.

How should we interpret the trajectory of this innovation from such a promising start to increasing strains leading to such unsatisfactory results? Empirical findings point in two directions, aside from those trends referred to previously as ingredients of this ‘political economy of rubbish collection in Porto Alegre’. First, several mediators (espe-cially those linked to the municipal government) working in the unit over the years were not able to interpret the distinct ‘timing of [social] change’ expected by political aspirations, deriving from ideological doctrines, but also reflecting ignorance about social processes shaping the daily challenges faced by the recruited poor families working in the newly established units. On the other hand, there was the ‘timing of [subjective] change’, experienced by members linked to the unit, in particular after the loss of a strong leadership commanding the group and the deteriorating market conditions with the passing of the years. If this distance in expectations had been perceived, those mediators would probably have proposed different actions. Instead of forcing



members to attend PB meetings, for example, an intense effort in organ-ising the group, using different methodologies to motivate and inform them about the innovation and its potentialities, coupled with actions in the city in order to regulate control on recyclable rubbish collected by the government (thus keeping its ‘higher quality’ and eventually higher incomes), would have made much more sense in the long term and maybe would have produced a growing sense of identity and more effective collective control of the innovation.

Second, although members are not to be ‘blamed’, a lesson of this case study calls attention to the extreme operational difficulties of social experiments mobilising citizens living in the frontier of survival. If they are supposed to be politically active and increase their visibility as a collective body in a given political field, the chances of their cap-acity to do so are slim. When survival and the ‘revolting conditions’ of life are the objective manifestations of their existence, it is some-what illusory to expect active involvement and ‘political awareness’ in the short run (or even in the long run, if more tolerant and supportive actions by external actors are not in place). In short, the main lesson of this innovative experiment in Porto Alegre questions the understand-ing of many left-inspired actions ‘supporting the poor’: after idealising humans’ capacity to (rationally) act in political fields when poverty is so dire and unequal relations are so blatantly visible, these are illusions of social transformation when individuals are not emancipated in any sphere of life, either in their educational background or in their mater-ial conditions of living, let alone their political worldviews.

This gradual repositioning into a new field and a diverse structure of capitals (and forms of power and social domination) is positing diffi-cult challenges for the continuity of this experiment. There is, first, the gradual disappearance of the initial effort to build a collective body cap-able of presenting itself in the original field and fight for new opportun-ities and more resources. The slow formation of a ‘private logic’ inside the unit, where few are able to dismiss any member because of disagree-ments and internal disputes, is a revealing facet of these new moments experienced by members. A second and even clearer impasse deriving from these internal tendencies centres on the growing barriers to the development of any sense of group identity. A member interviewed sug-gested that this identity was in formation, when she emphasised that ‘In the first time I worked here, I was still a bit embarrassed: “gosh, I work in the middle of the rubbish!”. I was always inventing something to pre-sent differently my work. Today this does not exist anymore and I feel myself as a recycler’ (Interview, 27 December 2006). This quasi-identity,



however, is not shared by the vast majority of the group, from the inter-views carried out with all of them. Most define themselves simply as ‘workers’. As a result, their occupation in the RU is merely ‘another job’ which has some advantages (most live near the unit) but also many dis-advantages, such as low payment, unhealthy working conditions and the stigma of working with rubbish. ‘Recyclers’ is a namesake ascribed mainly by external mediators with little resonance inside the unit. There is no evidence of collective identity in the group. If they share similar social and economic conditions as low-paid workers and also because they share the same working situation, these aspects did not create a meaningful notion of social identity thus far in the group, in particular after the inward movement described previously.

Nevertheless, the group did develop relations of comradeship and displayed instances of remarkable solidarity from time to time. To illus-trate this point, members do not enjoy labour rights according to law (vacations, for example). The unit is registered according to existing legal requirements, but their workers are not legally registered and do not pay social security in order to enjoy those rights. The group, how-ever, developed a scheme of ‘days off” for all, as a sort of vacation – the remaining group covers the absence of those who are out. Also, when someone is sick and unable to work there is no deduction of that day, in addition to other demonstrations of group solidarity that were uncovered during the fieldwork. These are indications, perhaps, that the internal fragmentation is not so deep and irreversible, and perhaps a new strategy organised by members and those still working with the units could produce a revival of this innovation in the years to come.

Conclusion

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated’. (Marx, 1975)

Writing about the ‘philosophy of praxis’, Gramsci suggested in the Cuaderni del Carcere that this Marxian thesis ‘posits a necessary relation of active reaction by man upon the structure, affirming the unity of the process of reality’ (Gramsci, 2000, p. 193). His assertion, however, is perhaps too optimistic and rather improbable when one analyses situ-ations of extreme poverty and ponders about possibilities of human



emancipation and political interaction with ‘structures’ or, as in this case study, with ambitious expectations about human agency. Under these situations, if the educator is not educated and thus able to fully grasp the social conditions of those who are supposed to develop ‘active reaction upon the structure’, it is possible that these citizens will stay under the sway of social domination and incapable of reaching their political emancipation. Who would educate political operators in gov-ernment attracted to ambitious notions of social transformation and so distant from the micro-politics reconfiguring the internal relations of the RU? Who would insist with them on the importance of a differ-ent time scale for redefining their chances of social mobilisation and participation in external spaces like participatory budgeting? Thus the question arises in such situations: does material deprivation create a structural barrier to citizens’ political engagement?

If findings of this case study may be generalised, an emphatic yes is the only plausible answer. After analysing the historical development of the unit and the lack of participation by members in outside events, a member responded with no hesitation: ‘Ah, it is too many children, one must work, when you are at home, kids do not want to know if I stole [food] or if I begged it; they only want to eat, there were days when I arrived at home and instead of attending a meeting I kept thinking with myself what I would give them to eat’ (Interview, 29 December 2006). Although this is only one facet that explains the development observed in the unit, it highlights barriers to participation that are typical of poor sectors and, also, the illusions of middle-class militants who are unable to put into perspective personal and subjective obstacles for citizens to engage in social and political activities. In this respect, the promising political development suggested by Doimo (1995) when she anticipated a ‘new ethical and political space’ for citizens in Brazil that could enhance participation and deepen democratic processes must be viewed with a grain of salt. In societies as unequal as the Brazilian one, governments seeking to implement innovations anchored in broad social participa-tion must consider material barriers to engage them in new spaces cre-ated with democratising trends. Poverty is not an invincible obstacle to promote social participation, but some forms of poverty in the frontier of extreme deprivation probably are a formidable barrier to emancipate citizens and open the doors of ‘thick citizenship’ for all.

If the micro-politics surrounding social interaction among the poorest and most marginalised groups is not fully understood, political prom-ises will be rapidly transformed into political platitudes. With the move towards a new field where personal relations inside the unit played a more decisive role, symbolic capital became the most crucial asset in the



hands of individuals involved in this social setting and common object-ives were placed in a distant second priority. Survival and individual reproduction were (and are) the main (and only) goals of each participant in the unit, and a new logic of human interaction permeates this activ-ity. As a result, the creative links imagined when this innovation was implemented, which would articulate conscious householders selecting recyclable materials on the one hand, to a social experiment at the other extreme, where poor citizens would gradually embody an informed and participatory collective group engaged in innovative recycling activ-ities, turned into a very different development. The relational definition of poverty situations, proposed by Gialdino from her study of cases of extreme poverty in Buenos Aires, are relevant here. For her, ‘poor people are those involved in a web of relations entailing multiple deprivation of material, symbolic, spiritual and transcendent goods indispensable for the autonomous development of the essential and existential com-ponents of their identity’ (Gialdino, 2006, p. 481). Without discuss-ing further her epistemological distinction of essential and existential components that makes up social identity, her relevant argument is the indispensability of access to those material and non-material goods to create chances of human autonomous development which comes to be the same, in Marxian terms, as human emancipation.

This is a micro case that may offer wider reverberations to similar situ-ations. In order to create greater chances of political involvement and social transformation, the educator (outside actors, in particular govern-ment officers and especially those moved by ambitious projects of polit-ical renewal) must be educated. It means, in short, that a differentiated understanding of variations in preferences, choices and possibilities by distinct social groups requires a flexible and more tolerant strategy when dealing with the most marginalised groups. This case indicates that the social emancipation of the poor cannot be reached merely by external models, models that ignore the time lag lived by the presumed bearers of that objective. When this lack of a proper understanding affects the innovation and there are concomitant impacts of other changes in the field, conditions for economic improvement, social development and political emancipation may indeed become problematic.

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100

5CaracasThe State and Peoples’ Power in the BarrioMargarita Lopez Maya

Introduction

The new opportunities opened up by the Chávez government since 1999 for promoting popular participation in the management of public affairs undoubtedly constitute a central element in its overall national revolutionary project. Between 1999 and 2007, during the first presi-dential period, they were seen as part of what was identified as the ‘Bolivarian’ project or the creation of a ‘participatory and protagonistic’ democracy. Subsequently, they have been seen as part of the project of a ‘twentieth-century socialism’, identified as the central orientation of the president’s second government.

The participatory innovations in Caracas which we will be exam-ining here form part of this project and, as a result, have particular characteristics. They are not initiatives taken by political organisations operating at a local or federal level, experimenting with new forms of public administration at odds with national government policy. Nor are they promoted by actors from civil society. They are the result of ori-entations proportioned by the national government, which simultan-eously seek to promote various different though interrelated objectives: to improve the efficiency of the public administration, to consolidate the hegemony achieved by the new Bolivarian actors and to contribute to the construction of a model of society conceived of as an alternative to capitalism. The political alliance supporting President Chávez con-trols a solid majority of the local and regional authorities, so it can be assumed that the experiences we examine here are being reproduced in some form all over the country. For Bolivarianism, it is a question of promoting changes in the popular sectors which involve the ‘empower-ment’ of a popular subject capable of infusing life into a participatory


Caracas: The State and Peoples’ Power 101

and protagonistic democracy which is at the heart of its overall project. It is also about making things work in the unplanned urban sectors or popular barrios as they are known.

Technical Water Round-Tables (Mesas Tecnicas de Agua, henceforth, MTAs) Self-Managing Community Organisations (OCAs), Urban Land Committees (CTUs) and Communal Councils (CCs), amongst other forms of participation, have created high expectations both within and with-out Venezuela. The prolonged crisis of the Venezuelan State and of its rep-resentative democracy provoked a profound political instability, together with a marked worsening of public services, above all in the popular bar-rios, where the majority of the poor live. In this sense, Caracas, with its more than three million inhabitants, approximately half of which live in these barrios, can be considered representative of all the main urban centres in the country. For this research, we asked: Have the participatory innovations improved the quality of services in the community? What strengths or weaknesses are to be identified in relation to the services offered by local government institutions? These new Venezuelan initia-tives, conceived of as the basis for a new form of democracy capable of improving on merely representative democracy – and also on capitalism itself – do they really contribute to overcoming the prevailing inequality and poverty? Has the meaning and the quality of democracy really been transformed? Is the state more democratic as a result?

The context: Caracas and its barrios

As the capital of a country with enormous oil resources, Caracas under-went radical transformations during the course of the twentieth cen-tury. Thanks to the considerable fiscal income available from oil from the 1920s on, the Venezuelan State was able to stimulate an acceler-ated modernisation process which affected above all the capital city of Caracas. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it counted more than three million inhabitants, compared with 100,000 at the outset of the twentieth century (INE, 2008), and was an important destination for migrants.

Despite the policies of successive governments designed to plan urban development, Venezuela’s urban concentrations would characteristic-ally find a large proportion of their population deprived of essential services and even of effective citizenship, as many inhabitants settled illegally. The crisis of the import-substitution model in the 1980s aggra-vated the territorial polarization which separated the poor ghettoes from the wealthy urbanisations. Currently, about half the families of



the city live in popular barrios which either lack basic public services such as direct access to drinking water, street lighting, paved streets, etc. or, where they exist, have experienced serious problems with them as a result of inadequate maintenance. At the same time, the problems of security, transportation and access to food are particularly acute.

In political-administrative terms, Caracas is made up of five muni-cipalities governed by their respective elected mayors, together with a so-called super-mayor, also elected, who is responsible for the entire metropolitan area embracing the five municipalities. Our case studies are within the two most populous municipalities where the majority of the popular barrios are to be found: Libertador, towards the west of the city, and Sucre, in the federal state of Miranda, towards the east. In Antímano Parish, Libertador Municipality, La Pedrera barrio can be found, and it was here that the MTA study was founded in 2004. In Petare Parish, Sucre Municipality, are the barrios Carpintero and Unión, where the experience of the OCA was developed.

Socioeconomic data for the Antímano and Petare parishes

Antímano Parish has about 150,000 inhabitants (Census, 2001), of which some 15,000, or 3,700 families, live in La Pedrera (Interview, Hidrocapital, 28 November 2007). This parish, and also the barrio itself, is one of the few that continued a process of territorial expansion beyond the 1980s, receiving migrants from both within and without the city. Since 1990 its population has increased by 9.0 per cent, com-pared with an overall growth for the city calculated as 0.1 per cent between 1990 and 2001 (INE, 2006).

Petare Parish, according to the 2001 census and its projections for 2006, has 546,766 inhabitants (INE, 2006), of which 39,200 (more than 9,500 families) live in the barrios Carpintero and Unión (OCA, undated). Compared with Antímano Parish (see Table 5.1), the socioeconomic con-ditions of the Petare barrios are slightly better, although it is still one of the two parishes in Caracas with the highest concentration of popular barrios and has important levels of poverty and exclusion. Carpintero and Unión are much older barrios than La Pedrera, and began to be occupied in the 1940s. The land where barrio Unión was built was made available free in 1948 by the Gallegos government in order to settle peasants who had been displaced from other areas in the city as a result of urban growth (Interview, community activist, 22 November 2006). This explains its more numerous population and greater consolidation. Also, in Petare Parish there are some residential areas with social sectors with medium and medium-high incomes.



In recent years, as a result of the fiscal boom and the social policies of the Chávez government, principally those known as the ‘Missions’ (Misiones), the indices of poverty in the country at large, and conse-quently in these Caracas parishes, have been falling, although we do not count detailed comparative data. According to the National Statistics Office, the proportion of homes classified as ‘poor’ has been falling per-sistently since 2003: from 35.5 per cent in 2005, to 31.85 per cent in 2006, and 27.5 per cent in 2007 (INE, 2008).

The deficiencies of basic services have not, however, been confronted to any significant degree, as was only too evident in the course of our field work. Furthermore, the Antímano and Petare parishes register high levels of violence and criminality. The homicide rate in the former in 2006 was 76 per 100,000 inhabitants, and in the latter it was 72, compared to an average in the Metropolitan District of 37 (based on calculations from the Centro de Estudios para la Paz, UCV, 2007). In our interviews, particularly in the barrio La Pedrera, the problem of

Table 5.1 Antímano and Petare: Socioeconomic data, 2006

Antímano

parish* Petare parish**Libertador

Municipality

Number of inhabitants 150,971 546,766 2,091,452

Poverty percentage of homes

28.65 15.97 16.35

Critical poverty percentage of homes

6.44 2.34 2.86

Percentage of uneducated children

2.05 1.37 0.95

Percentage of overcrowded homes

17.27 11 10

Percentage with inadequate housing

8.31 2.09 3.07

Percentage lacking basic services

4.41 1.68 2.09

Percentage with extreme economic dependence

4.39 2.81 3

* Antímano is one of the 22 parishes in the Libertador Municipality.** Petare Parish forms part of the Metropolitan District of Caracas (MDC). In the absence of data for the MDC, its data are compared with that of the Libertador Municipality and not with those of the rest of Miranda federal state, to which it belongs.Source: INE, 2006.



violence was constantly mentioned as an obstacle for participating in the different government initiatives.

The socioeconomic context of the innovations

The participatory mechanisms we are studying must be understood against the background of solutions attempted by grassroots actors during the political crisis of the 1990s, as a result of the loss of legit-imacy of representative democracy and a questioning of the role of political parties. In 1998, as we have indicated, there was a clear shift in hegemony with the emergence of the Bolivarian movement headed by Hugo Chávez, whose project assumed form in the 1999 Constitution.

The new constitutional concept of participation had its origins in sociopolitical developments generated by the reform of the State since the late 1980s (Gómez Calcaño and López Maya, 1990). In this pro-cess, a consensus was achieved for the election of state governors on the basis of universal, direct and secret suffrage – hitherto they had been appointed by the president – and also on the creation and popular elec-tion of the mayors. There was also an incipient decentralization of pub-lic services to the regions and municipalities. Thanks to these changes, left-wing parties like the Movement to Socialism (MAS) and the Radical Cause (Causa R) won various mayoral and governor posts. This led to the introduction of participatory initiatives for the popular sectors. The MTAs and the OCAs were based on participatory experiences stimu-lated and supported by the mayors of Libertador (Caracas) and Caroní (Bolívar State), both in the hands of the Causa R. This party divided in 1997 and key leaders, including the mayors who had promoted these innovations, helped found the party, Fatherland for all (Patria Para Todos, PPT), which formed part of the political alliance backing Chavez in 1998 and since.

Since Chávez has been in power, participatory innovations are stim-ulated by the National Executive rather than the municipality. They form part of a process of re-centralisation of the public administration, with power concentrated in the hands of the president. In consequence, the municipal governments of Libertador and Sucre, together with the metropolitan authorities, do not have a significant participation in the experiences we analyse here. This is despite their clear legal responsi-bilities for water services and urban planning, and despite the fact that they belong to the president’s party. They leave the initiative to the cen-tral government and, according to the evidence of our interviews, do not offer support, or do so only occasionally in a partial way.



As for the political tendencies of voters in these parishes, Antímano has always voted in favor of the president with percentages well above the average for Caracas, while Petare is closer to the Caracas averages, fluctuating between the government and the opposition in successive elections. Antímano and the barrio La Pedrera are illustrative of the ‘ter-ritorialisation’ of the country’s political polarisation under the impact of Chavismo. These predominantly poor areas are clearly pro-Chávez. The difference to be noted in Petare is doubtless to be explained by the fact that while it contains popular barrios, Petare also contains some middle- and upper-class urbanisations. Another factor which could con-tribute to its greater political diversity is the fact that the popular barrios of Petare are older than those of Antímano, with a longer experience of popular struggles and closer links to those political organisations prevailing in the past.

Investigating with the people

Our research in Caracas has respected the general conceptual and methodological guidelines established for the six cities being studied in the overall project. On the one hand, we have tried to understand the objectives, changes and results produced once poor people and their communities begin to take advantage of the opportunities for partici-pation offered by the government. On the other hand, the methodo-logical strategy was the co-production of knowledge, incorporating into the research process those community organisations and activists with which we were working, together with public servants committed to the innovations at different levels of the administration.

In order to understand the objectives, changes and results involved in these experiences, we took as our starting point the concept of par-ticipation, both in theoretical and political terms, as elaborated by the Bolivarian government. We emphasise this point because the concept has many connotations and has been broached from very different perspectives (Involve, 2005). In the case of the Venezuelan govern-ment’s discourse, we have interpreted it on the basis of official doc-uments, above all the 1999 Constitution and the General Outline of the Plan for the Nation’s Economic and Social Development 2001–2007 (GOPNESD, 2001).

In the constitution, ‘participatory and protagonistic’ democracy sanctions the right of citizens to participate ‘directly, semi-directly and indirectly’, not only in the election process, but also in the ‘for-mulation, execution and control of public policy’ (“Exposition of



Motives”, 2000). There is a clear difference with the approach of the 1961 Constitution. While the forms of representative democracy are preserved, there is now a commitment to apply different mechanisms for participation in all the ambits of the state, with a view to trans-forming the profoundly unequal power relations prevalent in society (Article 62). In the GOPNESD 2001–07, it is argued that participation promotes self-development, co-responsibility and the ‘protagonism’ of citizens. On this basis, it is intended to construct a society which is democratic, egalitarian and infused with the values of solidarity.

According to the Bolivarian vision, the state is also a key actor (GOPNESD, 2001), ‘accompanying’ society and creating the conditions for empowering the citizens. By way of their increasing participation in the management of public affairs, individuals, families and organised society become transforming and transformed actors. It is they, and not the state, who are the protagonists.

Once the way in which participation is understood in official circles had been firmly established, we created the instruments for collecting, analysing and evaluating changes and results in communities where participatory initiatives had been introduced. We were looking for cases in which there had been technical and material aid in order to resolve some important community problem during the course of at least an entire year. Our initial contacts led us to choose the Technical Water Round-Tables (MTAs) in La Pedrera barrio in Antímano and the Self-Managing Community Organisations (OCAs) in the Carpintero and Unión barrios in Petare. In the first case, the community had been organ-ised in an MTA since 2005 and were promoting a project for replacing the tubes for their water supply with the support of Hidrocapital, the public water company of the Caracas Metropolitian District and the Environment Ministry. In the second case, the community, organised into a ‘consorcio’ (consortium), had participated between 1999 and 2000 in an overall plan for reconditioning the terrain on which their houses were built, with the support of the National Housing Council (CONAVI); and, between 2004 and 2005, now organised as an OCA, had contracted the first repairs with the support of the Housing and Habitat Ministry.

Beyond the bibliographical materials, official documents and those of the different organisations, the research counted on a field-work diary and semi-structured interviews with participants, public servants and professionals. The organisation of the data sought to facilitate the evalu-ation of three dimensions of the general problem that we regarded as crucial: a) the role of participation in enhancing the quality of life; b) in



strengthening the autonomous organising capacity of the community; and c) how the democratic quality of the Venezuelan state or political system had improved or been modified.

During the course of two years we were in continuous contact with the participants, professionals and public servants involved in these initiatives, incorporating their suggestions and commentaries. In the same spirit, the drafts we prepared were made available to them in order to obtain feedback which not only improved the material, but effectively meant that the final versions were the result of a joint effort involving the participants themselves. We also created an audiovisual archive with photos and videos of the communities and, finally, we incorporated bibliography, documents and some interviews with public servants to help us to include a general analysis of other participatory initiatives such as the Urban Land Committees, the Bolivarian Circles and the Communal Councils.

The co-production of knowledge had, in our view, average success, as we don’t believe that those involved felt themselves to be co-participants as intended. This is explained by several factors. One was the novelty, as much for ourselves as investigators as for the participants, officers and experts who were not familiar with the idea that academics like us would seek a horizontal exchange of knowledge. We perceived awkwardness in some people and for that reason we decided early on not to propose a formal relationship of associates in the production of knowledge – as the methodology had suggested – but rather a more informal relationship of co-participants based on reciprocal trust, speaking a lot and seeing each other frequently. This would allow shared reflection, something which we believe was achieved reasonably well. We believe that we counted on advantages in building confidence with our co-participants because we were introduced to these experiences by activists with much recognition in the communities. The contributions of the participants of the inno-vations we studied were mostly about rectifying information when we posed questions and exchanged ideas. The activists in the OCA federation were the most analytical because of their long experience, along with the officers and experts who served both experiences. The latter offered to correct manuscripts and deepened or questioned some of our results.

It is worth pointing out that Caracas is not an easy city for building sustained relationships of academics with popular communities or with officers overwhelmed with tasks, which has an impact on the success of this methodology. Political and territorial polarisation which inten-sified over the last years did not help create confidence towards those visiting the poor neighbourhoods. Besides this, there was a significant



physical distance between the middle and local class residencies. Levels of insecurity in the city are high, especially in the popular neighbour-hoods, and transport is not very efficient. It is important to plan ahead, although that does not guarantee meetings will happen, as people are accustomed to meetings not taking place and to a sense of time which is not very rigorous. The time fixed for meetings is only an approximate reference and it is never certain that the activity will take place and when. We always had to ask help from people involved to reach the barrios. In La Pedrera it was too dangerous to stay after 5.00 pm. In Petare we could stay longer but we were always accompanied, never alone. In the Carpintero y Unión barrios our co-participants were activists with many tasks and little time to dedicate to us. The OCA was functioning at minimum capacity, which did not give much motivation.

In the case of the MTA La Pedrera, as we will explain further on, a landslide produced by torrential rains destroyed a good part of the neighbourhood when we were finishing the research and forced many families to abandon their houses and seek refuge. That prevented a final co-production with the participants of the MTA. With the mem-bers of the OCA Carpintero y Unión, as with the Federation of OCAs, the experience was more proactive, although the multiplicity of tasks of the members of these organisations and of ourselves made it difficult to fix meetings and for them to read documents and give their opin-ions. The oral discussion in meetings was the main vehicle for reflec-tion; people privileged the spoken over the written. Our final meeting with the Federation of OCAs was very positive for the dynamic it gen-erated – the technical advisers attended – and it was very useful for some of the results we present here.

Regenerating the barrios: The ‘people’ as protagonists

The two innovations which we tracked in this research represent ways to regenerate the barrios of Caracas, which would be technically effect-ive as well as involve the communities in processes of self-management. As we have already pointed out, in general the state of the public ser-vices in some sectors of Caracas is amongst the worst of the six cities covered in this research project. But the access to drinking water in the Antímano parish is a particularly acute problem even for Caracas, and had provoked continuous street demonstrations during the 1990s (see Provea, 1989–1999). It was during these years that the mayor of Libertador, Aristóbulo Istúriz of the Causa R party, took the initiative of establishing a ‘technical work round-table’ which brought together



municipal officers, technical specialists and members of the commu-nity in order to look for solutions to the problem and ways to reduce the conflict. Between 1993 and 1995, Antímano parish witnessed the functioning of the first MTA (Arconada, 1996).

From 1999 on, but now under the auspices of Hidrocapital, MTAs were formed all over Caracas not, as with Istúriz, at a parish level, but covering smaller areas, communities within different sectors of the parishes. For those sectors of a parish which share a common source of water, Hidrocapital encouraged the formation of Community Water Councils (CCAs), participatory points of contact for all the MTAs shar-ing a common water source, in order to exchange information about the water supply with each other and with representatives of the cen-tral or local government once every two weeks. The success of these two initiatives in helping to regularise the supply of drinking water led to their introduction all over the rest of the country. By 2007, there were about 2,700 MTAs functioning across the country (Interview, Hidrocapital, 8 August 2007).

The age of some of the popular barrios in Caracas has led to an accumulation of urban problems derived from the continuous, and unplanned, construction of houses and service facilities. This general problem, which has at times provoked landslides and the collapse of buildings, became critical towards the end of the twentieth century, and led to different attempts to find a solution. One of these was the so-called ‘social consortium’ (consorcio social), an entity that would serve as the source of inspiration for the OCAs. The idea originated in the Consorcio Catuche in the barrio Catuche, San José parish, in the 1990s. It was conceived of as a civil organisation with participation of the organised community, a group of Jesuit priests who worked in the community and another group of professional urban plan-ners from the Central University, amongst the latter, the architect Josefina Baldó (López, 2007). These three ‘partners’ came together to prepare a plan to clean up the stream crossing the barrio, which had become little more than a pestilent sewer and was provoking the risk of landslides.

This idea of a ‘social consortium’ to confront problems related to rehabilitation of deteriorating barrios caught the attention of the Libertador mayor who offered material support for the project. In late 1999, as a result of the tragedy provoked by the landslides in the sur-rounding mountains and the thousands of deaths (some of them in Catuche itself), President Chávez appointed architect Josefina Baldó, president of CONAVI. From this post, she was to stimulate the formation



of ‘social consorcios’ all across the country (Interviews, 16 November 2006).

The consorcios sought solutions to the complex problems of the physical rehabilitation of the barrios combining an integrated tech-nical vision with community participation. After the initial impulse from CONAVI between 1999 and 2000, the consorcios were trans-formed into the OCAs between 2004 and 2005 under minister of Housing and Habitat Julio Montes. Whereas in the consorcios the community worked in partnership with the other agents involved in developing its projects, the OCAs gave the organised community more power, subordinating the other agents to it. Like the corsorcios, they were conceived of as a means of finding solutions to concrete problems, while at the same time creating favorable conditions for self-development and popular self-management, together with the empowerment of the community based on a delegated administra-tion of public resources.

In 2005, the community appointed its management committee through a Citizens’ Assembly. Its members took part in training and, on the basis of a participatory diagnosis and with support from pro-fessionals and technical staff from the ministry, approved an over-all regeneration plan costing approximately Bs. 5,000 million (OCA, undated). The initial resources were received the same year, permitting the construction of a containing wall in the Unión barrio and a four-floor building for different social services, also in the upper Unión bar-rio (Interview, community activist, 16 October 2006). Unfortunately, Minister Montes resigned as a result of differences with the president of the Republic and his successor shut down the OCA’s programme. The OCA in Carpintero-Unión found itself without financial resources, the project was paralyzed and since then activity has been minimal.

In the case of the La Pedrera MTA, the participants have no doubt about its contribution to their well-being. The first benefit they cite is the establishment of a guaranteed water supply every 18 or 20 days. Before participating in the MTA, water was available at uncertain inter-vals and, on average, about every 45 days. In the 1990s, the situation had become critical and the service facilities the government had pro-vided in the 1980s virtually collapsed, largely as a result of the increas-ing demand from a growing number of inhabitants. At the time when the tubes were installed the barrio had only three levels with housing. Currently, there are 18. The increased demand, the loss of water through leakages, illegal tapping of the pipes and the mere passing of the years all contributed to a situation in which most families had to rely on



water trucks which did not drive up the hillside on a regular basis and in times of scarcity charged abusive prices.

At the fortnightly meetings of the Community Water Councils (CCAs), Hidrocapital registered the observations of La Pedrera MTA on the water supply and their complaints about leakages and pipe damage, and jointly they agree to a programme of repairs. Hidrocapital squads check and repair the pipes. Although receiving water once every 18 days might appear a minor contribution to the community’s well-being, it represents a substantial improvement on the situation in the 1990s. By way of the CCA, the MTA is informed by Hidrocapital about any par-ticular problem with the water supply and the community understands why water is available only every 18 days and has a way of channeling any complaint.

In 2005 the La Pedrera MTA, with technical support from Hidrocapital specialists, designed a project to replace the worn-out water pipes and received Bs. 800 million (about US$ 372,000) from the government in order to complete it. Towards the end of 2007 the project was more or less finished and participants commented how the responsibilities it involved had served to educate them about the difficulties in supplying the city with water. Apart from the tangible benefits represented by regu-larising the water supply, the CCA participants recognise other improve-ments in the quality of life which they see as fruit of the MTA’s activities. The members of the community get to know each other better and to cooperate more in order to resolve common problems. They are aware of the way work is progressing and when it is completed, and there are more people willing to participate in community activities. Some are stimulated to study in order to be better prepared to find solutions to problems. They are more willing to broach other problems, such as street lighting (Interviews, community members of the MTA, 22 November 2006; 1 November 2006; 26 September 2006). Nevertheless, in all the interviews, there is mention of many problems which cannot be solved simply on the basis of innovations of this sort. We will leave the discus-sion of this and other weaknesses for our concluding comments.

In the Carpintero-Unión OCA, the contribution to a better stand-ard of living, while generally recognized, was much more difficult to appreciate, as a result of the paralysis of the works which had been planned and the understandable frustration of those who had been involved. The OCA had been conceived of on a more ambitious scale than the MTA, embracing a series of projects whose resources were to be administered and supervised by the community itself: containment walls; concrete steps for access to houses where roads were not viable;



construction for housing to replace those buildings in danger of col-lapsing; improvements for the housing built on ground considered safe; construction of streets, drainage and sewer systems, etc. Because two isolated projects in the Unión barrio were the only practical evidence available before the project was paralysed, those interviewed were skep-tical about this innovation. Some felt that their requirements had not been met and that, while the two constructions had improved the situ-ation where they had been undertaken, this was hardly sufficient for the community to view this form of participation in positive terms. On the contrary, it was pointed out that many who had begun participating drifted away and there were complaints from some that those who par-ticipated either failed to deliver on the promises or used their resources for their personal benefit (Interviews, community activists, 6 October 2006; 22 November 2006).

Building sustainable participation at the grassroots: How much autonomy do the innovations promote?

In Venezuela, doubts about the capacity of these new spaces for par-ticipation to strengthen the autonomy of the popular organisations is of particular relevance, because the popular organisations are not the result of initiatives ‘from below’, but rather stimulated by the central government, and because there is a strong paternalist and clientelist culture in the country. Furthermore, the approval of resources remains in the hands of the national authorities, thus accentuating a notably asymmetrical power relationship with the popular organisations which support them.

However, there are various elements which our research has revealed that can be considered a counterweight to this danger:

The types of participation we are examining have their origin in a. initiatives developed in the 1990s at a local level, stimulated by new sociopolitical actors seeking to deepen democratic culture at a local level while, at the same time, overcoming the blatant deficiencies of the public services. It was precisely their success which prompted an attempt to encourage them on a national scale.In our research, we could appreciate how those participating in the b. MTAs and the OCAs valued the new spaces precisely because of the opportunities they offered for improving or developing their capacity to manage the public services directly (Interviews, 26 September 2006; 22 November 2006). Some claim to have developed entre-preneurial skills or the capacity to effectively exercise citizenship,



as a contribution to the realisation of self-government (Interview, 26 September 2006).The members of the OCA insisted that the key to effective auton-c. omy was to manage state resources directly (Interview, 6 October 2006):

No, look, people have to realise that there has been a profound change here and to the extent that [each and everyone] contrib-utes to the change we are going to advance and, as I tell many of my friends, the revolution means a true change when the com-munities are allowed to undertake the management, because all the participation you can give to an organisation or to a commu-nity this participation finally runs up against economic power, and you know who controls the power, here and everywhere else? The one who controls the cheque book. (OCA Federation, Field Diary, 11 November 2006)

In some cases, those who participate in these innovations come d. from previously existing popular organisations and have experience fighting for improvements in their barrios (Interviews, participants, 1 November 2006; 25 October 2006; 6 October 2006). They argue that, while it is true that the state is very powerful when compared with the popular organisations, the deficiencies and the lack of attention on the part of the state is precisely what stimulates popular autonomy.

‘We are all squatters’ was a phrase used in a meeting where we were discussing this topic (OCA, Field Diary, 23 November 2007). The majority of poor families have at some time left behind what they had and, together with other families, dared to occupy a terrain to which they had no legitimate claim. This type of action calls for auda-city, organisational capacity, sacrifice, solidarity, creativity, all qual-ities that potentially favour autonomous action. It was also pointed out that the initial lack of the most elemental human rights, together with the stigma attached to the families recently squatted, led to struggles on the basis of which rights are fought for against successive governments. This is the dynamic ‘from below’ which runs parallel to the attempts on behalf of the state to co-opt the popular organi-sations – whatever the government – and which gives these popular sectors the potential for constructing a robust power independent of the government.

Amongst those who have participated in the experiences of the OCA, some argue that this innovation had even stimulated an economic



dynamic in the barrio which guaranteed the planning and the success-ful completion of works of real quality (OCA Field Diary, 11 November 2006; Interview, 21 November 2006). They consider that the state bur-eaucracy fears this type of popular organisation and as an example point to the experience of the Catuche Consortium, whose access to resources was interrupted by the Chávez government in 2001, putting the community in a very vulnerable position because there were several works only half-completed. The organised community managed to gain access to an international source of finance thanks to the support of the Jesuits. They also sued the state for its failure to comply with the obliga-tion to promote participation and won the case, thus obliging the state to fulfill the obligations it had assumed (López, 2007; Sentencia, 2001). In 2005, with the interruption of access to resources for the OCA by the Ministry of Housing and Habitat, the affected organisations founded an OCA Federation, currently active and looking for financing to reacti-vate its projects, whether national or international, public or private.

Participants and public servants involved in both initiatives, however, recognise that the poverty, violence and insecurity prevailing in the barrios, together with the lack of education and political formation, are obstacles for a robust and independent participation (Interview, com-munity activist, 8 August 2007; OCA, Field Diary, 23 November 2007). People begin to lose their enthusiasm – they say – and feel that the work is not getting anywhere; to this same extent, they drop out, they get frustrated and they tend to adapt themselves to the requirements of the public servants who, if they too are badly prepared, end up bureau-cratising the process. In general, the participants acknowledge that in their barrios there are a lot of difficulties, there is a lot of apathy when it comes to participating, with a reduced number of activists who tend always to be the same ones.

Participation to democratise the state

By involving individuals, families and community organisations in decisions affecting their own lives, the Bolivarian project has attempted to give more substance to Venezuelan democracy, improv-ing on the previously prevailing model of representative democracy. As we have already suggested, the strategy is explicitly two-pronged: on the one hand to promote closer and more horizontal relations between state and society; on the other to stimulate a convergence between dis-tinct understandings of the problem of urban services, thus improving the possibilities of a more appropriate diagnosis and more adequate solutions. In our interviews, there was a general recognition of the new



state orientation as positive. People now feel they have rights, that is, that they are citizens, and it is for this reason that the innovations point in the direction of an improvement in the democratic quality of the Venezuelan state.

The innovations we have studied also contribute to a strengthen-ing of the democratic character of the relationship between citizens, between citizens and their social organisations and between those represented and their representatives. The organisations promoted by the state must be formed and must adopt decisions by way of citizens’ assemblies, fulfilling certain requirements designed to guarantee greater cohesion and a greater sense of belonging and identity amongst the members. For instance, depending on the particular right that is being reclaimed, a requirement may be to organise a census of the families in the community, determine the physical limits of the community and/or elaborate a map of the community, identifying the different houses, or elaborate a map indicating the system of pipes for access to drink-ing water, or reconstruct the history of the barrio, etc. Furthermore, responding to norms established by the government, representatives in contact with intermediate organisations or official organisms function as delegates or spokesmen, with an authorisation subject to cancellation at any time (cf. Ley de los Consejos Comunales, 2006).

Nevertheless, those we interviewed indicated several problems or obstacles in the way of instilling democratic values into the socio-political relations generated by these innovations. There is a relatively low level of participation of the majority of the members of the commu-nity. One of the themes which came up again and again in the interviews was the almost insurmountable difficulty of incorporating members of the community beyond those who have always been involved in com-munity activities. In the case of the La Pedrera MTA, at the outset, in 2004, assemblies were organised in the different sectors and the general assembly for the barrio counted on good attendance (Interview, com-munity activist, 1 November 2006) and 38 ‘spokespersons’ were elected to begin the work. However, shortly afterwards, as the result of internal bickering, the number fell to 8, nearly all women, who were those that effectively assumed responsibility for the project of replacing the tubes until it was finished in 2007.

There are many factors which help explain the apathy. The weight of a traditional lack of confidence in government initiatives can still be felt. People are accustomed to electoral promises that are subsequently forgotten. There is also the all-too-frequent experience of those indi-viduals who use the participation of others in order to promote their



own personal objectives. Over the years, there has been plenty of evi-dence of personal enrichment at the expense of others and the motives of activists are often questioned. In other cases, the lack of time and/or payment for community work discourages potential participants. Unemployment or the need for various different jobs – and the double workday of women – discourages a lot of people. On the other hand, in many barrios there is not even minimum security. In La Pedrera the streets are at the mercy of delinquents or armed gangs after dark. There is no possibility of organising meetings after people get back from work on weekdays. They have to be organised for the weekend.

Some see the politicisation of the innovations as a problem also. Carpintero-Unión OCA interviewees were very emphatic on the import-ance of community work that is not subject to the pressures of party imperatives. The MTAs, unlike neighbourhood organisations which, in the past, were co-opted by the political parties, emphatically assert their lack of subjection to the parties, claiming that neither before nor now do they respond or belong to any political party (Interviews, 29 July 2006; 6 October 2006). They say that this favours popular participation and could gradually undermine the prevailing prejudices against initiatives supported by the government. In 2008, however, the president pressed strongly for people to enter the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSVU), and most Chavista sup-porters in the barrios joined it. In the case of the La Pedrera MTA, it was argued in the same way, that community work related to the prob-lems of water not only has no political colour, but consciously promotes tolerance and pluralism (Interview, 28 November 2006). Nevertheless, during 2007 and the debates on the communal councils, this point was a source of differences and tensions within the Bolivarian movement. The government tended to favour a conception of the CC as part of the ‘socialist’ state and not of society, thus tending to subject this and other initiatives to the imperatives of the official party and its project. The Communal Council Law of 2006 aimed to enshrine this principal through the constitutional reform, but the reform was rejected in a ref-erendum in December 2007. Some of our interviewees expressed their disagreement with this way of viewing the problem and informed us that a figure in the government committed to the non-interference of the parties and member of the Presidential Commission for Popular Power discussing the reform of the law was removed from the commis-sion precisely because he did not share the official view.

Many of our interviewees point out that a deepening of democratic practice by way of participation cannot be ‘decreed’. It is necessarily



a process that takes time, that calls for a process of formation, that requires technical assistance, a sustained experience of participation, adjustments in the innovations and, finally, institutionalisation. The OCAs have the advantage that they have been the result of a relatively prolonged process of reflection and practical application since the 1980s, in which teams of technical experts, public servants and mem-bers of the OCAs accumulated experience and introduced the modifica-tions suggested by that same experience. As a result, they incorporate legal and operative previsions, designed to strengthen the position of the organised community in the face of the powerful Venezuelan state, protecting them from the profoundly negative aspects of the national political culture, such as clientelism and corruption. As a result of their territorial scope, of the complexity with which they pose the problem of physical regeneration and the management controls they contemplate, they contribute to a more integral perception of the problems of the community while, at the same time, favouring a more mature political formation. However, the instability derived from the fact that they were developed more as a result of the personal commitment of determined public servants than of an institutional commitment with government offices meant that in the end they contributed little to a strengthening of democratic culture in the barrios where they were introduced. By way of contrast, the MTAs, thanks to the permanent commitment of Hidrocapital since 1999, and in the case of La Pedrera barrio since 2004, have clearly contributed to improving the information managed by the community, promoting greater social responsibility and, finally, a more participatory political culture.

The OCAs and the MTAs: Participation for self-development and problem solving

The MTAs and the OCAs have in common the fact that they were derived conceptually from the principles established in the 1999 Constitution and the development plan, GOPNESD, which define participation as an instrument for achieving self-development and the transformation of the excluded sectors into full citizens. They are different, however, when it comes to the means considered appropriate for achieving this transformation or empowerment.

The MTAs promote participation by providing incentives for organ-isation and participation around a basic, concrete and clearly delim-ited problem: the deficient access to drinking water. This innovation combines the search for ways to improve a public service through co-management between the state and the organised community. In the



case of the MTAs and the water committees (CCAs), the community has direct contact with the public authorities and technicians responsible for water services and, later on, with other national or local munici-pal authorities. In the case of the La Pedrera MTA, Hidrocapital gave a stable commitment of support to their project and the search for the necessary resources. During two and a half years, the MTA developed this project directly, counting on the support of Hidrocapital and, to a lesser extent, the Environment Ministry. The activists involved were profoundly affected by this experience.

Although this participatory innovation appears to have been success-ful, it nevertheless had a tragic ending. In November 2007, once the work had been completed, the entire effort proved to have been useless. Torrential rains in October had swept away houses on the hillside and with them the dreams and the results of the struggle. The municipality, which had never participated in the innovation, declared the barrio a high-risk zone and obliged the inhabitants of the 4th Plano, or level, to vacate their houses, amongst them the homes of two members of the MTA were demolished. This terrible experience directly affected about 170 families (Field Diary, November 2007).

In 1994, a report prepared by the Central University (UCV) had already pointed out that the terrain of La Pedrera in Antímano was exceptionally risky and that only a complex and well-planned oper-ation could make it appropriate for the construction of houses (UCV, UPF 9, 1994). Neither at the time nor more recently did the different governments take this report into account and the terrain continued to be occupied with fresh contingents of squatters. With a vision that proved well-intentioned but short-sighted, Hidrocapital had supported the La Pedrera community and the government provided 800 million bolívares without insisting on a full evaluation which could have led to the adequate conditioning of the terrain. As a result, the investment, and with it the experience, were lost. One of the participants in the MTA commented that she was thinking of unearthing the tubes before leaving, either to donate them to some other community that needed them or to take them to the new terrain they expected the government to find them (conversation, 26 November 2007).

The absence of a long- or medium-term vision for state planning was not a weakness in the case of the consorcios or the OCAs promoted by CONAVI and the Housing and Habitat Ministry. On the contrary, the OCAs encouraged community participation in a territorial unit, pre-viously diagnosed by urban planners as sharing common problems which could be resolved by designing integral plans (master plans) for



a physical rehabilitation. This territorial unit did not necessarily coin-cide with the way the urban space had historically been occupied; it was defined in terms of shared problems on the basis of which the state could use to promote popular organisation and participation. In this case, there is a greater technical input than in the case of the MTA.

The OCAs, however, do share with the MTAs the idea that the par-ticipation of the organised community is an essential ingredient for the solution of the problems in the barrios, both because the inhabitants are those who best know the nature of their problems and could there-fore be expected to offer the best solutions, and also because without their consent and collaboration there is no possibility of modifying the existing buildings within a democratic framework. They also share the notion that participation is a process of learning for self-development and empowerment. They also are similar to the MTAs in that they are organisations with their own legal identity, subject to the Civil Code; that is to say, they are part of the emerging civil society which increasingly assumes the role of negotiating with the state at the same time as it replaces the city government in certain of its functions. The OCAs are co-participants in the designing of policies for their barrios on the basis of the so-called ‘participatory diagnoses’ which establish the priorities for the master plans, and the state concedes the resources for them to manage and administer them directly in all the different phases of the work.

Unfortunately, this innovation was applied only intermittently and was finally paralysed when Minister Montes resigned and the new min-ister abandoned the innovation, withdrawing resources. The resigna-tion of Montes was the object of various interpretations in those days. It took place in October 2005, after President Chávez in his Sunday pro-gramme (Aló Presidente) surprisingly rebuked him publicly for not hav-ing fulfilled the goal of constructing 120,000 houses that year, as part of the recently launched Misión Vivienda (Housing Mission). Chávez had to show that these houses had been built because the electoral campaign for parliamentary elections was coming to an end and some thought that an ‘immediatist’ logic of implementation was prevail-ing over a long-term strategy (Interview, OCA architect, 16 November 2006). Montes’ advisors had advised him not to commit to this goal as they knew it was impossible to fulfill: land was not available, the projects were not viable, and because a popular participative process like the one proposed had to respect the time frames of the people.

Others, especially the Urban Land Committees (CTUs), criticised the OCAs for giving too much weight to technical criteria and advisers,



which weakened the autonomy of the communities (Interviews, CTU activists, 28 July 2008; 20 August 2008). Nevertheless, attempts had been made to correct that weakness when the consorcios transformed into OCAs, in order to ensure that the organised community prevailed over other agents, something which our interviews with the CTU did not value (Ibid.). There was a certain ignorance amongst activists of other experiences, which brings misunderstandings, which in general has weakened everyone. Some of our interviewees of the OCAs tended to conclude that the Bolivarians, including the president, saw them as having a capacity for autonomous popular initiative which escaped their control and that of the state, and which they feared or did not approve of (OCA, Field Diary, 21 November 2006; Interview, 16 November 2006). If we examine the functioning of some of the other participatory forms, we might well conclude that they are right about this.

Bolivarian Circles, Urban Land Committees and Communal Councils: Participatory experiments and the poor in Bolivarian Venezuela

The participatory innovations introduced by the Bolivarian govern-ment during Chávez’ first term of office have been many and varied. The commitment of the Bolivarian project towards the direct partici-pation of organised communities constitutes an example of the cre-ativity and political will with which the new hegemonic actors have tried to overcome the shortcomings of the previous political model in Venezuela. The cases studied have, however, revealed the complexity of the problem and the difficulties encountered in the attempts to develop consistent efforts to overcome the poverty and severe restriction on the basic human rights which is the day-to-day experience of the urban majorities in this oil-rich country.

While two specific cases such as those considered here can hardly justify generalisations about the entire process of transformation pro-moted by the government since 1999, they can be considered adequate examples of communities managing resources made available by the government and serve to indicate some strengths and/or weaknesses of these experiences. In order to give a broader assessment of the efforts of the Bolivarian government to build a participatory rather than rep-resentative democracy, it is useful to place them in the context of other initiatives.

Two important initiatives during Chávez’ first period of government (1999–2007) were the Bolivarian Circles (CBs) and the Urban Land Committees (CTUs). The Bolivarian Circles (CBs) were created in 2000



by Chávez himself, with the idea of organising the popular movement which supported him (Hansen and Hawkins, 2004). They played an important role defending the government between 2002 and 2004 when the opposition forces were trying to overthrow Chávez. In 2004 there could have been some 65,000 active CBs with a membership of about 2,200,000 (both estimates taken from Hansen and Hawkins, 2004). They declined shortly after due partly to the loss of members to other organisations, such as the Electoral Battle Units. These in turn were deactivated with the creation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela in 2007; the government has promoted the formation of Socialist Battalions as the grassroots units for the new party.

The CTUs emerged from Decree No. 1666 of 2002, which involved, for the first time in the country’s history, an effort to regularise urban property in the popular barrios. It recognised the right of the popu-lar sectors to the property of the terrain they had invaded in order to build their houses. The Urban Land Committee was an organisa-tional model to be established by the communities themselves, as in the case of the MTAs and the OCAs, by way of citizens’ assemblies. According to the decree Nº 1666 of 2002, the CTUs were to be made up of a maximum of 200 families and were obliged to reconstruct the history of the community and define its territorial limits by elabor-ating a map. The CTUs were an expression of struggles in the 1990s by a popular movement known as the Assembly of Barrios, which was dissolved in 1993. However, its demands were kept alive by commu-nity leaders, and, following the decree, the CTU had an important dynamic of its own and independence from the government during the period 2002–04 when the government was dealing with the after-math of the April 2002 coup.

From 2004 on, the minister of Housing and Habitat, Julio Montes, supported the CTUs and also the Centres of Participation for the Transformation of the Environment (CPTH), organised as an initiative of the CTUs but, unlike the latter, they were legally recognised and could thus receive resources. However, as in the case of the OCAs, CPTHs were paralysed when Montes left the ministry because they did not count on the support of the president. The CTUs continued functioning and in 2006 there were about 6,000 scattered across the country, incorpor-ating about a million families (OTNRTU, 2007). Unlike the MTAs and the OCAs, the CTUs do not put the accent on the resolution of specific problems, but rather on the right of the popular sector to property and to be fully fledged citizens. They lack legal status, however, and the office where they are registered depends on the vice-presidency of the



republic. As a consequence, there is a constant tension in the relation-ship with the government, which tends to want to control them and use them for political ends, especially electoral ones (García-Guadilla, 2006). This also happens with the MTAs, but to a lesser extent with the OCAs, which have greater legal autonomy and, perhaps in part because of their scale (an average of 2,000 families), tend to count on a more solid political formation.

The communal councils (CCs) and the so-called People’s Power are key elements for popular participation for the second presidential period (2007–13). President Chávez first launched the idea of the communal councils in 2005, a new participatory innovation which would assume legal form on the basis of the Communal Councils Law of April 2006. According to this law, the CCs ‘are focal points for the participation, articulation and integration of the diverse community organisations, social groups and citizens, which permit the organised population to manage directly public policies and projects designed to respond to the needs and aspirations of a society based on equity and social justice’ (Article 2). The CCs are conceived of as government on a small scale (they have a maximum of 400 families), they do not have a legal charac-ter but do have numerous tasks, ever more as time passes (Weffer, 2007). The law determines how they are to be created, how they should func-tion, how decisions are to be taken, and requires, for access to public funds, that they be registered with the Local Presidential Commission for Popular Power, which depends on the central government and whose members are appointed by the president of the republic himself (Articles 20 and 31). The law created a National Fund for the Councils as an autonomous organisation without legal status, with an executive council appointed by the president, in order to finance ‘community, social and productive’ projects (Article 29). The funds are transferred to a Communal Council Bank which is organised as a cooperative, as established in the law.

With this legal-judicial framework, the CCs are clearly conceived of as part of the state, tied to and dependant on the presidency of the republic. They express the process of recentralisation of the state and concentration of power in the hands of the president, tendencies which have been accentuated during recent years.

The CCs have provoked enormous expectations. The president on countless occasions has referred to them as the basic nuclei for build-ing a new model of society and state, ‘twenty-first-century socialism’. In December 2006, he referred to them as the fifth motor of the revo-lution, ‘the explosion of popular power’. In the Constitutional Reform



Proposal presented in August 2007, they were incorporated into the constitution itself (Article 70) and formed the basis for a reorganisation of the territorial structure. The proposal was rejected by the elector-ate in December 2007, and this conception of the CCs and of the new ‘geometry of power’ was relegated to limbo in 2008.

There are few academic publications devoted to the CC. As a result, more than hard data or consistent evaluations, what we find are doubts and unanswered questions. The CC, depending on the particular char-acteristics of the communities that have created them, the part of the country where they are established, and the previous experience of the respective communities of participation, will offer very different trajec-tories. Some observations, however, can be made, from our fieldwork and that of others.

During the course of 2007, innumerable CCs were formed without complying with the norms established in the law; others were formed simply as a way of gaining access to public funds. There are cases in which the priorities of a CC were imposed on the community by some government bureaucrat, in others by small groups within the commu-nity, and yet others where those who did not share the Chavista con-viction of the majority were simply excluded (García-Guadilla, 2006; Lerner, 2007). Popular activists with different backgrounds and dis-similar political convictions have complained about the bureaucratic obstacles they encounter when attempting to form a CC (see Weffer, 2007; González, 2007). Nevertheless, if Chávez or some other authority visits a community, a CC is formed and resources are assigned, whatever the formal obstacles (Ibid.).

Participation in the CC is very much stimulated by the combination of financial motives (access to the resources which high oil prices have made available to the government), together with the promises of a delegation of power. The result has apparently been quite effective as, according to official data, towards the end of 2007 there were more than 30,000 CCs. However, both in the law and in its practical application there are serious weaknesses in controlling and accounting for the resources dispensed and this has led some commentators to suggest that this innovation and the networks being established do more to encourage the clientelism so engrained in Venezuelan political culture than the development of a strong and autonomous popular power (García-Guadilla, 2007).

The CCs are mini-governments with a demanding number of tasks. They are reliant on information and continuous technical support from government entities. However, participants in our fieldwork said it was very unclear which entities were responsible for giving this.



The CCs are an attempt to transcend the type of political represen-tation typical of the liberal democratic model. They rely on spokesper-sons recallable at any time rather than representatives. Nevertheless, the small size of the operative space; the lack of, or limited, clarity with respect to the intermediate organisations and how they function; the preference for assemblies at the expense of universal, direct and secret suffrage; the dependency on the presidency; the isolation from municipal and federal authorities; together with other characteristics can undermine rather than enhance the democratic quality of the Venezuelan political system. Although they might conceivably prove appropriate instruments for managing and controlling public policies at a local level, even this is doubtful because the sheer size of the barrios and the complexity of their problems make it difficult to envisage solu-tions that pass through the hands of organisations with a maximum of 400 families. At the same time, the size of the CCs makes it inconceiv-able that they can influence decisions affecting the general contours of the society as a whole, much less so the fundamental direction of national policies (López Maya, 2007).

Conclusion

Two years studying participative experiences in Bolivarian Caracas has helped us to appreciate the importance for the renovation of Venezuelan democracy of creating processes through which organised communities might assume responsibilities for public management of resources. In Venezuela, these are considerable given state ownership of one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

In the first period of Chávez, the participatory innovations which we examined here had distinct origins and conceptions in terms of how to empower the poor and excluded of society. Each one in its own way provoked enthusiasm and created conditions to propel the development of a feeling of belonging and self-esteem amongst the inhabitants of the popular neighbourhoods, invisible and stigmatized in previous epochs. A political consciousness reemerged, which has contributed to the return of the Venezuelan majorities to political participation, from which they had been excluded since at least the 1980s. Nevertheless, on evaluating the improvement in the quality of life and democracy the results continue to be weak. Innumerable obstacles face those who live in the urban districts of the country and are preventing the stability, improvement and consolidation of the innovations.



At the end of this research, the Bolivarian government is in a second constitution period, in which it appears less interested in evaluating and perfecting the experiences initiated and more in creating a new institutionality which will homogenise popular participation and incorporate it into the structure of the socialist state. The MTAs and OCAs, like the CTUs, CPTH and other forms of organisation, have been weakened in favour of the communal councils. The latter, which were institutionalised by law in 2006 without an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses with respect to previous forms and without an open and wide discussion with the organised communities about their merits and relevance, nevertheless have grown exponentially, dis-placing the others due to the channeling of public resources for the popular sectors to them by the national executive. The work under-taken in the first period tended to generate tensions between those wanting to drive participation co-opted from above – linked to the recentralising tendencies of the state and the concentration of powers in the president – and those who seek to develop certain capacity for independent dialogue with the government and its officers. The out-come is not predetermined.

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127

6MedellínParticipatory Creativity in a Conflictive CityOmar Uran

Introduction

The innovation which is the focus of this chapter is the Planning and Participatory Budgeting Programme (PB) in Medellín. A civic coalition government introduced PB following its electoral victory in 2003, as a new kind of response to the crisis of political legitimacy and urban development in the city since the 1990s, exemplified by exceptionally high levels of violence and conflict. The coalition saw PB as part of an historic process of change in the political and economic structures of a city which no longer obeyed the will of its government but that of armed and unarmed collectives. Citizen’s participation was a framework to build new norms of democratic behaviour and local development, stronger local and citywide identity and to disarm politically violent actors and clientelistic politicians. This chapter explores, through the lens of various actors in the process, how this experiment fared. Did it contribute to a new civic consciousness and new ways of addressing conflict?

Medellín in context: Between the atypical and the stereotypical Latin American city

As is the case of most Latin American cities, rapid demographic growth started to take place in Medellín in the 1920s, and reached a point of relative stability in the 1980s. This coincided with different phases of industrial growth and crisis. Between 1920 and 1950, there were three key developments. The public service companies (water, electricity and phone) were merged into the Public Companies of Medellín (Empresas Públicas de Medellín, EPM), connecting many formal and informal



dwellings to the public service networks of the city under their own master plan. This contributed to the integration of the city and, in con-trast to other Colombian and Latin American cities, meant that between the 1960s and the 1990s Medellín did not suffer from major deficien-cies in, or conflicts over, basic public services and urban infrastructure. Secondly, the city developed a master plan for urban development; and, finally, a strong manufacturing base.

This relative growth and well-being occurred within a closed and traditional political and social system. Communities were integrated physically into the dynamics of urban production and consumption, but there was no such parallel process of integration into the political dynamics. Until well into the 1970s, the leadership of the two trad-itional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) was mainly composed of descendants from colonial families – businessmen and landowners (Franco, 2006, p. 205). Political participation in other groups, mainly popular or left-wing groups, was in effect prohibited under the National Front (Frente Nacional) governments, a bipartisan pact at the national level which came into operation in 1958.

This situation began to change in the mid-1970s, a period that coin-cided with an industrial crisis (Betancur et al., 2001) and with the end of the National Front. At the same time a new political class of popular or ‘plebeian’ character (Franco, 2006, p. 207) emerged, which competed with the traditional industrial oligarchs for political leadership of the city and the department of Antioquia, of which it is the capital. This new political class was highly skilled in the construction and management of clientelistic networks in the more open-post National Front elect-oral scenarios. They used the activities of neighbourhood Community Action Councils (Juntas de Acción Comunal, henceforth JACs) as their primary means for this.

Between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the conver-gence of an economic crisis, drug trafficking and armed groups in the form of urban militias dramatically affected Medellín. Unemployment rates increased as never before in the city and criminality rose in the barrios. Guerrilla militias took advantage of the situation to apply ‘just-ice’ and legitimise themselves to citizens, whilst the drug trafficking dons attempted to gain recognition from the political and economic establishment at a local and national level. The period of relative toler-ance from politicians, the national business and landed elites came to an end and generated one of the bloodiest city conflicts in the world. Table 6.1 shows the evolution of the homicide rate in Medellín per 100,000 inhabitants.


Medellín: Participatory Creativity 129

In the mid-1990s, two key trends emerged in response to this phenom-enon. The first was based on the civic and mobilising tradition of social and community organisations in the city, who demanded a monopoly on arms by the state and a peaceful solution to the armed conflict.

Table 6.1 Evolution in the homicide rate in Medellín per 100,000 inhabitants

Year Rate

1980 43

1981 58

1982 57

1983 58

1984 71

1985 101

1986 123

1987 142

1988 195

1989 237

1990 312

1991 375

1992 331

1993 311

1994 266

1995 226

1996 199

1997 163

1998 154

1999 167

2000 160

2001 174

2002 184

2003 98

2004 57

Source: Secretaría de Gobierno de Medellín, 2004.



The second, which was much less visible, had a political-military char-acter. It brought together members of the political establishment, the armed forces and business and landowning elites in a coalition with factions of the drug trafficking community in an attempt to displace forcefully those groups that were considered to be insurgent and anti-establishment (Franco, 2006, p. 373).

Between 1997 and 2003, the city experienced a new cycle of violence, although this time the actors were different. The main violence took place between guerrilla militias and paramilitary groups, who emerged the winners of the confrontation. The guerrilla militias were forced to leave the city or be absorbed into the paramilitaries. This cycle was ended by a negotiation process between paramilitaries and the national government towards the end of 2003.

During this period, there were new configurations in the sociopolitical dynamics of the city. Popular citizens’ organisations and movements came together with private business–sector foundations, academic and cultural networks and even union organisations around a common ana-lysis. They defined the moment as a crisis of confidence in a corrupt local government system within a society, which had become ungovernable. It is in this climate that the political movement, Citizen’s Commitment (Compromiso Ciudadano) emerged. In this movement, the Local Planning Network (Red de Planeación Local) and the Network of Community Organisations (Red de Organizaciones Comunitarias) identified a common commitment to political decentralisation and citizens’ participation.

After failing in 2000, the movement managed to win the elections for mayor of Medellín in 2003 and, as part of its governance programme (Governable and Participative Medellín), outlined the strategic object-ives of its planning and participatory budgeting programme. Firstly, it aimed to strengthen citizens’ participation, focusing on maximising the potential of the communities to affect the decision making of the government and the municipal budgets, thus contributing to the gen-eration of a new model of public management, a better democracy and process of sustainable development in the city. A second objective was to strengthen the system of municipal planning through a participatory budget. Thirdly, it aimed to promote citizenship building and attitudes of peaceful coexistence. Fourthly, it aimed to strengthen municipal institutions responsible for participative public management.

Co-production of knowledge in Medellín

The research that informs this analysis was produced from an inter-active rather than extractive methodological approach. Different



research tools were used to this end, including: detailed interviews, discussion groups, direct observations, research diaries and a careful analysis of the norms that govern participation, planning and budg-eting in Medellín, as well as a documentary review and analysis. The conclusions reflect debate amongst the different participating groups in this investigation and their feedback has been incorpo-rated in order to illustrate the extent of contrasting views within the collected data.

We used discussion groups as our primary sources of data collection because this method allowed us to gain a closer understanding of the lived experience of the participants in the PB process. At the same time, it served as a space for analysis and critique of the results from the other research tools.

We co-produced knowledge with three groups. The first two included eight representatives from each of the consultative councils of the PB: one in Zone 1 (the Zone is an administrative unit encompassing sev-eral communes) and the second in Comuna 11 (comuna is the name for Medellín’s neighbourhood units). These two councils cover two starkly contrasting territories. Zone 1 is one of the poorest areas in the city, with high levels of informality in both employment and land occu-pation, along with a long history of insurgent and counterinsurgent armed groups and common criminals. Nevertheless, in this area there is a significant number of social organisations and a high level of par-ticipatory dynamics. In contrast, Comuna 11 is one of the most suc-cessfully consolidated comunas in the city, in terms of both social and spatial factors. Most of the residents are middle class, independent pro-fessionals and levels of employment are comparatively high. Violence is not significant, despite perennial conflicts and discussions over the use of land for recreation, sport or commerce.

A third group was formed with nine officers from the munici-pal administration who were linked to the implementation, control and follow-up processes of the Planning and Participatory Budgeting Programme. These participants were primarily public-sector employ-ees; each had more than 12 years of experience in the municipality of Medellín.

Finally, my own role needs to be brought into the picture. I was an actor in this process as well as author of this study. I was a coordinator of the PB, but also a researcher/advisor to an NGO, the Popular Training Institution (Instituto Popular de Capacitación, IPC), which has promoted and studied such initiatives in other municipalities. Cumulatively this methodology together with the systematic PB evaluation carried out with the different officers and citizens of Medellín has provided a rich



pool of primary source material that has been used to reference this research.

Municipal actors and the building of civic politics

The mayor of Medellín (2004–07), Sergio Fajardo, who was responsible for the implementation of this programme, did not see the PB as an imposition from the citizens’ coalition that took him to power. The PB was always a key part of his political agenda, which he saw as citizen-orientated, republican and participative:

From the start, since we began to participate in politics, I knew that a proposal of participatory budgeting in Medellín would be an innov-ation that would be in line with our way of understanding politics from a civic point of view I think that the process is a collective phe-nomenon; it’s not for the poor or for the elite. No, I think that it is a process for a city that is advancing and taking big steps. (Interview, mayor, 17 May 2007)

The positive attitude towards the programme is reflected in the fact that it was still maintained after the change of government, despite the difficulties of coordination and implementation that these kinds of programmes entail:

I know that we started with a theoretical concept and some experi-ence and we have learned on the job, but that is what it is about. Everywhere I go people talk to me about participatory budgeting. In some communities some people tell me that there are some things that need to be changed but they ask me please make it last forever.

However, other high-ranking officers of the mayoral office exhibit a more neutral attitude towards the programme, and their approach is focused on the technical capacities of the PB to solve problems and on the ‘maturing of the process itself’:

It [PB] cannot be glorified. There is room for development. If the process matures, we could think about not 7% but 14% of the muni-cipal budget. People do not act with a technical criterion, and this is a problem with the process that needs to be taken into consider-ation. People have to consider that it is not an infrastructural issue, but rather a matter of maintaining the infrastructure when they are



thinking about prioritising investments. (Interview, former chief executive, 10 November 2006)

Through observations and discussions with a group of officers from the City Council, we noticed that the attitude of departmental secre-taries (heads of department directly responsible to the mayor) towards the process varies. The PB implies that officers lose a little bit of free-dom in the distribution and allocation of the monetary resources in the city. Moreover, officers are more exposed to citizens in implementing projects, and sometimes they have to explain why some initiatives can-not be taken forward. Some senior officers do not like this and consider it an administrative burden:

Definitely, this administration has been different because of its will-ingness to support participation and transparency and to carry out processes. This also depends on the attitude and perception of offic-ers. Regarding what happened in Comuna 1 [community criticism of the attitude of some departmental secretaries towards the implemen-tation of the PB], some officers said ‘they are ungrateful’, ‘then they don’t get anything’, as if municipal resources were a gift. (Interview, PB officer, 21 April 2007)

It is difficult to translate a philosophy and guiding political principles into reality, especially when most high-level officers have a very tech-nical mentality and quite limited negotiation skills. Due to the difficul-ties of the process, which led to misunderstandings and/or frustrations amongst implementing officers and departmental secretaries alike, the mayor had to act as the main authority, as reflected in his following statement:

My role has always been to provide conceptual and ideological sup-port and establish what we are going to do. I have not had to deal with the details, but when I have had to get closer, I have given them my conviction and conveyed a very clear message that this is crucial for us, that we are doing it with political conviction and for no other reason. I have always been in contact through citizens’ spaces ... dealing with and facing issues, explaining. (Interview, mayor, 17 May 2007)

Maintaining the legitimacy and coherence of the programme also implied critical interaction with other actors, starting with the



Municipal Council – in which the political movement of the mayor was a minority with only 3 representatives out of 21. In the beginning, the Municipal Council displayed mistrust and reluctance towards the PB. However, after seeing the citizens’ support for this proposal, the coun-cil became an auditor of the programme, forcing the mayor’s office, and especially those departmental secretaries who indicated a reluc-tance to support the PB, to improve their levels of implementation and also their relationships and negotiation skills with communities and grassroots groups. This attitude is clearly demonstrated in the following quote from the Municipal Council of Medellín during the first year of the programme:

The current municipal administration is implementing the participa-tory budgeting. This democratic mechanism should be quickly mon-itored in order to guarantee the city that this is not part of a double game to give the crumbs to the population while other powerful actors continue to make big decisions. We also need to make sure that we are taking into account lessons learnt and critical outcomes for its implementation from similar experiences in other parts of the world. (Municipal Council of Medellín. Act 279, Paragraph 96, 24 June 2005)

This attitude facilitated the consolidation and institutionalisation of the programme as the Municipal Council became an interlocutor of the administration on the progress of the programme, thus forcing it to dis-cuss and act as a political body towards this corporation.

The attitude of Medellín’s citizens and their organisations was posi-tive and supportive of the programme whilst remaining critical. This approach was a cause of discomfort for some departmental secretar-ies who thought that because the mayor and the programme enjoyed high levels of support (more that 80 per cent), they were not susceptible to criticism, misinterpreting criticism as a deliberate act of opposition. Although this was sometimes true, in the majority of cases it reflected the educated judgment of the participating representatives. An example of this attitude is reflected in the following quote from an intervention by a representative of the Network of Zonal Planning, a group repre-senting grassroots interests in some comunas, during a debate in the Municipal Council:

The Network of Zonal Planning is convinced that the programme of participatory budgeting is a strategy that strengthens the processes



of participatory planning for local development that at the mid and long term will manage to generate pedagogical effects and positively impact the development of the city, allowing us to carry out plural-istic and inclusive exercises aimed at overcoming inappropriate prac-tises in the allocation and management of public resources. We are aware that it is an excellent exercise of democratic participation and therefore we support it one hundred percent but this support doesn’t mean that we are going to be quiet. (Municipal Council of Medellín Act 279, paragraphs 219 to 255, 24 June 2005)

The attitude of most public servants and traditional leaders was ini-tially neutral and sceptical. They had seen how many campaigns dis-appear in front of their eyes and they end up adjusting to the new government and its rules of the game. However, this attitude changed in many people during the process. This was mainly because citizens reached an explicit agreement from the beginning that the PB would be implemented using ordinary resources (municipal taxes) rather than contingency funds. Secondly, they got a paragraph inserted into the protocols which stated that no project prioritised through the partici-patory budgeting could be changed or eliminated unilaterally by the municipal administration. Both administrators and traditional lead-ers came to trust sufficiently that the time and effort they were going to invest in the process would not become a frustrating and wearying experience, as had been the case with previous governments.

Creativity and conflict: The emergence of the ‘community’ as a space of identity and political interaction

The purpose of the following section is to focus on events and processes that emerged within or from the PB and were uncovered through the research. The focus is not only on the PB as a public policy, but also on its insertion into the particular traditions and cultures of the city and its comunas.

Multiple interests and neighbourhood assemblies in Comuna 1: Building democratic norms

Neighbourhood Assemblies (NA) started during the second year of the PB, mostly due to the demands and pressures of the Community Action Councils (JACs). These claimed that Consultative Councils restricted participation in the PB because only representatives of social and



community organisations could attend them. The NAs also reflected the goal of the municipal administration to renew community leader-ship, because many of the representatives to the PB from neighbourhood organisations and the JACs continued to make use of the clientelis-tic practices of traditional political parties. At the beginning of each year, the political administration agreed the methodology and general processes of the PB with the JACs and the local administrative councils (Juntas Administradoras Locales, henceforth JALs). The JALs were elected bodies created by the 1986 constitutional reform and which, alongside the popular election of mayors, were part of an effort to open up the democratic structures of the cities of Colombia.

Municipal and administrative traditional leaders faced new dynamics in the comunas as PB got underway. New groups had emerged, not in all comunas, but they were present in Comuna 1 of Zone 1 where this case study was based. One of these was the Network of Zonal Planning. This is a network of social and community organisations seeking local devel-opment and the empowerment of grassroots organisations. In Zone 1 they had a specific project called the Development Plan of Comuna 1. Another was the organisations formed by armed actors demobilised and reintegrated (reinsertados) through negotiations between the national government and paramilitary groups. These organisations of reinserta-dos actively participated in the spaces of the PB within this comuna in order to gain political legitimacy and acquire resources to support its militant base there. A third group is the more active citizens who par-ticipate in these spaces with a lower profile, more anonymously but in large numbers. They are ultimately the disputed base of legitimacy of the actors in conflict.

In 2006, two weeks before the NA meetings took place, pamphlets inviting ‘civil disobedience’ towards the NAs started to appear in Zone 1, contending that the NAs were an imposition of the municipal administration. The pamphlets were an anonymous parody of official publicity. On 11 March, when most of the neighbourhoods of the city were conducting NAs, those in Comuna 1 did not. By the end of that day, there had been 415 NAs around the city with the participation of more than 34,000 people, except in Comuna 1. The administration got together with a group of spokespeople from the Consultative Council in Comuna 1, who argued that they supported ‘disobedience’ but they had not produced or distributed the pamphlet that encouraged people not to attend the NA. Their main argument was that the administra-tion ignored the internal process of participation in the comuna, espe-cially the local development plan in which organisational forms had



emerged in each neighbourhood; a diagnosis of needs and prioritisation had been agreed upon, and the NAs did not recognise this. The admin-istration argued that representatives of the whole city had agreed to the methodology of the NAs, that there had not been a Consultative Council to declare this disobedience and that there were no adminis-trative criteria to make an exception in Comuna 1.

The outcome of this first meeting was not positive. The administra-tion considered suspending the PB in this comuna, and the spokespeople thought about conducting protests. However, the administration was not keen on creating a political crisis, and the spokespersons for Comuna 1 did not want to stop receiving the resources for their comuna if the PB was suspended. This pragmatic attitude contributed to the fact that after two other meetings in which there was a slight adjustment in the content of the NAs to incorporate a brief consultation of the priorities of the local development plan, Comuna 1 was carrying out their NAs a month later.

This example shows the relationships, alliances and conflicts behind this particular impasse. First, at the beginning of the year representa-tives of Comuna 1 agreed to the format of the NAs with the munici-pal administration. After meetings in the comuna, they reconsidered their position. This shows the difficulties that ‘leaders’ or ‘spokespeople’ sometimes face in achieving consensus. These difficulties stem from strong leaderships in Comuna 1 emerging from three different ori-gins: traditional clientelistic political parties (especially the Liberals), processes of popular organisation and mobilisation (associated with a left-wing tradition active in the local development plans) and demobi-lised from the negotiation process between the national government and paramilitary groups. These three groups compete for hegemony in Comuna 1, and the spaces that the PB has opened became a place to challenge each other’s approaches and resources.

Secondly, PB promoted the need for political representation before the municipal administration amongst traditional left-wing groups as well as demobilised organisations. This led to an extraordinary situation for Colombia. These two groupings have co-aligned themselves, along with representatives of traditional parties, in order to maintain a strong and well-articulated process that allows them to negotiate resources, approaches, results and deadlines with the municipal administration. Right-wing demobilised groups hope to generate employment for their support base and left-wing organisations hope to mobilise around local development.

However, due to the context of Medellín, although this causes concern for some, it can also be seen as an advance in political relationships in



the comuna and a new approach to overcoming violent practises. Rather than kill each other, the left and the right are politicising their posi-tions and finding common objectives, such as working against historic stigmatisation and vindicating the name of Comuna 1 in the city.

The NAs in Comuna 1 show that non-governmental actors, espe-cially community actors, can gain autonomy and evolve in a creative manner when they gain access to spaces of decision making. This is possible as long as there is enough political will and technical and methodological capacity from the administration to understand and accept conflict as something inherent to public management and to handle and orientate this conflict towards the consolidation of norms and democratic procedures in community politics. However, the impasse also underlines the risk that autonomous local groups can upset the political and methodological coherence of a proposal for the city. It also warns us about the importance of carefully interpret-ing local manifestations of ‘civil disobedience’. Do they correspond to collective discussions and decisions or to the political interest of small groups or local political coalitions?

Citizens’ creativity and technical expertise in the PB process

Amongst the most important aspects for the development and legitim-acy of the PB was that its norms and methodology allowed the opening of spaces for creativity and citizen innovation. The normal approach of traditional leaders towards public money was to allocate funds to the construction and maintenance of small infrastructure projects in the neighbourhood or to buy goods for social and community organisa-tions. However, the new agendas emerging with PB introduced the idea that these resources could be seen as public capital to be invested to enhance the value of other capital within communities.

The critical attitude and autonomy gained by participants in PB also created the possibility of innovative responses to specific problems, as a participant in a Comuna 11 discussion group pointed out:

The most interesting thing is the possibility of people introducing very innovative projects into the community and doing things that the administration would have never dreamt of doing regarding culture, education, etc., things that bureaucracies are too rigid to do. One of the difficulties we have faced is how to include officers because it is easier for them to get together with three or four people to tell them what is feasible and what is not, and we have had issues with this that we have solved. (10 February 2006)



The amount of money in discussion was quite significant, on average US$2,645,503 per comuna. Funds were distributed according to the size, population and human development index of each comuna, and ranged between US$5,291,005 and US$1,534,392. In other words, citizens had to decide whether they wanted to allocate resources just to solve specific problems and necessities or to treat them as the initial capital for local development plans and projects. Initial expectations of participants are broadened from their immediate neighbourhood to the wider commu-nity of the comuna. This means people needed to listen to each other more and be willing to empathise with strangers. This increased com-plexity. Appropriate procedures and skills of officers and citizens were required in order to let the process flow in a democratic and creative way and avoid personal conflicts and paralysis.

There were many polemical issues, such as the discussion on a secur-ity project in Comuna 11 or economic development in Comuna 1. For example, there were two competing perspectives on security, one of them notably nonviolent and based on citizen training and the other more clearly defensive and focused on policing. They had to consider both municipal and national politics. After multiple discussions and arguments, and to preserve unity in the Consultative Council, a deci-sion was made to allocate resources to support both policing and edu-cation in citizens’ security.

In Comuna 1, there was a problem between the wish of the comuna to guide the process of economic and commercial development and the technical quality of the proposals. The process was delayed for more than one year. In this case, the municipal administration gave the com-munity organisation autonomy in the first phase, but after the internal auditors and the municipal controller questioned the efficiency of public spending in Comuna 1, pressure was put on leaders and organi-sations of the comuna to change the initiatives. Community leaders ini-tially thought that it was just political posturing by the administration, but after listening to and reading the statements of the control bodies, they understood that these issues transcended the administration and reflected financial parameters of the laws that rule municipal public treasuries. Understanding these political and legal realities facilitated the resolution of this impasse and the search for solutions, which would benefit both the administration and the comuna.

The advantages and disadvantages of social and community organi-sations, NGOs and universities who took part in this process became evident in the discussions on local planning and development. These organisations provided visions, which transcended a narrow focus on



infrastructure and explored questions of higher education, chains of production, communication networks and culture, amongst others. The problem is that there were very few professionals and institutions in the city who advocated ‘alternative local development’ and under-stood the human, technical and methodological means for implement-ing proposals. There was also a distance between the theoretical and practical training that professionals get in universities and the growing demand by participants in PB for more adequate concepts, policies and instruments for local development.

This incongruity between politics and discourse, and technical and operational issues manifested itself in management issues and delays in the implementation of the budget. This was often due to difficulties in negotiations between the local state and organised citizens of the comu-nas. Often it was not clear for any of the parties what they had to agree to and why and what funds were available, especially for economic development projects. However, citizens’ initiatives began to address these deficits and laid the basis for innovative approaches to the man-agement and planning of local development in the city. This became clear in the issue of allocating local funds for higher education and sup-port for the participative management of local development plans.

This initiative originated from Comuna 1 and was presented and defended by representatives of a JAC and approved by a majority dur-ing the first PB Consultative Council to prioritise initiatives in 2004. The initiative stems from recognition that one of the gravest problems of the comuna is the lack of professionals who live there and who are committed to local development. There was also criticism that existing higher education training for young people in the comuna emphasises technical and technological skills rather than professional and scien-tific training for the comunas’ youngsters. The proposal rejected the claim of traditional leaders that problems could be resolved by building a university in the comuna to save transport costs. This would imply a restricted range of programmes and limit the students to a reduced range of opportunities and options.

The comuna needed to train professionals in strategic areas for its devel-opment, such as economists, social workers, civil engineers amongst others, and hopefully in the best universities. Therefore, the problem was not building a university but guaranteeing university access. For this purpose, the PB in Comuna 1 created a higher education fund to which students who had previously been admitted into any under-graduate programme in public universities in the city could have access. Access was dependent on being a resident of the comuna at least for the



previous three years and maintaining a certain average academic grade. It also required involvement with a social or community organisation in the comuna, dedicating a set amount of time each week to social work not only to help the organisation in particular but also to get to know the comuna and get involved in local development processes.

The PB enabled initiatives which had been part of previous local planning processes to gain resources and be developed at a higher level, and not only for a few neighbourhoods but for all of the comunas and localities in the city. The participatory budget became one of the main management instruments for these plans in a reciprocal relationship between the budget and the local plan. However, what is specific to these local plans was the concern to create spaces for the comunas and localities to receive technical and political support, accountable to the communities. This filled a void in terms of the management and devel-opment of the plans, which the municipality, the universities and the NGOs did not have the capacity to fill.

It is too early to assess the success in achieving these goals. Nonetheless, together with the original idea of higher education linked to local development, the city has advanced a little through citizens’ initiatives to form human technical and political infrastructures to support their own alternative discourses and generate the social and political bases for genuine endogenous development.

Between citizen participation and local political representation: Tension and conflicts

In the course of PB, the logic behind the relationship between munici-pal councillors and the community, and between voters and commu-nity intermediaries (mainly representatives of the JALs and leaders of the JACs) began to change. However, this did not make the Municipal Council feel that its competencies were under challenge. Many muni-cipal representatives changed their relationships and political actions to give more power to the community political representatives of the JALs and members of the JACs. They then focused more on the global and strategic management of the municipal government. However, this opened up tensions and struggles at the neighbourhood and the wider comuna levels over who were the most legitimate representatives.

Within this struggle, the role of a special type of representative, who call themselves ‘community leaders’, was particularly important. These are the traditional leaders from JACs and JALs and coordinators of the clientelistic networks of traditional parties. They know the way in which the municipal administration works slightly better than other



representatives and they take advantage of this in order to maintain control over public resources allocated to their respective communi-ties. For the purpose of this chapter, these characters have been labelled ‘community oligarchies’ because in fact they are few in number – four or five in each comuna or locality. Our field research showed that they were much more significant in the poorer areas – where interactions were much more informal – than in the rather better off and more structured comunas.

The JALs emerged, in particular, as a significant focal point for ten-sion and conflict in the PB process in Medellín. It was here that disputes occurred between these constitutionally recognised seven-member elected bodies which had planning, surveillance and control functions across the entire comuna and the JACs, whose members were elected by each neighbourhood association and who did not have assigned functions, although they could enter into contracts with the state. To confuse the situation, however, the JACs had an articulating body, the Asocomunal, that worked at the comunal level just like the JALs. Voting levels are traditionally low in Medellín, reflecting a profound deficit in legitimacy amongst citizens. Those attending the PB Consultative Councils asked themselves: what are the obligations of representatives to the citizens who elect them? Who do they really represent? Do they represent political parties, themselves, neighbourhoods or districts, community groups in particular or comunas and localities as a whole? Certainly, it is very difficult for seven people with few operative and communication resources to represent comunas with an average of 140,000 inhabitants.

The JACs argued that they originate at the grassroots and they there-fore know people’s needs better than anyone else. On the other hand, members of the JALs insist on their constitutional character and on the fact that they represent the needs of the comunas, not the neighbour-hoods, before the Municipal Council. They are also elected by popu-lar vote with many more votes required than any representative of the JACs. However, despite this discussion, both JALs and JACs in general came to accept and legitimise Consultative Councils as spaces of par-ticipation, construction and decision making regarding initiatives for community development.

Within the PB process itself, there are two levels of representation. One is composed of people elected by Neighbourhood Assemblies (NAs) and by social and community organisations as representatives on the Consultative Council. The other is people within each Consultative Council elected onto the Committees of Spokespeople and the Municipal



Committee of the PB, who represents each comuna and locality as well as the whole of the PB process before the municipal administration.

This dual origin of the representatives became a source of continuous tensions around the implementation and decision-making processes of the PB. On the one hand, there was a localist territorial view, held by a significant number of representatives from the neighbourhoods, which was interested in where processes are implemented. On the other hand, there was a corporatist view, articulated by nonprofit social organisa-tions and corporations, which was interested more in what was going to be implemented and in the kind of contracts. However, the tension that emerged from these double and simultaneous representations contrib-uted to making the process more dynamic. Decisions were never taken automatically without any discussion, and this enhanced the delibera-tive potential of Consultative Councils and the participatory budget process as a whole.

At the second level of representation – before the municipal authorities – another kind of tension emerged. It was no longer about the representation of a small territory or organisation in particu-lar, but about representing the whole set of representatives from the Consultative Councils before the municipal administration to discuss and agree on methodologies and political and managerial issues. It is at this level that the issue of representation acquired a more polemical and critical character, because the possibility of discussing and nego-tiating with the administration enhanced the risk that people would privilege private interests and try to influence where to invest and who to hire.

In the beginning, the Spokespeople’s Committees of the Consultative Councils of PB built a shared decision-making process with the munici-pal administration while safeguarding the autonomy of the community process. However, over time some spokespersons began to lose their sense of collectivity and increasingly forgot to consult and take into account other representatives. The process was changed in its third year follow-ing complaints, and the Spokespeople’s Committee was replaced by the Coordinating Group of the Consultative Council. Negotiations around specific initiatives and projects were to be taken to the respective com-mittees of the Consultative Council. The elimination of an extra level of representation in the form of the Spokespeople’s Committee allevi-ated tensions and the process became more agile and transparent.

The role of ‘community oligarchies’ has been historically reinforced by two dynamics. On the one hand, there are the traditional clientelis-tic approaches to politics based on ‘favours’ and individual necessities.



A councillor looks for a person to get him votes in each comuna, pri-marily in exchange for a public position for his network of friends or family, and funds to carry out projects and activities in the neighbour-hoods where the votes came from. Normally, in order to make things easier, this person is a member of the JAL or the Asocomunal of their respective comunas. The traditional method of conducting public com-munity management has reinforced this model. When public servants conduct consultations to make decisions regarding the allocation of resources in a comuna, it is easier, more efficient and logistically more streamlined to invite only members of the JALs and directors of the Asocomunal. This reinforces the strategic power of their members by giving access to privileged information and ensuring that state deci-sions focus on the niches in which they are politically active. This cre-ates a loop that reinforces their legitimacy and their ‘aura’ in the eyes of their communities.

The PB radically changed this logic. It broadened the access of citi-zens to public information, opening and widening spaces in which priorities and public resource allocation in the community could be dis-cussed. Predictably, when the spaces opened, more people participated and there were more points of view. This increased the level of conflict within the community. One person from the community oligarchy mentioned in an interview (community leader, Comuna 3, 29 October 2006) that discussions and conflict were primarily due to the meth-odology that reduces everyone to the same level, ignoring authorities and organisational hierarchies, and not due to a conflict of interests. Political participation is not for everyone, he argued, but for those who know or at least comply with the following requirements:

Someone who knows about all aspects of the law, from the formula-tion of proposals, the knowledge of norms, and the follow up, and leads the community to submit their own projects and that commu-nity actions are self-sustainable in the long-term.

These statements evidence the self-legitimising attitude of the commu-nity oligarchy. Their discourse builds symbolic barriers and justifies their opposition to the emergence of new leaderships that do not recog-nise their ‘authority’ and experience. These attitudes of traditional lead-ers are fostered by the general lack of knowledge about politics and the rules of democracy and the reluctance of others to assume tasks. Many new participants do not know how to challenge the norms created by the community oligarchy or how to react to the often-aggressive eloquence



of traditional leaders. In Comuna 1, commissions were formed to focus on different tasks of the participatory budget, but these were monopo-lised by a few spokespeople who had the time and resources and felt comfortable with the level of the discussion. Two ‘leaders’ recognised their domination:

I will tell you something, nobody in the comuna or anywhere else believes or thinks of themselves as essential but I think that if some people, if one decided to leave all this, the current process that the comuna is living could be slowed down. (Interview, male community leader, Comuna 1, 26 September 2006)

First we meet to decide who is going to be our representative but the most natural thing is that they choose me. (Interview, female com-munity leader, Comuna 1, 21 October 2006)

The dynamics of community oligarchies is not just a consequence of the nature of the oligarchs. It is also due to the unwillingness of citi-zens to assume public responsibilities, arguing lack of time or, more significantly, because they are afraid of being unsuccessful and failing, something already documented in the history of the formation of our political culture and its colonial structure (Rama, 1985; Romero, 1984).

It is here where the PB enters the equation as an educational device and a process of citizen development, since the methodological instru-ments and the new spaces not only allowed access to information, but also to decision making. It helped build self-confidence for citizens who, for the first time, were able to take part in public discussions. In this sense, the PB has helped to expose community oligarchies and at least enable some new voices to appear on the scene.

Nonetheless, demanding accountability and quality of representation has been problematic. The old leaders often mobilised legal and other resources against efforts to make them accountable and complained of political persecution. This has generated conflictive environments in which legitimacy and representativity is disputed between the ‘commu-nity oligarchy’ and emerging leaderships who are trying to change the logic of local politics and articulate it to local development.

Critical attitudes from citizens and the use of methodologies such as participatory planning that foster deliberation and articulate the work of small committees with plenary discussions in the Consultative Committee have nevertheless opened the doors of community politics to new actors and new visions. At the same time, they have made the conditions for the legitimacy of political action in the comuna more



demanding, both for the leaders who live there and for the municipal administration and the councillors who search for votes. Revitalising democracy in the comunas has brought new conflicts, but our research suggests that this has also been productive of building new norms of citizenship in the poorest areas of the city.

Public administration and challenges to participation

The political coherence of the PB depended greatly on the motivation and involvement of officers in their dual role as citizens and public servants, as well as members of their unions. As one of the former coor-dinators of the programme states:

Traditionally, officers do not get involved politically in the public management of the city because they are hardly taken into account by the municipal government in the processes of reflection and evalu-ation of municipal programmes. Usually, the municipal administra-tion reduces the role of those officers to the mere implementation of policies, although the constitutional frame considers them public servants, i.e., people who apart from their work have a public respon-sibility. We wanted to rescue that, the political and citizen dimen-sion of public servants as workers of the municipality and citizens of Medellín. I do not know if we have managed to do it, but this has been one of the objectives that emerged when we got to the municipal administration. (Interview, co-coordinator of PB, 18 January 2007)

The challenge was therefore both to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the work of public servants and to recognise their political subjectiv-ity and the accumulated knowledge that they have gathered in public administration of the city. The instruments created in order to do this were the ‘zonal teams of planning and participatory budgeting’, which were first created by mayoral decree in 2004 and then incorporated into Municipal Agreement 283 of 2007, which institutionalised the PB pro-gramme. These aimed to:

Overcome the current lack of coordination of public action at the territorial level (zones and localities) and the consequences it has on public servants and organised communities integrating and harmo-nising public management to the new demands of participation add-ing value to local development with their technical knowledge and skills to manage public issues. (Municipio de Medellín, Decree 0507, 3 October 2005)



Nevertheless, these changes were not easy or even possible without overcoming a legacy of complexities. One of these was the ‘culture of the traditional officer’ who is used to ‘serving different masters’. Another was the clientelistic legacy, which meant that vacancies were often filled irrespective of commitment to the city, thus deepening the gap between officers and citizens. Many officers considered them-selves part of the ‘paid clientelist system’ (public servants discussion, 26 October 2006), impervious to accountability and democratisation processes because they themselves were a result of unaccountable and non-technical processes of recruitment. They were also resistant to the knowledge of citizens as legitimate and as something that should be recognised in the process of joint planning and construction of the city. Finally, they were used to seeing themselves as officers with-out citizen responsibility: ‘there was no added value, we were only operatives’ (Ibid.).

The zonal teams contributed significantly to a change in attitude of public servants towards citizens by creating spaces for encounter and social interaction between officers and citizens in a horizontal manner. Arrogant attitudes changed, particularly towards the poorest citizens.

Technical knowledge was challenged and dialogue encouraged, alongside awareness of non-standardised realities and existing popular knowledge.

The zonal team made me realise that we have met people who wanted to discuss before acting, to programme before doing and to plan. At the beginning, public servants were sceptical but now there is a big group of them involved in the process defending it whether they support the administration or not. (public servants – zonal technical team discussion, 26 October 2006)

The launch of the new administrative career in the mid-1990s and the legitimisation of different forms of participation in the new political constitution of 1991 reduced the number of officers recruited through clientelism. There are more people working on their own merit, with-out owing favours. However, neoliberal reforms and adjustments to the state, such as Law 617 of 2002, reduced the number of public servants and increased those under a service contract. Greater professionalisation has been offset against the loss of institutional learning and knowledge and the uncertainties created by the temporary nature of appoint-ments. This has prejudiced the development of long-term democratic policies and weakened the identity of state workers and their sense of



responsibility to citizens. This is a challenge to the sustainability and deepening of Medellín’s participatory experiments.

Participatory budgeting and the reinserted paramilitary groups

The research found that groups of reinsertados formed social organisa-tions in the city, participate in the PB and have sometimes tried to take advantage of their past to spread fear and influence community decisions in favour of their immediate interests. Most of the reinserta-dos live in the comunas and have formed associations and cooperatives in order to keep their organic structure and access public and private resources to support their projects and their new civil life. These are not paramilitary elite, but low-ranking leaders, militants and their popular social base.

On 21 March 2007, a report of the ombudsman’s office (quoted by IPC Agencia de Prensa, 2007) pointed out that:

Participation mechanisms and organisational autonomy have become a threat to the hegemony of illegal armed actors, mainly militias and self-defence groups. This largely affects community leaders and rep-resentatives who refuse to subject themselves to the new powers in their neighbourhoods and become targets of attacks.

It is possible that some resources collectively prioritised through PB have favoured social groups controlled by the reinsertados to make jobs for their militants and social base. This research allowed us to explore the participation of the demobilised or reinsertados and the open dynamics of discussion and public decision making. Such processes contrast with their vertical military legacy, so they had to learn about politics, delib-eration and electoral processes. They had to interact with other groups to find support for their initiatives.

At the beginning, reinsertados who attended PB Consultative Councils wanted to present themselves as community leaders or as people who deserve some kind of special recognition. In most cases, the way they expressed themselves reflected their military experience, inspiring both respect and fear. Rather than arguments, these representatives seemed to give orders or instructions. However, they were often sidelined by the knowledge and arguments of old and new community leaders, and par-ticipants gradually began to lose their fear of the reinsertados. The lat-ter, in turn, had to forge alliances, change their discursive strategy and embrace deliberative and electoral procedures and decision making.



However, only an explicit and manifest political commitment from the local government to ensure democracy, legality and accountability of procedures and to guarantee political liberties and security of partici-pants could allow the exercise of planning and participatory budgeting to be carried out in comunas with a very recent history of armed con-flict. It was this political commitment which enabled new leaderships and collective processes of local development to emerge, which in turn contributed to the legitimacy and social sustainability of the process of reintegrating ex-combatants.

The PB became a strategic programme that allowed the city to advance through offering a space for participation and decision mak-ing to all citizens. Simultaneously, it opened up scenes for local con-flicts that challenged officers, public forces, reinsertados and social organisations to find nonviolent solutions to the inner tensions of community life.

The PB made conflicts visible as well as improved ways for managing and resolving them. For example, in Comuna 5, there were some death threats around discussions and decisions regarding the PB. This led the Municipal Administration to call for a PB Consultative Council on 13 May 2006 to deal with the topic of security and to discuss whether the programme should be maintained in this comuna. There was a wide attendance from all social groups. Representatives of different local gov-ernmental agencies and the metropolitan police were present together with those from the JACs, the Municipal Council and most representa-tives of the participatory budget in the comuna. Once the municipal administration discussed the possibility of ending PB in this comuna, several representatives expressed their discontent and identified who was behind the threats, offering support to the police. Some others reported that the threats had been a recurrent theme in the comuna for many years preceding the PB. At the end, it became clear in the Community Consultative Council that rivalries and partisan jealousies had fused with corporative interests, particularly of the JACs, who used groups of reinsertados to carry out threats.

As in other comunas in the city, once this was clear and the state com-mitted itself to monitoring the process, the levels of conflict and threats significantly decreased. This generated a renewed sense of trust in the process. Similar cases in Comunas 11 and 2 involved struggles over the use of public parks and sports facilities. The local state had to coordin-ate the Municipal Council, the police, the JALs and the mayoral office in the search for solutions. These cases illustrate how PB advanced in an environment of latent and persistent conflict in communities which



needed a public space to deal with their conflicts as well as a clear com-mitment from the local state to find institutional solutions.

In this context of tension and dialogue, a basic trust between partici-pants was slowly built. It depended on the daily efforts of public serv-ants to make people respect the rules of the game and the principles of democracy. They negotiated the timelines and outcomes of projects, which tested the political willingness of the government to guarantee citizens’ participation and increase the level of community political autonomy. This ultimately enhanced the legitimacy of the local state. As one research participant in Comuna 11 stated:

The fact that in these spaces there is also the presence of actors marked by the peace processes, whether demobilised or not, is import-ant. ... Representatives of different organisations and neighbour-hoods feel relaxed to discuss topics like security and the generation of employment because the municipal administration accompanies and advises them in that space and everyone participates under the same conditions. (focus group discussion, 20 October 2006)

Conclusion

Participatory budget and planning for local development emerged in 2004 as part of a slow consensus that began in the 1990s, amongst different sectors and groups in the city regarding which strategies and instruments should be used to overcome the crisis in the city. This explains the positive attitude towards the programme from commu-nity organisations, unions and professional associations, and the ardent criticisms from political parties. The PB in Medellín cannot be under-stood outside this historical framework; reducing it to a mere technical instrument for the efficient allocation of resources loses its sense and political and analytical potential.

The PB allowed for the generation of space for social and political action at the intra-urban and community levels. Such space did not pre-viously exist in Medellín but emerged from the way in which the PB was developed, bringing actors together to discuss their intended common goals. This is the contribution and innovation of the PB in Medellín. The following are some of the key conclusions from our research.

Citizenship and representation

Community leaders in Medellín became important interlocutors for politicians used to clientelistic practises. This in turn increased their value – measured in money and in contracts – to communities which



relied on mediation to access resources or to have any kind of contact with the political powers of the city.

The PB broke with this logic, incorporating and including the commu-nity in decision making at the community level as much as possible, thus activating processes of citizenship organisation and autonomous political participation in those territories. In this way, the power and hegemony of ‘traditional leaders’ was weakened if not entirely broken. At the same time, the number and quality of citizens who can participate in decision making and influence initiatives was vastly multiplied. Political and sym-bolic capital concentrated in ‘community oligarchies’ was redistributed. As in any other process of redistribution, the first phase is characterised by conflict and instability, due to the resistance of the ‘oligarchy’ and the inexperience of the new participating citizens in the management of municipal and community public matters under democratic norms.

Although conflict is the expression of change in itself, citizens do not tolerate long periods of uncertainty. Therefore, the decision was taken to institutionalise the PB and declare it a municipal norm that would guarantee not only the administrative and monetary public resources required for its operation, but would also resolve conflicts. This is achieved through defining decision-making competencies in the community and ensuring PB Consultative Councils have the max-imum level of community power, composed of an average 100 people per comuna. This opened a new phase of political life in the city that can only be evaluated in several years’ time.

Citizenship and bureaucracy

Undoubtedly, the sustainability of these processes is inextricably linked to the role of public servants in all the phases of the process. Public serv-ants should be seen also as citizens and inhabitants of the city where they work. Although this research only included some officers, they were in charge of implementation and responsible for part of the pro-gramme. These officers were caught in the midst of serious internal conflicts and tensions and their actions and coordination were key to maintaining momentum. The stereotypical view that counterposes civil society and citizens against the state does not necessarily explain reality, especially when officers are seen as workers and citizens them-selves with a stake in the city.

Citizenship, conflict and violence

In conflictive contexts, such as Medellín, the PB can be a political instrument with potential to prevent and transform situations of polit-ical violence and even violent crime. This is possible only if local public



dialogue spaces are constructed, where words delegitimate violence. However, the commitment of the local government to guarantee the protection of citizens is fundamental. In other words, if the PB and the spaces it generates re-legitimise the local state, the latter should legitim-ise and protect the spaces of the PB.

This is a dialectical movement; in order to overcome the conflict, the state has to process and incorporate it politically. In return for security, citizens learn to report threats. This process is full of diffi-culties. However, PB demonstrated that democracy and politics in gen-eral can be mechanisms of conflict resolution. They conceptualise and de-individualise issues and transform them into something public. Indeed, it makes one’s own issue everybody’s issue, through the free-dom and the creative power of words, which is the principle of the PB as part of a deliberative democratic ideal. The crises of democracies do not require a return to authoritarian regimes but an increase in demo-cratic intelligence, something which the PB consciously and perman-ently aimed to promote.

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154

7ManchesterBetween the Grassroots and City Hall: Participation in a Global CityJohn Diamond and Jenny Pearce

Introduction

This chapter explores the disconnect between the grassroots, the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and City Hall. Although new spaces for participation in the city opened up in the new millennium, they remained embedded in a complex set of established relationships and patterns of decision making. In Manchester City Council’s bid for global city status, with its much acclaimed city centre renovation, there is little enthusiasm for central government’s emphasis on community engagement mediated through the VCS. The community contribution to the city ‘vision’ remains marginal and contingent upon funding, media-tors and the goodwill of the representative state. In the Manchester case, the local state has a strong sense that accountability comes through the electoral process. Despite enthusiastic and challenging ideas on com-munity engagement outside the local state, in the end the strategy has emanated from within it, attempting to draw in the VCS, which in turn has found it hard to articulate and implement a distinct approach with equal claims to legitimacy. However, the creative approach to new spaces for participation through the national community empowerment para-digm constituted an effort to reconnect the grassroots with City Hall. The Manchester case analyses the limits and potential of these efforts.

Setting the context: ‘The poor become the crowd of the city’

We chose Manchester as one of the UK case studies because of its indus-trial and urban history and its significance as a regional centre. As a


Manchester: Participation in a Global City 155

‘city’ it carries immediate ‘name recognition’ on an international stage. In part that has to do with the power of football as a global brand (des-pite the fact that the Manchester United ground is not in Manchester) and of music and its appeal to young people in the 1980s and 1990s. This latter development was used by local universities as part of their marketing processes to attract young people to study in Manchester. Thus the City of Manchester has a ‘pull’ on the political and economic development of the subregion of Greater Manchester. Manchester is home to every central government initiative on urban policy as a con-sequence of the relative poverty of the citizens of Manchester, and it has become an opportunity to observe whether trickle-down econom-ics works. As a result of all of the above, Manchester is also home to a developed and, over the past 30 years, well-established set of organi-sations to promote, support and encourage the VCS, known as ‘infra-structure’ organisations. The extent to which these are able to facilitate access for community-based grassroots projects into new spaces of deci-sion making and engagement is one of the themes which emerged from this study.

The scale and diversity of the sector should not be confused with its influence, power and authority. According to the 2005 research funded by the UK Government’s ChangeUp initiative, there were an estimated 2,000 VCS organisations in the City of Manchester – 750 of which were Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups. A parallel study in 2006 by The Work Foundation, entitled Ideopolis: Knowledge City-Regions (Jones et al., 2006), took Manchester as one of the case stud-ies. The authors argue that Manchester demonstrates some of the core elements which suggest it has the potential for social and economic development. Whilst this study clearly predates the global collapse of the banking system, it is their observations on the quality of political life in Manchester which has meaning for us. They set out the criteria by which cities can map their claims to be an ‘Ideopolis’ and they include: building on what’s there; creating a physical transformation; diverse specialism; high skill organisations; vibrant universities; cul-tural and leisure diversity; good communications; strong civic leader-ship and investing in communities (Jones et al., 2006, p. 6). In their summary of the Manchester case study they cite the leadership and vision as a model for other cities, but also note that ‘The City is work-ing hard to address the challenges facing inner city communities, although some interviewees expressed concern about too much focus on economic growth and not enough on deprived areas’ (Jones et al., 2006, p. 90).



This tension between a city of both global vision and persistent pov-erty is rooted in its shift since the 1970s and 1980s from ‘bastion of municipal socialism’ (Quilley, 2002) to champion of an entrepreneurial revolution. This shift has led some to ask whether Manchester is a city in decline or transformation (Peck and Ward, 2002). The case for the latter is strong as the Work Foundation report points out. Equally, the city has serious problems of unemployment and deprivation somewhat concealed by the glamour of its reputation and makeover. One of our interviewees from the VCS expressed it thus:

The poor become the crowd of the city, I mean, Piccadilly Gardens is an absolutely classic example, this where we are sitting now, this used to be down in a dip and it used to be the kind of druggies, alco-holics place in a dip, out of the public view so they could drink and do whatever else, and now the poor play in the fountains and it is a better place, it is a more public place but you are still left with two questions, partly everyone recognises it’s a better place so although all the inequalities are still there at least people are enjoying play-ing in the fountains, the other part is that a lot of the poor are now shoved somewhere else, they’re just hidden from view. (Interview, 28 February 2005)

Manchester, in sum, is a de-industrialised city of great potential which has been partially realised by its city centre development and its iconic global status around football, music and higher education in particular. This status has given its leadership some room for man-oeuvre vis-à-vis central government, and an ability to adapt its ini-tiatives to its own priorities and interpretation of the New Labour agenda. The municipal innovations explored here were thus shaped as much by the local leadership’s ultimate belief in the transforma-tive power of the local state as by New Labour’s national community engagement mission. The aspiration of some within the VCS to use new spaces to empower those at the grassroots was not given much credence by City Hall, which felt the sector was not connected enough to the city’s social realities and maintained that elected councillors were in a better position to champion the interests of the excluded. The leader of the council argued that a new generation of Manchester councillors had emerged which was particularly committed to that goal (Interview, 13 August 2008). Our research explored the conse-quences of these distinct postures and attitudes towards participation in the global city.



Co-production of knowledge, authorship and voice

The core underlying principle of the research was its conscious attempt to ‘co-create’ the knowledge and understanding generated by the research questions in collaboration with activists, residents and voluntary organi-sations involved in local initiatives or neighbourhood-based projects. In Manchester this included the Community Empowerment Network for Manchester (CN4M), which was set up in 2001 as a ‘network of networks’, and funded, after central government money ended in March 2006, by the Manchester Partnership, the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), and later by the council itself. The second partner was Community Pride Initiative (CPI), a radical and grassroots independent voluntary organ-isation which played a key role in the CN4M at its initiation and in the city’s first Community Engagement Strategy. The third partners were two grassroots community associations, the Hamilton Road Area Community Association (HRACA) and the Whalley Range Forum. HRACA also won a Practitioner Fellowship (see Preface) which enabled them to build a pro-ject of their own in collaboration with the research team.

It is important for methodological as well as theoretical and concep-tual reasons to discuss the processes used to shape this chapter and give it texture and colour. The primary source material which has been used to reflect the stories and narratives which were brought together in the fieldwork were compiled and collated by the dedicated researcher for the project, Lucy Brill. In addition to the rich and diverse set of experiences contained within the qualitative data, we are drawing upon a number of additional sets of sources. One is the reflections and observations of the Practitioner Fellows funded by the project, who were based in a resident and tenants’ association in Manchester; and the others are our own empirical studies of Manchester’s community and regeneration processes. John Diamond has lived in the City of Manchester since 1975 and has carried out extensive primary and empirical research in the city, as well as evaluations of a range of social and educational policy practice developments since 1984.

Power, authority and decision making: The Manchester way

The main primary research upon which this chapter is based involved tracking with research partners how efforts were made to enhance grassroots participation in the new spaces opening up in the city. The first was the efforts by the CN4M to engage voluntary and community



organisations in new formal spaces for participation, notably the LSP, but at the same time, to pilot its own spaces for community participa-tion on a geographical ward base level. The field researcher tracked these processes with CN4M itself, but also through the lens of the neighbour-hood organisations, HRACA and the Whalley Range Forum. The second was efforts by CPI to enable local people in the most marginalised com-munities to engage critically with new participation spaces through ‘Schools of Participation’. The field researcher attended several activities organized by CPI within Longsight ward, a very deprived ward with a large Pakistani and Bangladeshi community.

While these processes were under way, the city leadership launched a series of consultation events in 2006, ‘between individuals and their city’ (Manchester Partnership, 2009), around the idea of a ‘Mancunian Agreement’, its own approach to involving communities in the future of Manchester. A council officer involved in the process who attended a meeting organised by the research team described it as ‘about taking ward co-ordination a step further, moving from service planning to greater community empowerment’ (Manchester Reference Group meet-ing, 2 October 2006), a sign of the increased attention by the council to the central government’s community engagement strategy. The coun-cil had not signed the first Community Engagement Strategy docu-ment in 2002, which had been largely drawn up by CPI, although the Manchester Partnership had. The council did appoint a Community Engagement Development Officer (CEDO) in 2004 and introduced a ward coordination scheme with support officers in each ward to implement community engagement work in the locality. The CEDO was tasked with working with the ward coordination teams, as well as across the 11 council departments, with the umbrella VCS groups and LSP partners to develop community engagement work across the local authority. One of his first tasks was to work out the issues which stopped the council signing the first Community Engagement Strategy, most of which revolved around fears that it would undermine the mandate of local councillors. CN4M was viewed with considerable distrust at this point (Interview, CEDO, 25 July 2007). The CEDO played an important role in nurturing better understanding of the CN4M within the coun-cil. The council, in turn, began to acknowledge the importance of com-munity engagement and signed up to Manchester Partnership’s new community strategy in 2006 and its goal: ‘to enable more Manchester people and communities to share in and to benefit more directly from the city’s success’ (Manchester Sustainable Community Strategy 2006–2015, paragraph 2.3).



However, the council also sought to align the strategy with its own understanding of how the representative state should relate to its citi-zens. The leader of the council took the view that most people do not want to participate in actual decision making, quoting a survey which had found that only 20 per cent of people aspire to that level of participation (Interview, leader of the council, 13 August 2008). However, he recognised the importance of active citizenship and cap-acity to feed views about services into city-wide planning, alongside enhanced personal commitment to the city, expressed through the idea of the Mancunian Agreement and an emerging concept of ‘sense of place’.

The field researcher monitored progress on the Mancunian Agreement as much as she could and attended several consultations, although much of the process was carried out via the internet. She also tried to track pilot agreements which were due to proceed following the consultations, but in the end these did not take place until after the field research period. The council had not had a strong idea of how the agreement would work before they launched it. The field researcher records in her diary the sense that ‘to date decisions around the Agreement appear to have been taken behind closed doors’. Her fieldwork diary (13 June 2006) fol-lowing attendance at one of the consultation events confirms the sense that this was very much the council’s vision and records:

General feeling was that the Agreement could only work if intro-duced at the grassroots level, as something that local communities could shape to meet their particular needs and not as a universal centrally controlled initiative.

The field researcher focused on grassroots involvement in shaping neigh-bourhood and city-wide processes, either through their own ‘created spaces’ (Cornwall, 2002) or through spaces facilitated by strategic non-governmental allies. CPI, which had played a significant role in setting up the Community Empowerment Network, was strongly influenced by liberation theology and the Brazilian literacy theorist and practitioner, Paulo Freire, and protected its autonomy and radical spirit. However, the organisation was facing a severe financial crisis by the time of the research. CN4M workers had become increasingly aware of the difficul-ties of involving the grassroots in new political spaces which were still tailored to those willing and able to operate at a high level of political and bureaucratic sophistication. At the same time, the VCS was being invited into partnership spaces with key city-wide actors and treated as



an interlocutor for the first time, and CN4M had to take account of its emerging relationship to those actors as well as the grassroots.

City Hall still questioned the relationship of the VCS with the most excluded (Interview, leader of the council, 13 August 2008), as much as some members of the VCS questioned City Hall. The vitality of the city leaders’ approach to the rebirth of the city went hand in hand with great confidence that the local state could directly relate to Mancunians and enlist their support and enthusiasm in ways which would address the exclusionary deficits of that rebirth. The Mancunian Agreement was an embryonic idea in 2006. Over time it took shape as a deliv-ery mechanism for Manchester’s vision, in particular the Sustainable Community Strategy 2006–2015, in which residents were encouraged to make a Mancunian Agreement over any local issue, between them-selves, service providers and agencies.

These distinct approaches to how to engage citizens, particularly the socially and economically deprived, should be situated in a broader social and political context. Firstly, those who are active in local pol-itics are not always active in the Labour Party (or any other party for that matter). The Labour Party in Manchester has declined over the last 25 years and, as a consequence, there is a much reduced number of individuals involved in the decision-making processes and in the selection of party candidates. An active party base provides a periph-ery to the elected leadership and also a point of external reference for both the leadership and the membership. The decline in the member-ship and the decline in the remit of elected politicians creates a vac-uum within which the leadership develops points or places of reference which lack the same kind of challenge and interaction that the mem-bership provide.

Secondly, we can locate the experiences of practitioners and activists in the broader ‘story’ of Manchester and the way in which City Hall has sought to appropriate or co-opt community or VCS activists into its decision-making processes. A layer of City Hall has begun to seek out alternative sites of consultation to inform their ways of working. Thirdly, we can observe how the different networks and alliances of VCS professionals interact with each other as well as with City Hall and how the interests of the ‘professionalised’ sector become aligned with those of City Hall over time. Finally, we can hear local neighbourhood activists describe their sense of marginalisation and exclusion from both City Hall and the VCS across the city. Whilst City Hall and the paid professionalised VCS have framed their relationships in the con-text of public policy programmes and new initiatives and are able to



negotiate sets of relationships which can be mutually beneficial, this is not the case with neighbourhood activists. As a result, there are levels of mistrust and doubt which could be opened up and clarified if there was a willingness to explore the basis of this hostility.

The Manchester case study provides a route into the ways in which street-based VCS practitioners seek to work with local residents as well as negotiate their roles and responsibilities with line managers, man-agement committees and funders and engage with the agencies and services of the local authority (and public sector), political institutions and external VCS organisations. There is much confusion about power, authority and decision making in the city. Those individuals who occupy key decision-making roles within the formal structures of the City Council are referred to in a number of interviews as ‘the people with power’, as one participant expressed it in a focus group discussion organised by the field researcher (23 May 2007):

It’s all about power, you might say that a small number of people hold a lot of power within the city, because the council is such a hier-archical beast that one manager won’t do anything without check-ing with the other manager and that manager won’t do anything without checking with the other manager and then you get the per-son who gives the go ahead which is the real power base.

The evidence across the fieldwork and from other research is that the VCS agencies and organisations tend to overestimate the power and influence of key decision makers, underestimate their own potential and lack sufficient depth into neighbourhoods and communities to mobilise effectively when appropriate. This way of framing the con-text within which to discuss a particular set of outcomes assumes that power, authority and decision making are the same thing and that the exercise of significant power – resource allocation or distribution – is located at the level of City Hall. The reality is far more complex. An example is the ‘regeneration narrative’, an ongoing reference point in the field research.

The Manchester ‘regeneration narrative’ represents an explicit set of processes which draws in the key political actors as well as the powerful and influential non-party political actors across the city (including the VCS), as well as street-based community organisations. The dominant discourse within this narrative is one which has been shaped by ideas of ‘transformation’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘urban renaissance’. All of these ideas, concepts and images come straight from the ‘textbooks’ on urban policy



and urban regeneration over the past 20 to 30 years. In particular, a fea-ture of the conventional wisdom of contemporary urban regeneration is the collapse (or near to collapse) of political and civic institutions. This ‘collapse’ can be ascribed to the industrial decline of former manu-facturing cities and districts within cities and the emergence of ‘post-industrial cities’. In addition, the move away from the urban centre of an economically mobile and aspiring professional middle class (usu-ally white) and its replacement by a combination of older, poorer, less mobile and black working class, resulted in the ‘loss’ of the city centres and the retreat by the service and professional sectors too. In this con-text, political and civic administrative structures and processes have struggled to assert their legitimacy or authority. Partnership working and collaboration with the public and voluntary sectors became a way to address this. The policy and practice literature provides a rich and varied evidence base from a range of cases in which these relationships are played out (Yin and Yates, 1975; Blunkett and Jackson, 1987; Leach and Wilson, 2000; Byrne, 2001; Harvey, 2005). In the Manchester case, we can observe, over time, how these processes have shaped (literally) the size and architecture of the city. Across the city itself there have been different regeneration initiatives, all of which have drawn upon the VCS in different ways and for different purposes (Blakeley and Evans, 2008; Evans, 2007).

Research participants tended to believe that City Hall possesses sig-nificant authority and scope for action independent of central govern-ment (over what to spend on public and welfare services, for instance), and independent too of the broader global economy. Yet the key ser-vices identified as being part of the Manchester ‘success’ story are all (arguably) examples of developments and investments which are, con-versely, independent of City Hall. They provide a direct link into the global economy and represent Manchester’s attempt to position itself as an ‘international’ city-region (Craig and Mayo, 1995; Craig and Taylor, 2002; Foley and Martin, 2000). The different regeneration projects across Manchester, in fact, all share the same broad principles and ways of working and there is (relatively) little scope for innovation (Diamond, 1991; 2001; 2002). The extent to which the VCS can provide an inde-pendent voice and promote alternative ways of working or model dif-ferent values and practices is constrained by its relationship with City Hall and these other limits (Diamond & Nelson, 1993). Rather than anticipate the limits, imagine alternative perspectives and seek to build a VCS with an independent voice (Diamond, 2007; 2008), many activ-ists in the VCS over-identify both with their particular project and with



the political and officer networks across the city. There are real risks with getting too close to the individuals and agencies represented in and by City Hall. One of the risks is a distance from the group or neigh-bourhood project in which the VCS group is involved. Our case studies highlight rather than resolve this dilemma.

The Manchester case studies: ‘It becomes a ritual’

The ways in which partnership relationships between the VCS and other public agencies (including City Hall) are constructed and under-stood across the sector have been discussed in a number of studies of different cities (Birch and Whittam, 2008; Harrow and Bogdinova, 2006; and Munro et al., 2008). In these different places, the autonomy or capacity of VCS managers or organisations are examined and ana-lysed, together with the role they occupy as intermediaries between the local community and the state. The extent to which they are agents of change and mobilisation or facilitators of continuity and consensus has emerged as a key question in the literature and a potential frame-work for exploring the role of the VCS in the Manchester cases. The experience from the research suggests that whilst some individuals or groups do define themselves as agents of political change whose role is to enable people at the grassroots to assert their voice, they find it hard to mobilise effectively. One actor from the sector voiced her frustration in one of the research focus groups (23 May 2007):

What I’m worried about with the voluntary sector is the kind of slide into, we want to try and change certain things but we’re not really going full force into trying to change the things that need to be changed, and if you really want to change things, people, local people, local groups that the decisions are going to effect have to be involved from the beginning, and there’s a slide away from that and the voluntary sector is supporting that slide away from that, you want people to be involved from the beginning no matter how scared all of the agencies [are] to let people in, that’s where we should be advocating, we shouldn’t be advocating just little bits of this and little bits of that.

The VCS as a whole is often defined by others in terms of whether it has a ‘legitimate’ face or a ‘headbanger’ approach. If you are potentially situated in the former then there is a process of incorporation and co-option. If you are in the latter then marginalisation is quickly followed



by exclusion, the experience ultimately of CPI. CN4M encountered the opacity of decision making when it was invited around the table. At a focus group for the research with the Manchester partners (2 October 2006), two comments from VCS participants about their experiences in partnership spaces stand out. One person expressed their sense that ‘decisions were made in pre-meetings and that consensus, and the rules and framework of the process was used to avoid dissent’. Another made the point:

A real partnership must include difference and conflict; if it isn’t dealt with through competing ideas, instead its about managing an anodyne politics, things are buried, people begin to second guess, to self-censor, and gaining access is enough, diluting their agendas to what is possible; people only ask for much smaller things than they think are possible, and they in turn narrow the space as fewer people stay involved. It becomes a ritual.

The lack of overt confrontation might account for why some inter-viewees from the council side talked about better relations with the VCS and improved understanding of their role. The research partners, on the other hand, were keen to strengthen the independent voice of the VCS and reactivate the grassroots at the neighbourhood level. For a var-iety of reasons, as will be explored next, outcomes were generally dis-couraging. Does this confirm the leader’s scepticism towards people’s interest in participation?

It is important not to diminish the observations and reflections of the leader of the council, Richard Leese, who was very straightforward in his conception of the relationship between the VCS in Manchester and City Hall and what the limits were to that relationship. He expressed his scepticism of the participatory budget approach and argued for a model of community involvement which was defined within the existing City Hall systems. His lines of difference between those community activists or professional VCS staff who saw the role adopted by City Hall as a dis-empowering one was to frame the discussion by reference to formal sys-tems of accountability and representation. He gave a very cogent critique of the weaknesses of the VCS perspective and asserted the primacy of the elected dimension of local government. His argument was that the points of difference or dispute between the VCS and City Hall should be enacted through recognised and legitimised forms of engagement and participation. It followed that City Hall was the primary site of political authority and that therefore such organisations it supported, or called



into existence, were the ones with whom it decided to enter into dia-logue. He gave a number of examples of where this was taking place. He stressed the economic role of local authorities in the sense that what mattered were jobs, employment and how economic activity and access to work had an impact on health, social justice and a sense of pride and attachment to the city. In a long interview, his key observations contrasted sharply with a number of the contributors to the fieldwork. The view from City Hall was that the initiatives announced by the UK Labour Government in 2008 on empowerment and participation were really marginal to the primary objectives of City Hall: social and eco-nomic change as a precondition for other changes but only within the existing institutional and organisational frameworks.

CN4M: Beyond ritualistic participation

The history(ies) of the Community Empowerment Networks (CEN) are, themselves, an important example of the state promoting and allocating resources to develop and promote participation, capacity building and local ‘voices’ within new forms of local governance. The CEN model can be seen as further iteration of a particular ‘professionalised’ model of defining how the VCS should be staffed and managed and provide a spe-cified set of functions. Whilst it is clear from the data collected for this project (and evidence from other CENs across England) that the relation-ship between the networks, City Hall and the Local Strategic Partnership is difficult and conflictual at times, it did represent a ‘professional’ class talking to itself. The language of the processes, the style of meetings and the formal nature of the engagements meant that the majority of partici-pants would have been comfortable in the environment of the LSP and certainly would have understood the rules of engagement.

In the early years of its life, CN4M concentrated on getting representa-tives from the VCS into the thematic partnerships set up by the LSP (for example, transport, children and young people, sustainable com-munities etc.). It was only when it became clear that decision making tended to take place elsewhere that it changed tack. In 2003 the network created seven parallel ‘pool’ meetings to mirror each thematic partner-ship, each one providing a regular meeting place for activists and work-ers from local organisations with an interest in a particular issue. The aim of these was to provide a structure through which VCS participants who attended the thematic partnerships could remain responsive and accountable to the wider sector. The pools select their participants to attend the relevant thematic partnership meeting, and these individuals then feed back information to the pools. A ‘Protocol for Participation’



was drawn up, which set out the selection procedure for VCS partici-pants in the different spaces within the city. It established how informa-tion should be fed both from the sector to the participant about his or her role in the meetings and then back from the meetings to the sector. This partially addressed the problem of whether the participants were speaking for themselves or for the VCS. CN4M used the term ‘partici-pant’ rather than ‘representative’ to describe these individuals, to make it clear that a single individual could not hope to ‘represent’ the diver-sity of the VCS, but also because of local political sensitivities that this might lead to confusion with local councillors. However, the pools did not seem to overcome a sense that the VCS had little hope of influen-cing partnership policy; a member of the transport pool told the field researcher (5 July 2006) that he couldn’t think of a single issue raised in a pool meeting that had been taken up by the partnership. However, another problem for participants is that few are interested in the big stra-tegic questions of policy; many want to focus on their particular prob-lems and issues. By going to the pool, participants were joining a long and slow process for effecting policy change, which soon disillusioned those seeking a quick solution to their neighbourhood problems.

In April 2006, CN4M brought all its community engagement workers under the direct supervision of its central coordinating team and began to explore ways to establish new ward level fora where these did not already exist. The Whalley Range Forum and similar networks in other parts of the city provided a model for this new strategy to introduce a community and voluntary sector forum in every ward within the city. They hoped that these new spaces would make it easier for people to make connections between their local concerns and the strategic issues discussed at partnership and pool meetings, and thus enable the net-work to strengthen its links with grassroots activists. The worker from the All (Ardwick, Longsight and Levenshulme) Network also explained (10 August 2006) how this could strengthen the council’s own outreach at the ward level:

For example ward support meetings or ward coordination meetings can be really intimidating to attend because often it’s about people being answerable about service delivery to the council and the coun-cillors are quite vocal and you have to speak, but if you’ve never been to a formal meeting like that before it could be a really intimidating thing to do. So part of our role is providing some kind of support to people with papers, with how best to feed back, with how best to kind of make your point heard.



HRACA: Participation at the grassroots

It was very clear from the interview with the leader of the City Council that he regarded the network and the VCS infrastructure bodies, in particular, as largely irrelevant to the processes of local governance. However, in their efforts to move beyond ritualistic participation, CN4M at least had begun to explore a potential role in enabling the council’s ward coordination teams to work better. Some ward support officers recognised that this role was not played by any one else on the local political scene, but lay at the heart of the disconnection between politi-cians and communities and ultimately contributed to service delivery failure. This initiative was particularly welcomed by the Hamiliton Road Community Association (HRACA). Led by a handful of local activists, the HRACA became both a site for this research project to explore the ways in which participatory approaches to decision making and local politics were played out as well as an important partner in the process of knowledge co-production.

The HRACA is located in a quite different place from the CN4M or any other VCS infrastructure body or established community group. A sig-nificant part of the difference is evident through the class membership of the group and the ways in which the group functions. The admin-istrative base of HRACA is in one of the houses of the management activist group, in the Longsight area of Manchester. This is part of the ‘inner city’ spread around one of the major roads out of the city to the south (A6). It is predominantly an Asian community and has over the past 30 to 40 years become a neighbourhood of transition and tempor-ary, privately rented housing, with some local authority housing as well as social housing and owner-occupied units. Whilst this may appear to represent an area of social mix, there are some important spatial divi-sions within the neighbourhood along race lines as well as within the BME communities. The HRACA provides a very good example of VCS activity which is self-activated and a response to specific community-based issues. We can also see and ‘hear’ in the example of HRACA an illustration of a perceived failure of civic institutions and agencies within the locality or neighbourhood. At a street level, members of the HRACA describe their negative experiences of engaging with local politicians and the party organisations at neighbourhood level. Whilst there is an argument to be made about the disconnection between local politicians and their ability to exercise control or discretion over services (Stoker, 1996; 1994; Filkin et al., 2000; James and Cox, 2007) and the need to reassert ‘local’ control, the views of the HRACA are that the process is controlled by a combination of officers and politicians. Their focus,



therefore, is to seek to redress what they experience as a power imbal-ance. In this context the ‘politics’ of grassroots organisations is much more explicit than CN4M. It is also through the lens of the HRACA and other neighbourhood-level groups that the gap between them and CN4M becomes evident. One member of HRACA made the point that in some of these network meetings they felt like meetings with City Hall. The language and processes were as inaccessible and exclusive as the ones adopted by City Hall. Another network member from a South Manchester community centre echoed the same sentiment (Interview, 5 June 2006):

South Manchester Community Network members take turns at attending the CN4M meetings and to be honest these are tiresome, long evening meetings, they start at 6pm and often don’t finish till 9.30 or 10pm. Also hard to follow what’s being said, acronyms and codes should be banned because if she [the speaker] can’t understand it, what hope would ordinary residents have?

However, even within HRACA, it is clear that motivations and stam-ina for meetings are varied; their own meetings can be too boring for most residents:

There’s one chap who’ll come to the last 10 minutes of a meeting and sit there, fidgeting, you can tell he’s really uncomfortable, but then he will get involved and help with the activities so there’s different ways of being involved. (Interview, HRACA member, 4 May 2007)

Participation in cultural events, tree planting and a hanging basket and a better garden scheme proved very popular, on the other hand. The problems arise when dealing with ongoing irritations such as rub-bish collection, vandalism or risks to green spaces, for instance from a council sale of land. Good councillors should pick up on these, but they often don’t, so that in Longsight, residents felt that there was no one sticking up for the area ‘and when there’s no one holding them [the council] to account then things don’t get done, they prioritise the areas where people make a fuss and we lose out’ (Ibid). The same resi-dent recounted her fruitless efforts to find the right person in the coun-cil to speak to about a tree preservation order. This, in turn, leads to dependence on any association member who knows how the council works; in the case of HRACA this was the energetic driver of the associ-ation without whom many felt it would collapse. Most interviewees did



not view Manchester City Council as an indifferent or uncaring body, just distant and all-powerful.

The HRACA saw the ward forum idea as a way of reaching out to other groups in Longsight, connecting more with the Asian community (none of whom are represented in HRACA) and providing a more infor-mal space for interactions, because people ‘have had enough of meet-ings and structures’ (Interview, HRACA member, 9 November 2006). As part of their Practitioner Fellowship, HRACA decided to map the VCS organisations within Longsight which could then be used to build the forum. At the instigation of one of its most active members who had been to a workshop on using participatory methodologies, action research tools were used to find out what groups in Longsight might want in terms of working together. Although the process did elicit a lot of useful information about the neighbourhood, the entire context shifted and led to a very dismal conclusion to the research:

This Fellowship has resulted in us thinking more about the whole issue of local people being involved in affecting their own com-munity environment [civic society] and community involvement in decision making. It’s interesting to note that we automatically assume that these are good things to do. We met a lot of other people involved in civic society in Longsight, but discovered that not many are interested in influencing decision making which takes place out-side their own groups. People are concerned about decisions which they are unhappy with but are not prepared to commit the time and energy needed to try to influence those decisions. (HRACA, 2009)

Not only was the HRACA facing a funding crisis, but the Ward Forum Planning Group had met only four times and finally collapsed. The CN4M worker had felt she needed to get councillor buy-in before she went further in the process, to do it ‘properly’, but time ran out and she left her post and was not replaced; CN4M itself also entered a period of great uncertainty about its future and survival. Would HRACA have had a different response if the council had encouraged ways of engaging communities which were complementary to, rather than driven by, the representative state?

Community Pride: Resisting the logic of professionalisation

A final case to consider is that of the Community Pride Initiative (CPI). CPI played an important role in the efforts described previously to build a new kind of inclusive politics in the city. Set up under the auspices of



Church Action Against Poverty, CPI attracted a very committed team, with strong values derived mostly from radical theology. Here, analysis of power was paramount and viewed from the lens of the powerless. Leading CPI figures were deeply influenced by experiences in inter-national development and innovative forms of participation, such as participatory budgeting, which mobilised people as protagonists for change. CPI was set up in 1999 and saw the New Labour agenda as a serious opportunity, as its former coordinator recounted (Interview, 1 February 2007):

We were in the kind of brave new world of New Labour, Manchester was going to join the new Labour tribe, which I actually really believed in, which was we will put, for want of a better term, tack-ling poverty at the heart of everything that we do, but we will live in the real world which is that capital is dominant and capital is the thing that will transform this ... it’s just we genuinely believed that this could happen, if you see what I mean, but at the same time, the poor would be taken with it, and I don’t think we were being naïve in terms of trickle-down or anything like that, it had to be very very proactive and the onus had to be on, you know, as much energy going into regeneration initiatives and social programmes as was going into city centre redevelopment, and I think, um, jumping ahead three years, I began to wake up to the fact that actually that wasn’t happening.

The CPI quickly became a thorn in the flesh of the local author-ity, notably when they attempted to challenge the New Deal for Communities regeneration in East Manchester from their conviction that the process of involving residents was manipulated and that regen-eration was about the Commonwealth Games and Manchester’s glo-bal aspirations rather than the needs of its poorest communities. They found themselves out on a limb, as the regeneration officers rallied resi-dents against them and the churches themselves were accused of not supporting East Manchester (Interview, CPI community link worker, 17 May 2006). CPI’s coordinator at the time recognised how vulnerable they were to an accusation of ‘being against Manchester, or against the Commonwealth Games or against the East Manchester regeneration’ (Interview, 1 February 2007). The opportunity to set up the Community Empowerment Network in Manchester came from government office, not Manchester City Council, and although others were cautious about taking on such an endeavour, it was also seen as an opportunity to work



across the whole of Manchester, rather than just three or four commu-nities. It was also an opportunity to be ‘refreshing and inclusive’:

I’d been to Porto Alegre round about this time and I’d seen how they’d structured their participatory budgeting programmes, so I came back fresh with geographical networks of people, communities of interest networks of people, with this kind of plan to mobilise Manchester and we got a lot of grassroots community groups, communities of interest and so on believing in the Community Network. (Ibid.)

The former coordinator tried hard to bridge the two worlds of the grassroots and City Hall, given that in 2002 when he was focused on building CN4M, the City Council ‘would have no truck at all with com-munity engagement other than councillors engaging with local resi-dents almost on a one-to-one ward surgery, case-by-case basis’ (Ibid.). CPI’s vision nevertheless continued to annoy many in the City Council, although at the same time it may well have forced community engage-ment onto their agenda. When that happened, however, it was at a cost. The council’s Community Engagement Officer appointed in 2004 saw himself as a broker between a mistrusted network and the council, and he would claim that it was the former’s diminishing activism that drew the two together:

It’s about making sure that when people in the community network and the voluntary sector drop some of the activism part, nothing wrong with activism but sometimes it is a bit of a barrier, so now they’re coming with challenges but they’re coming also with solu-tions and options and a willingness to work together to make change happen. (Interview, CEO, 3 March 2006)

CN4M faced a real challenge in Manchester. To be taken seriously, it needed to abandon some of the very mobilising role which kept it most engaged with the grassroots. CPI resisted this kind of compromise, and nor would they become a service delivery organisation. They refused, in other words, to ‘professionalise’, to pay the attention they needed to their management structures and fundraising, and they paid the price in the end of a financial crisis. Nevertheless, in their seven years of work, CPI played a significant role in demonstrating another way of being a mediator and facilitator of grassroots social process. CPI experi-mented with a range of grassroots empowerment methods, recognis-ing that many local people remained reluctant to use the Community



Empowerment Network structures. Participatory research methodolo-gies aimed to recruit community researchers to find out barriers to local engagement, and community comics were designed to explain concepts such as the Local Strategic Partnership to people in an accessible way, another idea from the global South. The Schools of Participation aimed to provide people with their own space to develop capacity to engage, using Freirian methods of consciousness-raising and participatory tools. CPI received money from central government (who seemed to value this work rather more than local government at the time) to run four schools with refugees, in Longsight, with the deaf community and with Salford Faith Network. Its Research and Policy worker (Interview, 20 October 2006) honestly acknowledges the many difficulties they encountered, as everyone was learning. The school with Bangladeshi women from Longsight, for instance, had to recognise that the women had never had a space to talk about issues in a formalised way:

I don’t mean formal as in you know, pen and paper, but formalised as in this space we are now able to talk about our relationship with men. Whereas they’d go to the [Bangladeshi women’s group] previously and go so and so is being beaten up or why are men, as a joke, why are men sods, or I’m having problems with my mother-in-law, but encouraging women to realise that these are things that can be talked about in quite a structured way, rather than just chatting. (Ibid.)

Although the school ended up being less about using Freirian meth-ods and became much more a space for discussion, it managed to elicit some important learning for policy makers and politicians from one of the most marginalised sectors of Manchester society. The women knew exactly who to approach if they had a general rather than per-sonal problem, they knew the councillors’ names and many knew that they held surgeries at the library on Saturday mornings; they also knew the community organisations in Longsight. However, they still always chose to go to the Bangladeshi Women’s Association. It is this willing-ness to give time to listen and learn about how marginalised people internalise their marginality and build their lives around it that gave CPI a particular role. Whereas in the case of the Bangladeshi women this did not result in any formal outcome, in the case of the school for refugees and asylum seekers it did.

Male-dominated councils, particularly those in the Labour trad-ition, find it hard to recognise any worth in the VCS, partly because they view it as ‘white middle class’. CPI had supported the refugee and



asylum seekers to develop their own charter and a platform with the council. The council tried again and again to get them to change the charter before they would endorse it, which the refugees and asylum seekers resisted. Eventually a compromise was reached and the council agreed to endorse the spirit of the charter: The CPI worker (Interview, 20 October 2006) explained what happened:

So that’s the time I’ve seen that work [Schools of Participation] most effectively and really amazingly as well, because the chap within the council that we were dealing with was saying that we were in com-petition with the council, with what they were doing for refugees and asylum seekers you know he refused to meet with refugees and asylum seekers who had actually written the charter, he only wanted to meet with me. So I went to meet him and he said this is just white middle-class rubbish basically because of me, but after that, at the end of the meeting, he said, oh no, I will meet with them actually. So that was great and we had a fantastic meeting and it went from there really.

She herself had not been part of that particular School of Participation. But in her account of it she expresses her opinion that it had been very strong, ‘it wasn’t wishy-washy’. It had in fact been led by two of the men involved in CPI. Here was one of the tensions within the organisa-tion, around political vision and tactics, with a gendered twist. Was CPI about ‘mobilising’ and ‘action’? Or was it about smaller, slower changes over time? Although the School of Participation for refugee and asy-lum seekers was considered effective because of the charter, it strug-gled subsequently to maintain momentum. The CPI community link worker retained a commitment to the slower, more grassroots process. Her equally committed male colleague had the skills to broker relation-ships with the powerful. But this also led him to leave CPI and take up a national position where he felt he could be more effective. This was more than a shift of space. He had come to recognise limits to grassroots participation in tackling some of the big social challenges:

I learned over the later years that actually housing is a really sig-nificant and important subject, education is in its own right, forget participation, in its own right there are fundamental issues around inequalities and you can have the best participatory process in the whole world but I do think there are both at national and local levels, some straightforward decisions and I just felt we’d become obsessed



by doing participation and inclusion, to the detriment of actually tackling inequality head on. (Interview, 1 February 2007)

We could perhaps interpret these differences in terms of gendered approaches to power in which the masculine model ultimately draws men towards it; the interviewee himself was sensitive to such a possibil-ity. However, such an argument would not explain everything. CPI did leave a legacy in Manchester. In the course of this field research it was evident that it had greatly influenced CN4M in its efforts to persuade the South Manchester Regeneration Team to use more participatory methods in its consultations with the community; in CN4M’s reflec-tions on what makes a ‘community representative’ legitimate; in the idea of building spaces for the grassroots to gain confidence and knowledge of how power works before confronting the powerful; in the HRACA’s option for an action research tool when it mapped its local community organisations; and ultimately in struggling to reverse some of the profes-sionalising logic of the VCS and prevent it being co-opted once it became an accepted interlocutor of the local state. In the end its successes were limited. However, that does not mean its efforts were misplaced.

Conclusion: ‘A culture of distances’

A key theme of this chapter has been the social, political and economic relationship(s) between the grassroots, the VCS and City Hall. It has been important to explore the context within which participants attempted to make sense of what was happening and the extent to which these interpretations or narratives were explicitly shaped by an awareness of broader structural processes in play. A major conclusion of this study is that, at present, the space for those in the VCS who have that aware-ness to play a role at the grassroots and City Hall is minimal. However, this could be different. The problem is not only an all-powerful local state or an overly professionalised VCS. It lies also in the way all actors are caught up in a ‘culture of distances’, reinforced undoubtedly by the nature of the economic model which prevailed during the data collec-tion period and which evidently did not ‘trickle down’. Neither council-lors nor the more radical end of the VCS easily overcome this culture, indeed they often unwillingly and unwittingly reproduce it. There is a need for thorough reflection on how and why.

The Manchester case studies provide rich examples of the challenges facing the VCS, as well as political parties of the left in the UK, as they search for a progressive agenda at the local level. They point to the



problems of governance and accountability and the extent to which the institutions (as well as the individuals) of local government have the capacity to respond. There are limited examples of the kind of interven-tions that promote progressive or anti-oppressive politics and which are situated within a critique of the state or of the institutional frameworks which have emerged over time to support and to protect the state. Our case studies track some examples which might fall into this category but also chart their limitations.

At the time of writing most of the CENs have been wound up due to changes in funding and the LSPs are more closely linked to the for-mal structures of city halls across the country. The CN4M faced many challenges in terms of resources, its remit and sense of purpose and these were likely to shape a feeling of crisis or marginality amongst key staff. This sense of being on the outside is common across the VCS and, in particular, those projects which do explicitly seek to be involved in transformative actions. As the CN4M itself told the field researcher (Interview, 18 December 2006):

It is a frustration, because, because the same issues will come out wherever voluntary sector people are, and that is capacity, that is funding, that is lack of understanding, general understanding, because they’re not intrinsically involved in strategy stuff anyway, they’re outsiders. They don’t know the rules of the game. They don’t know the nitty-gritty of all the stuff that they’ve got to do. There’s also a frustration as to what are these people bringing? What do they do? And I’ve said the voluntary sector needs to be challenged more.

The risk in the Manchester context (as with all large urban conurba-tions) is that the primary reference points for key paid VCS workers are other paid VCS workers. As one participant noted at a regeneration event, the majority of people in the room were paid staff or professional workers from key agencies – ‘ordinary’ people were in the minority. A member of HRACA vividly described (Interview, 4 May 2007) how difficult such environments are for ‘ordinary people’:

I remember standing at the back and feeling like a complete outsider, most of the people there were professionals, people who were paid to be there and it was held during the day time. The guy stood at the front and did his presentation, full of ideas about the future and



about other areas, it didn’t seem relevant, it was as if it had already been decided.

Yet, the story is by no means entirely negative. Interviews do reveal an enormous amount of creative energy. The desire to make the city better does not only reside with elected councillors and paid officers, as this voluntary sector interview makes clear (Interview, 5 June 2006):

The [community] centre is a member of the South Manchester Community Network and of the Local Action Partnership. These meetings do provide some opportunity for local people to get involved although it is limited, a tendency to see the same faces at meetings. Local councillors hold monthly surgeries at the [community] centre, and the centre provides a space to bring people together, where local people are reluctant to take their concerns up directly, the centre plays a representative role. [The centre] also provides a neutral space for local issues to be discussed, for example, there has been lots of con-cern about young people in the locality, with conflict between differ-ent gangs, very distressing for local residents and conflicts emerging between older residents and the parents of the young people. The centre organised a meeting with representatives from the Housing Associations, the council, and the two groups of local people, provid-ing an opportunity for people to speak freely about their concerns in a non-intimidating space, often people are reluctant to go to more for-mal meetings because they lack confidence in their ability to express themselves. We’re there to make sure people can get heard.

At its most basic this reflection and description of practice confirms what some service professionals are reluctant to hear, i.e., that the VCS can facilitate interaction between groups and the welfare service providers. The VCS may have access to a different way of working or a location which is seen as neutral and accessible and they may use a dif-ferent ‘voice’ from that adopted by welfare state workers. But what this particular set of observations also provides is an insight into what might be understood as very small steps or interventions. They are not expli-citly about changing the politics of how decisions at a strategic level are taken in Manchester. But they are about the direct and lived expe-riences of individuals within communities and neighbourhoods and may be more about making the links between ‘personal’ or ‘individual’ empowerment and the collective or group sense of change which some VCS workers advocate.



The development of these independent or quasi-independent groups remains a very important process in the UK, but a fragile one. The claim that an independent and self-reflective VCS, acting as a ‘voice’ for local neighbourhood groups as part of a broader set of social processes, is one which the Manchester case study calls into question. There are independ-ent community-based groups, such as the Hamilton Road Community Association, across Manchester. Their strengths – neighbourhood-based, involving local residents, seeking to develop links with public bodies on behalf of residents, providing a localised street-level ‘leadership’ in response to the particular geographies of their place and time – are also their vulnerabilities. They are dependent on the involvement of a few individuals, they are at risk of being over-dependent on the ‘goodwill’ of council officers or local politicians; and they are likely to suffer ‘burn-out’ and collapse relatively quickly. Yet they also illustrate the potential of small, neighbourhood-based or issue-based organisations or initia-tives to act as pressure points on the local state and where possible to add to the overall ‘intelligence’ and awareness of local state agencies. They highlight how internalised understandings of power relationships can impede the building of an inclusive city, whether by the elected or non-elected state or by intermediary organisations. Overcoming the dis-tance between City Hall and these grassroots groups remains a challenge for all these actors.

It is a challenge, however, that City Hall is slowly coming to accept. Following a review by the field researcher of the city’s Community Engagement Strategy commissioned by the council and the publica-tion of the government’s Community Empowerment White Paper of 2008, a draft new strategy was drawn up in 2009 which reflected an effort to distinguish between consultation and participation, to change traditional decision-making processes and to build more transpar-ent relationships and feedback processes with the city’s communities (Conversation, former CEDO, 21 May 2009).

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8BradfordProfessionalised Participation in a Northern De-Industrialised CityHeather Blakey

Introduction

‘Participation’ is the new Holy Grail of British politics. For Bradford, a UK city which all too often hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons (such as the riots of 2001), this can mean another round of being blown about by the whims of national policy, in a search for ‘the’ solution to our problems. Participation in the UK is mostly top-led and centre-driven. Politicians are creating spaces for involvement as a response to a crisis of their legitimacy, evidenced by low faith in politicians, falling voter turnout and involvement in the political system. This is not necessarily evidence of apathy, as involvement in issue-based pol-itics and both formal and informal volunteering remains high (Home Office, 2004a, p. 175). Bradford, for example, has dynamic and varied voluntary organisations, but below average election turnout, particu-larly in the poorer city centre constituencies.

Participation in Bradford is shaped by this national context, but is also influenced by competing local factors. Bradford is an impover-ished de-industrialised northern city with high levels of deprivation and low standards of living, which have been relatively impervious to a procession of schemes and initiatives. A key impetus towards participation in Bradford is the need to find another way to improve service delivery and the recognition by some actors that this cannot be done without the experience and knowledge of all Bradford’s citi-zens. The senior executives of Bradford Vision (the Local Strategic Partnership until March 2008) have argued that people who are on a journey of overcoming powerlessness are ‘absolutely crucial to find-ing a workable solution to poverty and disadvantage’ (Interview, 13 January 2007).


Bradford: Professionalised Participation 181

However, these views are not shared by all in Bradford. The district is governed by a Conservative-led council, and though important part-ners such as Bradford Vision have taken the national commitment to increased participation seriously, the local political leadership is very sceptical. In the words of council leader Kris Hopkins, Bradford has ‘no shortage of partnership work, [we have] a shortage of outcomes’ (Interview, leader, 30 January 2007). The leader recognises that there are important ground-level activities, but that the council has to offer a strategic vision and ensure it is implemented; unlike activists, they have been given authority to do this by the electorate:

There is an ever growing division between elected representatives, then quite often self-appointed, non-elected representatives and community leaders, who actually have a particular interest. So those are quite legitimate, but they don’t have a democratic mandate. What they have is an issue that they are concerned about’. (Ibid. 7)

In championing participation, New Labour has given an increased pro-file to the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS), part of a newly named ‘Third Sector’, as the acceptable mediator of community per-spectives. It is an organised voice, well-versed in structures of govern-ance and decision making, seen to provide an accessible and to some degree representative impression of community views. The government has forced (often reluctant) councils to invite them ‘round the table’. However, the process has been tightly managed, and while efforts have been made to bring new issues and ideas to the spaces, these have been constrained by the many norms, procedures and expectations which govern the VCS and the context in which it operates. While the pres-ence of the VCS voice in decision making represents an opportunity for revitalising our democracy, do the terms of its participation prejudice its potential?

This chapter sets out the case that participation which is strongly managed ‘from above’ and heavily ‘professional’ in character, can erode the creative and challenging dimensions of voluntary and com-munity activity. Change in society depends on those activist dimen-sions of non-state actors, as much as the vision of elected state ones. Does ‘approved’ participation tame the activist? Or, to put it differ-ently, to what extent can activists make use of the access and oppor-tunities that the new governance structures provide without blunting their ability to think differently from the elected state and challenge it where necessary?



The Bradford context: ‘Dangerous nonsense’

Bradford is a city, in the north of England, of 467,655 people at the 2001 census. It is often seen as Leeds’ ‘poor relation’, left behind by the economic and cultural growth of its near neighbour. Historically, Bradford was the wealthy heart of the region, home to the largest textile mill in Europe and many famous industrialists and entrepre-neurs, notably Samuel Lister and Titus Salt. Bradford was a city of great industrial wealth, a centre of the global textile industry, and though many of the mills stand empty or have been converted into flats for commuters to Leeds, this industrial history shapes Bradford today in countless ways.

The Metropolitan District, which includes the City of Bradford as well as a number of smaller towns and villages, is a diverse place. It is a district of rich and poor, White and Asian, rural and urban. It has 93 localities which are ranked in the 10 per cent most deprived ‘super-output areas’ in the UK, and 12 which are ranked in the 10 per cent least deprived (Bradford Council, 2009). This is a legacy of our industrial past. In the nineteenth century, Bradford was home to the wealthiest elite in the world, the mill-owners, and the poorest of the poor. Bradford has also experienced a long history of immigration. Migrants came to labour in the mills and on the roads and railways that fed the city’s industrial growth. As a result, Bradford is home to many communities, includ-ing Irish, Polish, Ukrainian, African Caribbean and South Asians. More recently, a second wave of Eastern European migration took place. This history is with us today in the sometimes tense relationships between the different communities that shape Bradford, and a tendency for those communities to live apart (Ouseley, 2001). Poverty, unemploy-ment and below-average levels of educational achievement are other legacies. As a result, Bradford has often been at the forefront of national policy initiatives, such as the Community Cohesion agenda (following the ‘Bradford riots’ of 2001) and the Neighbourhood Renewal agenda, the government’s key policy initiative around poverty and community, also launched in 2001.

Bradford’s history is also present in the vibrancy of its social, cultural and political life. Bradford was, in 1893, the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party. It is the site of the first council housing in the country, and boasts a proud history of strikes and protest that shaped the labour movement in this country. However, in recent decades Bradford has lost the heart of its organised labour force as a result of de-industrialisation,



and seen the decline of trade union activity. The labour movement was a school for political activists, which has not been replaced. The organ-ised capacity of the people of Bradford to engage with decision makers has been greatly diminished. Bradford retains a Resource Centre (one of our key partners in this research) which has its roots in the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and which remains committed to supporting radical and community-based social change.

The way that activists in this centre tell their organisational his-tory paints a picture of the social and political climate of participa-tory politics in the UK since the 1970s. Bradford Resource Centre (BRC) was part of a network of resource centres which were preceded by the Community Development Project, action research initiated by the Callaghan government in the 1970s to see what could be done about the regions hit by industrial decline. This research concluded that inter-national capital flows were at the heart of the problem, and that the solution was to resource what we now call ‘social capital’ – trade union networks, women’s groups, etc. – to give these people a voice, so that their experience could be brought to bear on the problems of poverty and industrial decline. The powers of the day considered this ‘ultra-leftist dangerous nonsense’ (Interview, BRC, 26 February 2007). While it didn’t then become the accepted wisdom that it is today, the resource centres did come into being with that goal. Bradford Resource Centre has therefore experienced a journey that took it from the heart of a net-work of activists in the 1970s, through the decline of politicised activ-ism in the 1980s, to the present, where the ‘dangerous nonsense’ is the accepted way of looking at things: ‘what else is capacity building, if you strip out the management jargon?’ (Ibid.). However, the tale concludes almost on a note of despair; the access is there, finally the acceptance is there that ordinary people have the skills, the experience, the know-ledge to shape their own destinies, but where are the activists? As a member of the BRC expressed it:

What distresses me about the current managerial structure and voluntary-sector-as-business culture and the partnership mentality is the huge resources that go into it. I just weep when I think what those resources could have achieved 20 years ago if they were mobi-lised by people who had a more oppositional and more radical and more determined and more focused political strategy. Because we had numbers in those days, but we certainly didn’t have the access that [voluntary sector officers] have got now. (Ibid.)



Co-producing knowledge in Bradford

In Bradford, we worked alongside key voluntary and public sector individuals who are deeply involved in developing new participa-tory spaces in the district. We focused on two of these: the new VCS involvement structures and participatory budgeting pilot in Keighley. The research involved participant observation, semi-structured inter-views with key informants, and focus groups, as well as informal con-versations which allowed for feedback on initial analysis of the data. We also interviewed other key actors within representative and par-ticipatory decision-making structures in Bradford, who were not part-ners in the research, in order to ensure that the views of our partners were explored in the context of other experiences.

The process of co-production of knowledge took a different shape in each of the two cases. It was possible to identify senior VCS officers who acted as the key voices in the new spaces for VCS involvement. We worked with the following individuals: staff at CNet (Bradford’s Community Engagement Network), as well as other long-term activ-ists who have been working in the community and voluntary sector for many years. In the case of the Keighley PB pilot, we worked closely with the organising team from Bradford Vision and Keighley Voluntary Services (the Keighley-based VCS partner). I became a member of the PB reference group, and worked alongside the organisers, taking part in planning meetings and helping with different stages of the process. The process timetable coincided with the research timeframe, allowing me a much closer involvement in the development process itself. The research process created space for reflection which complemented the intense delivery phase of the pilot. The structures of VCS representation were more fully developed, and therefore the research instead played the role of sounding board for ideas.

In both cases we worked with paid VCS and LSP officers who wanted to bring about changes not only to social ‘outcomes’ in Bradford but to the way in which decision making and political systems operate; they are in this sense ‘activists’ as well as professionals. I believe this to genu-inely reflect the nature of participatory processes in Bradford, as the state engages primarily with paid professionals rather than community members at a strategic level, and develops and maintains the key par-ticipatory processes. The essence of co-production of knowledge in the Bradford case was to recognise the analysis, knowledge and experience of these actors, and to reflect together about how participation does or could work in Bradford. These relationships immeasurably enhanced



the research process. In each case, the research relationship took the form of a series of informal conversations, which both followed and shaped the research process. I distinguish these conversations from the formal interviews which we also held with key informants, as they were a genuinely two-way process. As researcher, I shared my ongoing analysis of the data and invited the analysis and reflection of my VCS and LSP colleagues. The conversations were also a space in which these actors probed my thinking, and the direction of the research, and invited my reflection on questions that were exercising them. Thus the research continuously fed back into real-life activities, as well as being itself shaped by the analysis of key informants. Together we developed a shared understanding of the questions we were exploring – they in their work and me in my research.

I felt my engagement to be very much participant and less observer in many instances. I believe a genuine commitment to co-production of knowledge requires this stance. Co-production of knowledge requires a level of trust that is based on a sense of shared objectives. It is this which allows the researcher to become a partner and a fellow actor, rather than an outside observer. This trust enables the research and the researcher to play a role in current debates and discussions within the context that is being researched. I suggest that research premised on co-production of knowledge with the ‘researched’ precludes the possi-bility of neutrality, though importantly it does not preclude disagree-ment, and this did occur, for instance when I shared a paper I was writing for a conference which contained some critical reflections of the PB pilot.

There were limitations to this methodology, as our collaborative efforts represented engagement with one ‘slice’ of the actors involved, paid workers in the statutory and voluntary sectors. We did not engage in the same depth with unpaid community activists or non-engaged community members. This chapter is a critical reflection on the proc-esses we tracked with our chosen research partners.

Participation in Bradford: ‘Open to chaos’?

Two organisations, both key partners in this research, have dominated the territory of participation in Bradford. Both exist as a direct result of New Labour national initiatives. The first, Bradford Vision (Bradford’s Local Strategic Partnership, LSP) was tasked with the distribution of Neighbourhood Renewal Funding (NRF) to deprived communities, and partnership work to bring together (at LSP board level and within



themed partnerships) the state, other public services, the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and the private sector. The second, CNet, was brought into being to support the least resourced of these partners – the VCS – to take up its place at these tables on a more equal footing. CNet is one of the Community Empowerment Networks (CEN) initiated by New Labour, in line with its emphasis on the VCS as the key route to community engagement.

CNet is an independent organisation situated fully within the VCS. Bradford Vision, though chaired by the leader of the council, opted to be an independent company, whereas many LSPs were structured as internal departments of their local council. It was, until early 2008 (when its LSP function was taken in-house by the council and Bradford Vision disbanded), amongst the largest and most independent LSPs in the country. This gave it room for innovation and independence, which it used to the full in the area of participatory neighbourhood management.

The two halves of Bradford Vision’s work have had very different dynamics. The neighbourhood work was built primarily on the vision of two women, with a history of working to support unheard voices. They have a fundamental belief that work on the ground to alleviate the effects of poverty and deprivation only ever patched over a funda-mental power imbalance. Partnership – as a value, not a buzzword – was embedded in their approach.

You bring down the mighty from their thrones, you raise up the lowly, and they meet each other. You create a field where they can meet and hear, and that’s the revolution. That’s where the head then connects with the heart. And then when they admit they don’t know, then you can build new relationships. Communities were say-ing we don’t want to be shaped top-down any more. The top lot saying no matter what we do, it’s not making any difference. And you saw a hole in the middle. (Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007)

The NRF work developed via a programme of Neighbourhood Action Planning (NAPs), whereby residents formed groups, consulted with their peers and produced a neighbourhood action plan, for which they were given £20,000 to deliver. They were encouraged to work in part-nership with service delivery organisations. The funding was seen as the draw, in order to build long-term partnerships: ‘we find with the NAPs if you put money on the table, people come’ (Interview, Bradford



Vision officer, 19 December 2006). The process was conceptualised as a learning journey: participants were asked ‘to do something more sophisticated’ in the second year, to consider statistics and targets as well as their own experience (Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 January 2007). The work of the NAPs gained a national profile, and laid the foundation for Bradford Vision’s PB pilot, which was intended to engage a much wider number of people in the neighbourhood plan-ning process in Keighley.

The partnership work follows a more formal (and national) struc-ture of themed partnerships. CNet exists to support the participation of the VCS in this work. CNet emerged from the recognition that if communities are to meaningfully participate in decision making they need to be resourced to do so. However, it is at the level of the part-nerships that the tensions between participatory and representative structures of governance come into sharpest relief. Bradford Vision at the time of our research was chaired by the leader of the council, but there were tensions between the council’s approach to participation and the attempts by Bradford Vision to open up new and innovative routes to engagement. The leader of the council, Kris Hopkins, com-pares representative government, the ‘cornerstone of our democracy,’ with participatory approaches which: ‘lead open to chaos’ (Interview, 30 January 2007).

Over the time period of this research, both cases suggested that ser-vice delivery organisations (via Bradford Vision) gave increasing rec-ognition to the voice of communities and the VCS. However, this was followed by the 2007–08 council-led review of Bradford Vision’s LSP function, and an associated shift in rhetoric regarding the place of the partnerships, summed up by the view of the leader of Bradford Council that we need:

Arenas where the principal people with cheque books, with a clear mandate from organisations and institutions, have a way to actually deliver [and not] ‘individual communities because we have got lots of them on there [the Board of Bradford Vision] now, and we haven’t delivered. (Ibid.)

The review of Bradford Vision culminated in its demise, and the loss of independence of the Bradford LSP, as the council took this function back in-house in March 2008. The innovative work begun by Bradford Vision around neighbourhood action planning and participatory budg-eting is currently in abeyance as a result.



And yet it is in these partnership spaces that Bradford Resource Centre – after years of holding out against state-sanctioned spaces for partnership and joint working, of choosing instead to focus on their ‘real’ job of providing hands-on support to the communities and small organisations that use their services – decided to take up their place at the table, because ‘it’s the only game in town’ (Interview, BRC, 26 February 2007). While activists may be seriously critical of the new participatory structures, questioning whether they represent an attempt to co-opt them in order to rubber-stamp decisions made elsewhere, they recognised that this is not the whole story, that there are opportunities – not perfect perhaps, but hard-won and potentially meaningful – and which they, as activists, as communities, as a sector, are perhaps not yet using to their full potential.

‘Professionalised participation’

In Bradford, we have explored these issues through two innovations, one of national origin and one of local origin. The (nationally sanc-tioned) innovation was CNet’s support for VCS forums which shad-owed and sent representatives to Bradford Vision’s strategic partnership boards. CNet’s website describes these forums as providing ‘a two-way communication channel to enable the voluntary and community sec-tor to influence and inform service providers and decision-makers at strategic level’ (CNet, 2009). CNet’s primary goal was to develop VCS representation within the partnerships, and it provided a varied pro-gramme of capacity-building initiatives in order to enable a wider pool of people and organisations to take up such positions. Forum coordina-tors were supported by a dedicated CNet worker, and the members of the forums themselves were encouraged to reflect on the role of the forum and their contributions to it. For example, during the course of this research, the VCS forums were each required to undertake a struc-tured reflection session enabling them to self-evaluate the effectiveness of the forum they were involved in.

The second innovation, Bradford’s participatory budgeting pilot, was led by Bradford Vision. Its roots were local, though it has the benefit of international inspiration and national recognition. Bradford Vision used PB to distribute Neighbourhood Renewal Funding (NRF) in the town of Keighley, building on prior PB experience from 2003 onwards in dis-tributing environment grants district-wide (known as ‘Clean Green’). The process we followed was open to all residents living in areas of Keighley eligible for NRF resources. While the process structure meant



it would be more accurately described as participatory grant-making (though incorporating elements of budgeting), this pilot was distinct from consultation in that it involved an actual handover of decision making around real financial resources.

Both innovations were marked by a high level of commitment from local actors. These actors were at times pessimistic, always realistic about the limitations of the spaces, and alive to the competing agendas of more powerful partners. Nevertheless, their aim was to bring about real social change, through the voices of the communities and activ-ists of Bradford. In meetings, the language popularised by New Labour dominated; those who have taken up positions as representatives were comfortable with the jargon of participation: capacity building, voice, influence, partnership, devolution. However, in private, the political vision (certainly of those who chose to engage closely with this research project) was evident, the language more radical, more frank. A number of the activists we interviewed identified themselves by terms such as ‘Marxist’, ‘radical’, ‘anarchist’, ‘revolutionary socialist’ (Interviews with community workers, statutory officers and senior members of the VCS, January 2007 to February 2007). Those who did not label their views like this had an equally powerful value base to their work. Importantly, these individuals were not activists on the outside of the multi-agency partnerships, but at their heart. These actors tried to intervene in nationally determined processes in order to open up spaces for genuine participation and shifts in power, which could both improve the deliv-ery of services and encourage greater involvement in local democracy, or ‘active citizenship’. Both cases demonstrate significant gains and suc-cesses, yet both are marked by a considerable level of frustration.

The strengths and limits of participatory innovations in Bradford

The participatory processes that we followed in Bradford have had real results. In Keighley, around 300 residents were directly involved in the PB Decision Day (see Box 8.1), approximately 10 of whom went on to be involved in monitoring the funded projects. This is an exponential increase from the numbers of residents previously involved in NRF fund-ing decisions; on average two in each of the seven NRF neighbourhoods in Keighley. The PB process demonstrated alternatives to ‘business as usual’ decision making. It generated an important sense (though lim-ited by being a pilot) of where and how to get involved in local decisions. The organisers reported that some people immediately began planning for ‘next time’, even though no ‘next time’ had been announced.



Box 8.1 Participatory budgeting in Keighley

Mar 2006 Bradford Vision decides to distribute Neighbourhood Renewal Funding in Keighley using participatory budgeting, and a ‘pot’ of £130,000 is agreed, including mainstream funds allocated through the Local Area Agreement.A reference group is formed, comprising (as permanent mem-bers, though other council and VCS workers attended occa-sionally) Bradford Vision staff, Keighley Voluntary Services community development (CD) workers and other staff, the council area coordinator for Keighley and an advisor from the UK PB Unit.

July–Aug 2006

Approximately 400 residents participate in a ‘budgeting’ process via a questionnaire identifying three priorities for expenditure from a list, alongside the opportunity to name local issues and suggest possible solutions. The questionnaire is taken ‘door-to-door’ and to existing community events by CD workers and Bradford Vision staff.

Sep 2006 This information is collated. It is decided that the money should be allocated by NRF area (as this is a central government con-dition of the funding), rather than by the priorities identified through the budgeting process, with the community ‘budget’ included in application packs for information and guidance.

Sep–Oct 2006

Community and voluntary, private and statutory organisations are invited to propose projects for funding, via a simple and accessible application form.

Nov 2006 Bids are scrutinised by a panel made up of members of the PB reference group, local councillors and local staff from statutory organisations. The group’s remit is to ascertain that bids met the process criteria and to offer advice on deliverability to appli-cants. They do not have a remit to reject bids; decisions on which projects receive funding are entirely to be taken by residents.

25 Nov 2006

Decision Day: approximately 300 residents (invited by letter to all eligible households, posters, flyers and word of mouth by community development workers) attend over two half-day ses-sions. Participants are each given a booklet containing details of the applications. Applicants each speak for three minutes about their project; participants are asked to give them a vote out of 10. Voting sheets are collected after every five presentations. Participants are asked to stay for the whole session. If anyone leaves early, their votes are deleted. The successful projects are announced at the end of each session. Evaluation forms suggest that the overwhelming majority of participants found the pro-cess fair and effective. There is a clear ‘buzz’ around the oppor-tunity to make real decisions.

Participants are invited to be involved in monitoring the suc-cessful projects. Approximately 10 people express an interest in this, and are later invited to quarterly monitoring meetings in their neighbourhoods.



Community organisations understood that applying to the commu-nity, in contrast to a traditional grant-giving panel, gave them a greater accountability to the people they served: ‘It’s about the community, it’s about their needs; it’s not just about us saying we want this money, it’s about what do people really need from us as a service’ (Interview, PB participant, 25 November 2006). Some organisations, seen locally to act as ‘gatekeepers’, were less enthusiastic about PB precisely because of this increased transparency, fearing they would ‘lose face’ if their project was unsuccessful. Residents and some organisations proposing projects, however, were enthusiastic about the ‘softer’ outcomes of their involve-ment, in particular the information and contacts they gained about the range of work going on in Keighley. Furthermore, Lavan (2007, pp. 40–1) suggests that PB may even the playing field for less ‘profession-alised’ community organisations, as – despite the expectations of some observers – participants do not vote disproportionately for the more slick or confident presentations but have empathy for presenters with less experience, thus allowing for money to be spent differently through PB processes than it would be within more traditional systems.

However, local residents were only involved in the process as ‘par-ticipants’ through a door-step budgeting questionnaire and as voters on Decision Day. The PB steering group was made up of statutory sector offic-ers from Bradford Vision and the local council, and paid VCS officers and community workers. Local councillors were involved at the project pro-posal scrutiny stage, but residents were not invited to any of the planning meetings, and consequently had no input to process design or develop-ment. The model prioritised individual over collective engagement and did not include space for deliberation within or across communities about how best to meet the needs of the area. Participants ‘budgeted’ individually, through a doorstep prioritisation exercise, and then voted individually.

Bradford’s VCS representatives also valued the outcomes they have achieved through involvement in strategic fora, citing instances of shifts in policy made through their involvement at partnership level, for example the development of a commissioning framework for work with children and young people which recognised that the VCS should be supported in order to enable them to undertake commissioned work. At a CNet-funded workshop in March 2007, VCS representatives testi-fied that they were invited into many more spaces and structures than ever before. One of the key VCS actors, while aware of the limitations of this shift, recognised its symbolic importance.

But I do think if you look back at Bradford a few years ago, there’s no way I would be co-chairing Bradford Vision with the Chamber



of Commerce and insisting on having meetings with the leader and just doing stuff as a matter of daily routine without apology, with-out feeling one had to fight. It is actually a really big step for the voluntary sector to be co-chairing an LSP and to have set up the idea as well ... and for that to be daily business, that is symbolic. They might not be feeling very empowered but at least people accept them, they’re now as the norm, whereas they weren’t the norm at all, they were kind of foreign animals. (Interview, 11 December 2006)

The problem here is not ‘professionalism’, not the ability of the VCS to do its job well, but ‘professionalisation’ in the sense that there are norms and jargon and (paid) technical experts: ‘an expert culture, mys-tification of common sense knowledge – and the jargon is just dreadful’ (Interview, neighbourhood renewal manager, Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007). As a result, these overly bureaucratic spaces are exponentially more accessible for ‘career’ participants (paid or unpaid) than for grass-roots participants, who have ideas and knowledge of how things work ‘on the ground’ but no professional experience. In the words of one experienced member of the VCS, community representation in Bradford ‘has been captured by the VCS’ (informal conversation, 20 June 2006), and indeed disproportionately by larger, better resourced organisations who are more able to release a member of staff. Moreover, not only are paid VCS workers often present on partnerships in the absence of community members, but the work of the partnership is time consum-ing, taking the paid workers away from their ‘real job’, as one member of the sector expressed it (informal conversation, 28 February 2006) and thus from the voices of the communities that they are supposed to represent.

Nor is it clear how much these participants are able to effect change in these spaces. As a result of the frustrating nature of many ‘partnership’ (representative) structures, it is often easier for those involved to cite their presence in decision-making spaces as an outcome, rather than to identify changes in policy or practice that have resulted from their pres-ence. There is a level of disappointment at the lack of equality, the sense that other partners meet frequently elsewhere, and that the decisions are not as open as they should be; as one representative put it during a CNet-facilitated session on the work of the VCS forums, ‘it’s “thanks for your contribution, but this is the decision” ’ (VCS forum member and partnership representative, 8 February 2007). It is evident that while the new participatory spaces in Bradford can have significant potential for



emergent governance norms, there is a recurrent sense of their limita-tions for meaningful change.

In addition, ‘partnership’ working is implicitly based on the assump-tion that participants are all colleagues working towards the same goal, that participation is about bringing different (professional) skills and experiences together in order to solve an agreed problem. Thus, representatives are chosen via selection on the basis of a job descrip-tion and required skill set (a process focused on the individual) rather than via election by the relevant VCS forum on the basis of a represen-tative mandate, a collective process which could contribute to build-ing a shared VCS agenda (Focus Group with VCS forum organisers, 20 February 2007). Representatives ‘participate’ in shared decisions of the partnership rather than represent the forums from which they come. The selection process thus places an emphasis on responsibility to the partnership (as informants and partnership members) rather than accountability, feedback and responsibility to the forum (as negotia-tors for their agenda). Throughout the research, VCS representatives have raised persistent issues of managing effective feedback, and the difficulties of creating two-way communication between representa-tives and their forums. This leads at times to the feeling that VCS representatives are complicit ‘rubber-stampers’ of decisions and indi-vidual spokespeople, rather than representative of a collective vol-untary and community sector project (CNet-funded workshop, VCS representatives, 23 March 2007).

Nevertheless, some do consciously try to navigate the tensions. But this is a difficult role, and one which requires considerable skills. This interviewee, who has played a significant role in representing the VCS in partnership spaces, expresses how she has to manage the expectation ‘from above’ that she ‘will play the game’, at the same time as her col-leagues urge her to challenge in a more forthright way – and she herself is aware that she is not in fact necessarily ‘representative’ of the sector or of the grassroots:

I think what confuses them is if one minute I’m cheery and concili-atory and the next minute I’m bringing a message from others in the voluntary sector which is more attacking. I’ve actually been told off, which I object to enormously, because I have publicly challenged a particular process. There are people in the voluntary sector who get cross with me because I don’t think they trust me to be challenging enough on their behalf. They would prefer me to be more angry, much more angry, much more vociferous and I don’t do that, it’s just



not the way I am, I have other ways of doing it. (Interview, VCS rep-resentative, 11 December 2006)

The professionalisation of participation also leads to organisa-tional ‘territoriality’; in other words, conflicts over which organisa-tions ‘should’ do which work? For example, it may be that CNet has struggled to link neighbourhood work with partnership work because ‘neighbourhoods were seen as [Bradford] Visions’ territory’, and, simi-larly, that Bradford Vision did not link adequately with CNet and other VCS organisations working at local level because they believed neigh-bourhoods to be ‘their’ territory (Interview with VCS representative, 15 January 2007). This view reflects a criticism of Bradford Vision that they were not ‘team players’, that they viewed the VCS as a barrier to the direct voices of communities, rather than a bridge.

While the VCS is clearly not ‘one’ entity with ‘one’ impact on com-munities, this ‘territoriality’ undoubtedly results in disconnections between those making strategic decisions and those working directly with communities; indeed, these two kinds of actors are rarely present in the same meeting or partnership. Where both community members and statutory officers are present (such as the neighbourhood partner-ships created by the NAP process), the statutory staff are likely to be front-line workers who do not have the necessary ‘permissions’ to act as a strategic go-between for their organisation. In one NAP partner-ship meeting (11 October 2007), a housing officer participating in the local partnership for his area responded to every issue by saying that it wasn’t his decision, to the mounting frustration of those present. He appeared to have been given no sense of himself as a conduit to deci-sion makers within his organisation. It is worth noting that following the demise of Bradford Vision in early 2008, CNet accelerated its move into neighbourhood working, which may increase the potential for linking strategic work and community organisations, a move made easier by the ‘vacuum’ left by Bradford Vision.

Many of those involved in organising and supporting participatory spaces – particularly within the voluntary sector – actively work to redress these issues, aiming to ensure that ‘the voices of communities are heard directly rather than being mediated’ (Interview with CNet worker, 15 January 2007). However, some argue that ‘professionalised’ participation is desirable, questioning whether residents, communi-ties and unpaid activists want to be in strategic spaces, and suggesting that it is right for these spaces to remain essentially ‘professionalised’



in character while building more accessible routes for voice and par-ticipation elsewhere. For at least one senior statutory sector official, it is simply ‘not appropriate for an ordinary resident to sit on a strategic partnership; it just doesn’t work; the business of that partnership is that business, and I think we need to be a bit tougher about that’(Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007).

A second argument for ‘professionalised’ participation is that it is non-threatening. It is easier for existing power holders to relate to par-ticipants who know the jargon and understand the spreadsheets, and who accept the ‘rules of the game’. As one (paid) VCS representative put it, the position of VCS representatives within the partnership has improved because ‘we have responded to the demands for more profes-sionalism’ (CNet-funded workshop, VCS representatives, 23 February 2007). This is seen as a prerequisite for acceptance as a partner. This is rooted in the view that change comes through relationships ‘which have taken years to build up and are becoming more positive’ (Ibid.) rather than through (potentially more adversarial) negotiation. Inevitably, some local power holders fear that participation takes power from them and places it in the hands of unelected community mem-bers. Local proponents of participation are fully aware of the tightrope that they tread – a tightrope that is brought into sharp relief by the fate of Bradford Vision. Key statutory sector workers remind us that they ‘need to work with whoever is in power’ and repeatedly state that this work must not be political. As one key actor put it: ‘PB comes from a left-wing radical socialist background but that’s not useful if you’re going to be working with people who don’t have those opinions; if you want to mainstream something, you’ve got to be able to describe it in other ways’(Interview, neighbourhood renewal manager Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007). Cross party buy-in has, from this perspective, greatly strengthened the capacity to do this kind of work, ‘all the politics has come our way, in the sense that this is now cross party understanding, that we ain’t going anywhere without communities’ (Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007).

These are thorny questions – and real issues. It is therefore worth examining a number of factors which contribute to the high degree of organisational control over the participatory innovations which we tracked. These include national state agendas, the VCS as bridge or bar-rier to enhanced participation, perceptions of the capacity of commu-nities (‘Joe and Jenny public’) to participate, and the sceptical leadership of the district.



National state agendas

Participation is supported in the UK by national policy. In the case of PB, the National Strategy (DCLG, 2008) protects local innovation and mandates work which might not otherwise be taken as seriously. Similarly, CNet’s national mandate to further VCS participation opened service provider doors previously closed to the VCS. National frame-works were important for many actors as a reference point which meant that their work could not now be brushed aside by powerful local scep-tics. National agendas are not seen, however, as the catalyst for partici-patory change. Our research partners from the VCS argued that they had been doing this work for decades, and it matters that this work is grounded, rooted in existing relationships and work. The key message from local actors was that participation cannot be delivered nationally, but has to be built locally. The vital role of national government is to offer a shield for such work, in a national framework which is flexible enough to allow for local ownership and innovation.

However, while national agendas are valued, their role is clearly double-edged, reinforcing the professionalising dynamic in two ways. Firstly, national guidelines set parameters – and thus limits – for par-ticipation, ‘from above’. In the Keighley PB pilot, the money was drawn from the Neighbourhood Renewal pot, as local innovators sought to find flexible funds which could be used within the pilot. This meant that these funds came with national priorities and targets around expenditure, which local organisers felt unable to override. Thus the priorities set by participants in the ‘budgeting’ exercise were deemed guidelines only, unlike the neighbourhood allocations and floor targets of the NR funds. As a result there was no direct link between the com-munity priorities, as expressed through the budgeting, and the spend on Decision Day, a fact that was commented upon by some participants who had been involved throughout the process (Interview, community development worker, 9 January 2007).

Secondly, alongside the national agenda around participation, there are other competing national agendas. The target culture which is in part aimed at eradicating the ‘postcode lottery’ makes local innovation harder. Thus, communities can get involved in helping to deliver the priorities of the state, in meeting targets on service delivery, but there is no scope for them to be involved in determining local agendas. In other words, agencies seek participation where community agendas coincide with their own, but they are not open to input where commu-nity agendas conflict with their targets (Blakey, Chesters and Pearce, 2006, p. 22).



The lack of scope for contributing to agenda-setting is a source of very great frustration, and is very closely linked to participants’ sense that the spaces they are invited into are controlled from elsewhere. Thus, the enthusiasm of many participants in the Keighley PB pilot was directly linked to the novel experience of taking decisions, rather than being sim-ply asked for their views. As an example of experiential learning, and in terms of its capacity therefore to help people feel differently about their involvement in participatory spaces, this cannot be underestimated.

The VCS: Bridge or barrier?

In speaking about participation, it is tempting for decision makers to pre-sent the VCS as the voice of communities. Government chooses to see the sector this way, a route to ‘hard-to-reach’ communities. While some organisations undoubtedly do act as an invaluable bridge – for example, VCS umbrella networks and Infrastructure Support Organisations (ISOs) who link up with grassroots groups and community-led organisations – it is important to remember that the VCS is not ‘the community’; indeed that it is neither a single entity nor autonomous. The VCS is increas-ingly shaped and regulated in-line with the government’s ‘Third Sector’ agenda, which seeks to improve the service delivery of the sector via a programme of VCS capacity-building. This agenda has been expressed in the ChangeUp Programme, now known as CapacityBuilders (Home Office, 2004b).

The tension between ‘choice’ and ‘voice’ is a very real one for many VCS activists. There is a tendency for government to see the VCS as the provider of delivery ‘choice’ for service users, a sense echoed at local level by Kris Hopkins’ insistence that all partners around the table, including the VCS, must ‘deliver’ (Interview, leader, 30 January 2007); that partnerships in fact should not be the ‘talking shops’ that VCS activists who wish to be a ‘voice’ for their communities perhaps actually want them to be.

Such activists resist the ‘delivery-choice’ view of the VCS. Even those within the health and social care sector, which is closely linked with ser-vice delivery, fight to maintain their traditional role as a ‘voice’ outside the system. As one put it, ‘we shouldn’t just be helping decide how to share the pie, we should be asking why isn’t the pie bigger!’ (Interview, Voluntary Sector Service Delivery Organisation, 16 January 2007). At the annual Bradford VCS conference (31 October 2006), Kevin Curley (chief executive, National Association for Voluntary and Community Action) presented this as the key tension facing the sector. He argued that there is a ‘dangerous tyranny of partnership which you must resist – we have



to work in partnership in order to influence, but we mustn’t join the club’. Indeed, for many present, the impact of partnership working (and the New Labour ‘Third Sector’ agenda) was to blunt the capacity of the VCS for challenge. Activists feel caught between their increased access to decision makers and the perceived silencing of oppositional voices, a tension exacerbated by the fact that much VCS funding relates to ser-vice delivery, and is overseen by the very decision makers that the sec-tor wishes to influence. Partnership has replaced negotiation, meaning that the VCS works more closely with the state than ever before. The VCS has become a professional and ‘quality assured’ part of the system, meaning that it has moved further away from the communities it once belonged to. Partnership, service delivery and choice go hand-in-hand with a view of communities as essentially consumers of services.

The VCS is also constrained by a lack of resources to engage with par-ticipatory processes. While such processes form a core part of statutory policy makers’ roles, VCS participants have to make time away from their ‘real job’. Some are particularly sceptical of what one termed ‘initia-tivitus’ – the recurring cycle of new ideas and new structures for which the VCS has to repeatedly learn the new language and rules (Interview, VCS representative, 26 February 2007). They then have to fit their agen-das, as organisations if not as communities, to the new structure, which itself doesn’t have time to develop before it is replaced. There was a high level of frustration that the VCS was always ‘on the back foot’, always reacting to the national or local state agenda; for example, responding to the demands of the Local Area Agreement (LAA) on short national timescales which did not allow for consultation across the sector, not to mention communities. The Keighley PB pilot itself was a one-off process, precluding the opportunity to put the learning into practice ‘next time’. Little wonder that organisations and communities are doubtful about investing too much time and capacity in new initiatives, or that VCS engagement in partnership spaces is dominated by paid professionals.

Thus, while the opportunities for partnership work ensure there is VCS input to decision making, their impact on the VCS itself is not always so positive. The tension between access to decision making and reduced autonomy is illustrated by the involvement of Bradford’s one VCS-led multi-sector partnership, the Building Communities Partnership (BCP), in developing the LAA in the district. The BCP’s VCS chair described how she was ‘told’ she was the lead negotiator for the LAA (informal con-versation, 24 July 2006). She felt it was an incredible opportunity for the VCS to be ‘at the heart of this decision-making process’, though ‘time-consuming and difficult’, overwhelming the VCS-led business of the



partnership with a state-led agenda (Ibid.). This led in turn to a reduc-tion of VCS interest in, and attendance at, the BCP, which had previ-ously been well-attended: a ‘created’ space initiated and led by the VCS, and therefore originally a space for the articulation of a VCS agenda.

This perhaps gets to the heart of the balancing act of the VCS. Increasing opportunities for the sector to have a voice at this strategic level move the structures of involvement yet further from communi-ties themselves. The very complexity of the processes, and the levels of strategic knowledge and understanding required, works against a turn-over of representatives. This concentrates ‘participation’ at this level in a very few hands, those with long careers in the VCS. In this sense, we can understand the professionalisation of the VCS as the extension of state cultures beyond its own borders, through the creation of a VCS elite which is increasingly permeable to the state itself.

Our research partners were very aware of these dilemmas, and con-strained by them. For example, the Keighley PB pilot was a (successful) attempt to directly involve community members in decision making facilitated but not mediated by the VCS. However, in order to make this work, organisers had to navigate their way through the professionalis-ing norms and constraints. And despite evidence that the disengaged had been motivated to attend a public event, many for the first time, policy makers were not persuaded to commit to further participatory budgeting. The reason has partly to do with perceptions of ‘communi-ties’ and their capacity to make as well as influence decisions in appro-priate ways.

‘Joe and Jenny public’

The views of policy makers are affected by an underlying scepticism towards the capacity of communities to take informed and intelli-gent decisions. Arguably, this is one reason that the state prefers the mediation of the VCS to direct participation by communities. For one member of the PB steering group, the battle is against ‘condescending, paternalist [attitudes] ... don’t give them a bath, they’ll just put coal in it’ (Interview, 19 December 2006).

A council officer illustrated some of these fears and complexities, describing how a youth group were given the food budget for a camping trip and sent (with £6 each) into a supermarket. They bought:

Pop, sweets, microwave meals: at the end of the day, almost every one of those kids were screaming that they’ve got nothing to eat, they had run out of money, what were we gonna do? It’s fine in



terms of, what shall we call it, the distribution of funny money [but] if you try to apply the same process to nuts and bolts everyday ser-vices, you are gonna be in serious trouble [if] you said to people, they could spend all their money on speed bumps, what happens when the streetlights start going out? In terms of basic services that people need, you just cannot trust ordinary Joe and Jenny Public to make the right decisions, and I know that sounds extremely negative but, they can’t afford to get it wrong! Can they? (Interview, council officer, 11 January 2007)

This officer had worked in one of the rougher areas of the district. He felt he knew the attitudes of people in these areas: ‘you criticise when you aren’t getting your own way’; ‘people look for handouts’, ‘unfor-tunately, especially in areas of so-called multiple deprivation, we’ve trained people to be dependent’. The council delivers services which ‘actually require years and years of training’; ‘[PB] might be the prefer-able thing to do in South America, but you know, Bradford ain’t South America; we ain’t corrupt!’ (Ibid.). This illustrates the views of many officers that they – though unelected themselves – have a democratic mandate; participatory mechanisms are understood as an attack on the legitimacy, even integrity, of the system they are embedded within.

Keighley councillors, while supportive of PB, were in favour of limited engagement which left real power in the ‘appropriate’ hands: ‘[larger amounts] have to be handled by people who know what £1.2 million will do, but for the smaller amounts, and where it is aimed at groups of people who otherwise wouldn’t get any money, then I thought that the participatory budgeting process that we went through was very, very good’ (Interview, Keighley councillor, 16 January 2007). Decision makers are also afraid of involving communities because they fear rais-ing expectations that they (the council) can’t meet: ‘when we talked to [local government officers] about it, all they could see were the nega-tives of it, people [will] come with wish lists, they’ll all want swimming pools, what will happen if public services can’t deliver’ (Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007).

Sceptical political leadership

While there are clear limits on the power of UK local authorities to act at variance to national strategy, it may be that with local political will, new ways of acting might be developed. VCS representatives are not all ‘anti-state’, despite their frustrations; many see the potential for tactical alliances between the local state and the VCS in challenging national



constraints (CNet-funded workshop, VCS representatives, 23 February 2007). However, in Bradford, the political leadership is sceptical about participation, which has a powerful impact on how effectively VCS par-ticipants in state-led partnerships are able to make use of these spaces.

Many arguments are put forward from within the council for the inappropriateness or ineffectiveness of participatory spaces. The leader of Bradford Council fears the creation of ‘talking shops’ which he sees as unproductive: ‘the more people you put into the room, the more dif-ferent views you are going to get’ (Interview, leader, 30 January 2007). This tallies with the recurrent view amongst VCS representatives that as they gained public access to decision-making partnerships, the ‘real’ decisions moved out the back door (CNet-funded workshop, VCS rep-resentatives, 23 March 2007). The civilised partnerships built with so much care are not always taken as seriously by statutory partners as by the VCS (though of course, as with the VCS, the ‘state’ is not a unified entity; a number of our research partners were statutory officers work-ing resolutely to build participation). At the demise of Bradford Vision, the council executive reviewed the number of VCS reps on partnership boards, with the intention of refocusing partnership membership on delivery organisations in control of resources (Presentation, assistant director of partnerships, Bradford Council to members and representa-tives of the VCS, 22 January 2008).

The fate of PB in Bradford also indicates low political support. Bradford Vision worked to bring PB into the mainstream of Bradford’s decision making over many years. Two ‘Clean Green’ PB events built a high degree of ownership from environmental organisations in the district.

The view of Bradford Vision officers was that this work should then be ‘mainstreamed’ (adopted by the council-led Environment Partnership), leaving the LSP free to develop other pilots, such as the Keighley process (Interview, chief executive Bradford Vision, 16 April 2007). Despite an initial commitment to use PB, the Environment Partnership allocated its funds through more traditional means, citing the tension between rep-resentative democracy and PB as the cause. One council officer also sug-gested that participatory budgeting is a less effective decision-making process than existing mechanisms:

We do everything through Neighbourhood Forums because we actu-ally believe that people should have an opportunity to comment. Not only on the services that are being provided, but comment on each other’s ideas, which I think is a little bit different from participatory voting. Collective discussion. You can’t do that with 300 people in



the room ... what I’m saying is funding shouldn’t be decided by who-ever happens to turn up to a circus-type event’. (Interview, council officer, 11 January 2007).

While more than 250 such forums are run each year in 135 venues, attended by nearly 15,000 people (Telegraph and Argus, 17 July 2006), public perception of them is low: regular sessions (as opposed to special sessions arranged in response to a contentious issue) are often poorly attended (Interview, community development worker, 9 January 2007, and observations), reflecting a widely held view that they are spaces for complaining or reacting, not for planning or decision making.

Though Bradford has allocated over a million pounds through PB processes, and is seen as one of the original innovators of this meth-odology in the UK, there are currently no plans for PB to continue in the district, despite national enthusiasm from the Department of Communities and Local Government. This lack of political ownership means that innovation can become a personal risk for the organisers, as one of them said:

I took the risk, you know, and I mean the council is a very risk-aversive institution; it just is, so that’s part of the task. I was driving up there on that Saturday and if this all goes horribly wrong (and it could have done, it was close to going really badly in the after-noon, you know) that’s my reputation in [the area] I could sense that I could really walk out of [there] professionally damaged at the end of the day. (Interview, 19 December 2006)

Conclusion: Beyond professionalised participation

Scepticism towards the capacity and willingness of people from deprived communities to participate in processes such as PB, which give them powers to decide funding allocations, reflects the character of our dem-ocracy. Many cannot conceive of the possibility that such people could make good decisions. There are some real issues around democratic mandates, community gatekeepers and ability to take on board the big picture as well as personal or particular interests, and real scope for improvement of the mechanisms in place for participation. However, there are also serious disconnections between elected councils and their voters. Neighbourhood forums work in some places and much less so in others, but ultimately they are forms of consultation and discussion in which grievances can be aired and communities can agree or disagree



with what the council offers. PB was an effort to go beyond these spaces of encounter, to give residents some real experience of decision making of their own. The VCS research partners we worked with were caught between their wish to connect to the grassroots and to prove them-selves professional – and compliant – interlocutors to the council.

Motivations behind the participation agenda are mixed, but this chap-ter shows that participation does inspire – as the voters at Bradford’s par-ticipatory budgeting (PB) day demonstrated: ‘it’s been worth it ... being here and thinking yes, I feel strongly about that, and I want to be part of the decision-making process’; ‘what you call people power, isn’t it?’(Interviews, PB participants, 25 November 2006). Thus, alongside national expectations which make ‘participation’ mandatory, via per-formance indicators and the ‘duty to involve’ (announced by the gov-ernment in 2007, and effective from April 2009), a wealth of local and ground-up initiatives can be found – rooted in individuals and organi-sations who are committed to making that same ‘participation’ mean-ingful. However, they face a professionalising logic which can limit its attraction to precisely the excluded communities it is trying to benefit.

The participatory budget pilot in Keighley was an attempt to dem-onstrate that ordinary people can make wise, informed, intelli-gent decisions on spending. While the fears of decision makers may be understandable – our political culture does not prepare people to participate – PB (and other forms of participation, including the CNet-facilitated forum self-evaluations and the NAPs) can also act as a school for participants. They help communities learn how to negotiate, articu-late their agendas and think beyond their immediate environment. This learning is crucial to improving the participatory spaces that exist. This research reflects only a snapshot on a journey. The current constraints on, and therefore the current limitations of, participatory processes cannot be regarded as unchangeable; rather, with these con-straints in mind, participatory processes must be developed, and used, to educate all participants, so that the powerful see that their fears are not necessarily the reality, and perhaps more importantly, so that citi-zens learn both to participate effectively and to insist upon meaningful participation.

Participatory activists operate in an increasingly apolitical context. A more motivated, politically engaged and knowledgeable electorate would have some impact on the politicians who represent them. Try to imagine a world in which people want to participate in government and feel empowered to do so: it is an overtly political world, one in which we feel that politics (with a small p and a large P) is central to



our lives, and where we see ourselves as consciously political beings. It is not irrelevant to the hard graft of building participatory spaces and encouraging active and willing participants that this is increasingly not the world we live in. This can be seen in the repeated insistence that ‘this work must not be political’, and in the fact that many of the key officials we interviewed spoke the neutered language of the state in pub-lic, and the radical language of activist politics in private. Coherent, collective grassroots movements are hard to find at the local level; the state is looking for participants, people are not demanding the space to participate. There is a sense amongst some VCS activists that there is a door, but, as yet, no one to push it open.

Bibliography

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CNet. 2009. http://www.cnet.org.uk/forums.php (Accessed 15 April 2009).DCLG. 2008. Giving more people a say in local spending; participatory budgeting: a

national strategy. London: DCLG.Electoral Commission. 2005. Electoral Data Report 2005 http://www.electoral-

commission.org.uk/document-summary?assetid=47268 Accessed 28 October 2009.

Home Office. 2004a, Home Office citizenship survey: people, families and communi-ties. Home Office Research Study 289. London: Home Office.

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Charitable Trust/Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.Telegraph and Argus, Bradford, 17 July 2006.


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9SalfordBeyond Parochialism: The Challenge of Participation for Change in a Working-Class CityDavina Miller

Introduction

This chapter argues that the Salford practice of participation in decision making has much potential, but that potential is unreal-ised because of unresolved issues about community participation in decision making. The participatory innovation in this chapter is the effort by a council in a working-class northern city to explore ways of engaging communities in decision making. Although these began in the 1990s, they continue to the present, with increasing funds devolved to the neighbourhood level. Begun as a response to shrinking resources and from a desire to politicise, they have become part of the national agenda of engagement with local communities. Community Committees have become an arena for dialogue, at best, and complaint, at worst. Real decision-making centres on the dis-bursement of some £250,000 in each Community Committee area. While these experiments have made an important difference in the relationships between councillors, officers and those members of the community who choose to participate, they have not gone deeper into the community or encouraged those who currently participate to enlarge their visions and mindsets for the progress of the city as a whole. Thus, at present, participation by residents is unrepresenta-tive, parochial, and does not obtain the best outcomes. This is partly a question of structure and procedures, such as a lack of deliberation informed by financial and legal parameters, which also has implica-tions for optimising outcomes. However, it must be recognised that deepening and widening the experience entails significant resources, not least in officer training and time, and these resources can be dif-ficult for councils to find.



The Salford context

We’re proud of our past but we don’t want to live in it. (John Merry, quoted in LGA Labour group, 2007, p. 34)

According to the 2001 census, Salford has a population of about 216,000, of which 3.9 per cent are from ethnic minority groups, although this does not capture the subsequent influx of Eastern European migrants. It is the 24th most deprived local authority in the country, with a quar-ter of the population economically inactive, more than a quarter with literacy difficulties, life expectancy some three years below average, and high crime rates. One-fifth of Salford men still work in manufacturing. In short, Salford remains a predominantly white, working-class city.

Like Manchester, Salford grew on the basis of textile and engineer-ing industries and experienced the same decline in the 1970s. Salford sees itself in relation to Manchester: it is the older city, but one which is overlooked. This is changing with the BBC’s decision, in 2007, to relocate some of its departments to Salford as opposed to Manchester. Salford was the first city to establish a free lending library and a munici-pal park. Its deprivation has been recorded in sociology and literature.

Salford was one of the first councils to establish a system of engage-ment with neighbourhoods at a time when there was no central govern-ment focus on participation; and it has experimented with participatory budgeting (PB), albeit on a very limited scale. The City Council is Labour-controlled, and has operated a cabinet system of government since 2000. Described by officers and councillors as ‘pragmatic’ (Henderson, Bowlby and Raco, 2007, p. 1452), Salford City Council could be char-acterised as ‘Old Labour’, although many of its leading lights in the 1990s and beyond, for example, Hazel Blears (now MP for Salford and until she resigned in 2009, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government), would see themselves as ‘New Labour’. The current leader sees himself as a bridge between the two.

In 1994, a system of nine Community Committees was established, each committee covering two wards. The committees meet every two months for two to three hours. In 1999–2000, the system was strength-ened with the introduction of devolved budgets, local political execu-tives (comprising ward councillors and neighbourhood officers), and neighbourhood coordinators. Currently, nearly £3.00 per head of popu-lation is devolved to the Community Committees which each have a Budget Group, comprised of councillors and local residents and sup-ported by officers, for making recommendations to the full committee.


Salford: Beyond Parochialism 207

Further subgroups conduct more detailed business. Political executives bring together the ward councillors with neighbourhood officers to discuss local issues and give direction to these and the Community Committee’s agenda. Neighbourhood coordinators (since 2004 renamed ‘managers’ to ‘make their roles more clearly defined’) (Interview, leader, 21 August 2008), tackle area issues by coordinating the work of the City Council and other agencies. The neighbourhood manager is supported by an area coordinator, typically a director or assistant director who is thus, theoretically, senior enough to support initiatives when neigh-bourhood coordination fails.

In 2000, at the same time as the city was strengthening the Community Committee structure, it began a series of meetings to investigate apply-ing PB to the citywide budget process. The impetus seems to have come from Community Pride (see Chapter 7), a charity established in 1999 to tackle poverty through increasing participation, and who lobbied the City Council and took part in citywide discussions until key advocates of PB moved on in 2003. However, the visions of Community Pride and the council were somewhat at odds. While Community Pride had visited Porto Alegre in Brazil, accompanied by two members of the local community, the council simply wanted to enhance its consultation pro-cess for the budget. There was never an intention to turn over decision making to those who attended budget consultation events, as they were ‘unrepresentative’ of the local population (Interview, leader, 21 August 2008). It is difficult to discern whether or not these discussions about the citywide budget and PB impacted upon subsequent initiatives in devolving funds to the local level. The process of devolution had begun in 2000 and the PB approach has been limited and depended on the initiative of individual actors, whether officers or councillors.

Officers and councillors now point to the Community Committee level when indicating examples or elements of PB – the devolved budget and other smaller pots of money that are transferred to the Community Committee. In 2006, part of the highways’ budget was devolved to this level; £100,000 to each Community Committee. In 2007, Claremont and Weaste Community Committee piloted a PB approach to deter-mining the use of this budget. This particular Community Committee will use PB again in determining the 2008 budget, and East Salford has followed suit. The council envisages further devolution of funds from environmental services and giving Community Committees a say in proposals for spending monies paid by developers to mitigate the impact of major construction upon localities, known as Section 106 monies.



Salford began its experiment in participation before there was cen-tral government pressure for engagement with communities. The leader was sceptical about ‘some aspects of government policy’ in two respects. First, he argued that ‘the restrictions’ imposed upon local government made it less attractive for people to vote as councils have little oppor-tunity to demonstrate clear choices. Second, he argued that he was concerned about policies ‘that seem to be saying that councils are not necessarily the most representative of bodies; it’s almost trying to build alternative structures to local councils and I think that is where it gets disastrous’. The government, the leader argued, ‘can be too prescriptive about how we actually engage with our local community’ (Interview, 15 February 2008).

One consequence of Salford constructing its framework for partici-pation prior to the central government’s policy agenda is that its focus is upon neighbourhoods rather than the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS). Given that the aim was to appeal directly to voters in the context of Conservative spending cuts, this focus is not surprising. However, it does mean that the framework, Community Committees, empowers local activists at the neighbourhood level. VCS members can and do attend Community Committees, and, while they might advise local residents, they do not mediate the council’s relationships with them.

Co-production of knowledge in Salford

The partner for this case study was Salford City Council. As an ex-councillor and a community activist, I had sympathy with both councillors and communities in the participation debate. An active citi-zen, I am a member of a residents’ association, a conservation group, chair of a local sports project and chair of Salford Community Leisure, a community cooperative. I was a city councillor from 2000 to 2004 and chaired a Community Committee throughout that time. Thus, I have known both the frustrations of interaction with the City Council and the challenges of working with communities. As such, I wanted to explore these issues. I chose Salford City Council as a partner, not to represent a council perspective, but to explore their difficulties in a context where they are often criticised by both communities and cen-tral government. The leader, Councillor John Merry, wanted an ana-lysis of the strengths and weaknesses of participation in the city. While he wanted to support the democratisation agenda, he also wanted to have the constraints within which councils work properly understood



by both citizens and central government. However, he expected a crit-ical analysis and understood that, while he would be given opportun-ities to correct errors, he would not control the final form of the work. Co-production of knowledge was problematic because of the division of labour. The council saw itself as the subject and provider of raw data and the academic as the writer.

Findings were shared with the leader and senior officers, and there was constant dialogue with the former. At an early stage of the research, I fed back to the leader a criticism of the process in East Salford for allo-cating £100,000 of highways’ funding. There was not a clear mechan-ism for prioritising projects. I suggested that a PB approach (as used in another Community Committee area) would provide such a mechan-ism. This was implemented. However, the execution was imperfect in that officers had not designed a way of preventing block voting by one particular group in the community.

The research was discussed in a meeting with the leader, with Community Pride in attendance, and with a group of senior officers on 14 November 2008. The main findings of the research were presented at a Salford Neighbourhood Management Summit on 16 December 2008. This involved senior officers and councillors, as well as the chairs of Community Committees.

Initially, senior officers suggested two areas of research that they would find helpful. The first entailed tracking the highways’ devolved budget and examining if the decisions the Community Committees have taken are different to those that would have been taken by engin-eers. This would yield analysis on the difference participation makes to outcomes. The methodological problem here was that this would have entailed asking overworked engineers to conduct a shadow exercise. Overall, the director of engineering argued, the emphasis upon safety in decisions had continued between engineers pre-devolution and com-munities post-devolution (E-mail correspondence, director, 5 August 2008). The research, however, reveals that the process for bringing together the technical expertise of engineers with the local knowledge of communities is imperfect so that outcomes are not maximised.

The second proposed area of research entailed an examination of whether or not service delivery had changed to meet the priorities defined by each Community Committee in its Community Action Plan (CAP). These documents are supposed to represent annual exercises wherein each Community Committee defines the problems of its area and prioritises the actions it would wish to see in solving those prob-lems. In practice, the construction of CAPs has fallen to officers. As



such, they are a collection of the work plans of directorates and agen-cies rather than the priorities of the community. There is widespread dissatisfaction with them – from officers, councillors and communi-ties. What is absent is a process, which all can trust, for working with communities to develop a meaningful CAP. Thus, it was not possible to conduct meaningful research on the difference CAPs make to service delivery since CAPs do not necessarily reflect community definitions of problems or solutions.

As for the community representatives, or activists, interviewed, while they were not the partners in this research, the intention was that this research would be useful for them in reflecting upon their interaction with the City Council. The research has been fed back to them. One has not responded, but two have done so in a positive vein. Of the three interviewed, I had worked closely with one of them in the New Deal for Communities regeneration partnership and we had a relationship of trust. Two men and one woman were interviewed. The two men came from different neighbourhoods (one the beneficiary of regener-ation funds) and were chosen because they are both regular attendees and vocal in meetings. I chose the woman partly for her gender, partly because, while a regular attendee, she was less vocal, and partly because she was a member of the subgroup making decisions about the high-ways’ devolved budget. In terms of backgrounds, one was a former miner with a degree in politics, one a former social worker (and a graduate of the School for Social Entrepreneurs), and one a worker in a commu-nity project. All were active in their local communities, two from the Broughton Trust, a community regeneration project, and one repre-sented a local community centre in a New Deal area. They were socially representative of East Salford Community Committee in that they were white, working-class people, although with a generally higher level of education than would be the norm. Seven formal and 10 informal inter-views were conducted. Eight Community Committees and five associ-ated meetings were observed.

East Salford Community Committee was chosen as the particular case study for the following reasons. First, it is the biggest Community Committee at 34,687 residents and brings together three wards, Riverside Irwell, Broughton and Kersal. Elsewhere in the city, each Community Committee comprises two wards. Second, at the time of the research, East Salford comprised the second, third and fourteenth most deprived wards in the city. Riverside Irwell and Broughton were within the 3 per cent most deprived wards nationally. Kersal consists of a large council estate, also within the 3 per cent most deprived communities



nationally (Indices of Deprivation, 2004) and one of the largest Jewish communities outside London with varying degrees of affluence and deprivation. It is typical of other Community Committees in the ‘inner city’ in terms of levels of deprivation. It is typical of all Community Committees in that local residents are the main actors. It is known as one of the most vociferous and best attended, a trait it shares with another Community Committee in the least deprived area of the city.

Community committees and devolved budgets: Participatory innovation in a working-class city

Salford City Council and conceptualising ‘community’

The conception of ‘the community’ as a geographical one as opposed to one based on class or interest has its origins in the structure of par-ticipation in Salford. Salford was one of the first to establish a system of engagement with neighbourhoods at a time when there was little central government focus on participation. The introduction of Community Committees in 1994 was led by then-Councillor Paul Goggins (now MP for Wythenshawe and Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office) with support from the then-leader, Councillor Bill Hinds. The political backdrop was one of centralism: as a deputy chief executive asserted, ‘they were politicians of the old school who knew what was best’ (quoted in Henderson, Bowlby and Raco, 2007, p. 1452). As Paul Goggins remembered (Interview, 18 January 2008), it was ‘the old style local government where the council and senior officials just made deci-sions’. Salford councillors, he went on, ‘had a lot to be proud of out of that kind of approach’, having achieved some good provision for the city and ‘won a lot of resources’ in the context of a Conservative central government intent on cutting spending. By the early 1990s, however, the centralised style ‘was coming under increased strain and pressure because the resources just were not there’.

It was in this context that Community Committees were conceived. First, the City Council wanted to meet the complaint about resources – to be ‘clearer that we were on the side of the community and working with them’ (Ibid.). Second, there was an accompanying reorganisation of services to follow the boundaries of Community Committee areas as the council had recognised that service delivery needed improvement. Third, Paul Goggins remembers it as part of a ‘cultural shift – part of the solution to this impoverishment, lack of opportunity, lack of confi-dence, is that people have to get a bit more control back over their own lives’. Salford’s early experiment in participation was equally a ‘political



and philosophical challenge’. As such, persuading the Labour Group was ‘tough’ (Ibid.).

Community Committees were conceived geographically: as ‘lines on a map’ (Ibid.). This focus on the neighbourhood can lend itself to paro-chialism. The invitation to participate is very limited in terms of the issues at stake and the level of decision making. To some extent this is necessary; if all decision making were transferred to the ward level, some decisions would never be made. The leader gave the example of the location of a travellers’ site: left to Community Committees, no site would ever be found, as each area would refuse. Moreover, a strategic, citywide perspective is necessary; otherwise the City Council ‘becomes a rudderless ship, responding to needs here and there’ (Interview, leader, 15 February 2008). However, this focus upon the neighbourhood, while potentially useful in improving service delivery, means that opportun-ities for deeper and wider political education and change are limited. Paul Goggins remembers that: ‘The core of what these Community Committees would do, would be to try and establish a vision for their own communities and their own areas’ (Interview, 18 January 2008). However, activists come to meetings with narrow agendas, typically involving the street scene in their neighbourhoods. This might be the natural consequence of the way the council conceived Community Committees; the invitation is to focus on the parochial. It is not neces-sarily a function of the social composition of the community partici-pants. One of the main protagonists, for example, is educated to degree level. It is perhaps a function of the fact that those currently active at Community Committee enjoy the participatory space as an arena for conflict, and the council has yet to find the will to change the space into something more creative by providing greater leadership and struc-ture around problems and solutions.

As the neighbourhood manager acknowledged, ‘Most people get involved originally because they can see a benefit for themselves or their street or their family’ (Interview, 18 August 2008). Presentations by officers or councillors on citywide initiatives might provoke discus-sion of broader themes, but these items are for information, not deci-sion. East Salford Community Committee is dominated by a group of 10–15 activists from the Broughton and Riverside Irwell wards. Some of these community representatives do engage with these broader themes, either following a presentation, or in raising an issue that the local media have covered. However, this is usually not agitation for change in accordance with a vision or agenda. It is mostly criti-cism of the City Council and other statutory agencies, which often



seem to be the subjects of deep suspicion and mistrust. A political or social agenda, beyond criticism of the City Council, is not discernible. As the neighbourhood manager argued, ‘Although they talk to each other, it doesn’t mean they have a common vision’ (Ibid.). In inter-views, the principal activists saw the role of Community Committees as ‘somewhere to ask questions’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). The activists, when asked about their agenda at meetings, gave the follow-ing responses. One replied, ‘Mine’s normally a fight’ (Ibid.). Another, ‘what’s the agenda for change? I’ve never considered the question before’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). The third replied that she simply reacted to what’s on the committee’s agenda (Interview, 17 January 2008). All came to the Community Committee through quite narrow interests. One came to attend through his paid work in skills provision; another through paid community work; and the third initially to get a grant for his community centre. Activists saw their community as necessarily parochial. One agreed with an officer’s characterisation of East Salford Community Committee as ‘tribal’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). Another, noting that attendance varies with the venue of com-mittee meetings, argued that ‘people don’t tend to travel’ when the maximum distance within the area would be no more than a couple of miles with transport provided (Interview, 17 January 2008).

Community Committees then, with their focus upon neighbour-hoods, are necessarily parochial and are marked by an absence of con-sciousness about participation as a bigger ideal.

The question of representativeness

All participants acknowledged that the question of representativeness hangs over Community Committees, both in terms of the under-representation of some neighbourhoods and communities and in terms of the accountability of members to the streets they claim to represent. All participants further acknowledged that Community Committee meetings are marked by their absence of civility. Few made the connec-tion between the lack of participation of the broader constituency they claimed to represent and the conduct of meetings. Indeed, both activ-ists and councillors seem to have accepted, and in some cases embraced, the combative style because the structure has come to serve their needs. The activists seem content with the opportunity to criticise the council and other agencies and the councillors find Community Committees useful in their battles with officers’ perceived intransigence. The attack in any case is usually so narrow as to cause no threat to councillors’ prerogatives. Indeed, councillors often line up, in a working-class city



like Salford, with the community and in opposition to officers. As Paul Goggins implied, Community Committees were as much about recon-necting officers with constituents’ demands, or managing the City Council’s bureaucracy, as they were about democratisation as a political process.

All interviewees were positive about Community Committees and the opportunities they afforded for participation and the improved outcomes as a result of that participation. In principle, all agreed that it was important to involve the community in decision making. One officer argued that Community Committees were ‘an opportunity to have dialogue rather than being told’ (Interview, managing director of Urban Vision, 25 January 08). Another officer asserted that the commu-nity ‘have to be in the decision-making process’ (Interview, neighbour-hood manager, 18 January 2008). Activists agreed. As one argued that, since ‘you have to live with it’, it was important that the community be involved in local decisions (Interview, 17 January 2008). As this paper makes clear later, actual decision making is limited, but the activists interviewed did not recognise the limitations and seemed content with, in effect, a local scrutiny function.

East Salford Community Committee represents some 35,000 people. Community Committees comprise councillors and ‘representatives of recognised community groups’ (Salford City Council, 2006). Although anyone can attend meetings, the voting members are those representa-tives and ward councillors. In general, these community groups are tenants’ and residents’ associations. In East Salford, the voting mem-bers number 45. Both activists and the City Council recognise that this might not be entirely representative of the community as a whole.

The neighbourhood manager acknowledged that it was ‘quite dif-ficult’ to ensure the Community Committee remained representa-tive (Interview, 18 January 2008). The City Council recognises that often members are self-selecting and that it is not unusual to have one-member ‘organisations’ represented in Community Committee meetings. It is, as the leader acknowledged, ‘relatively easy to set up a group and get recognised at the Community Committee’ (Interview, 15 February 2008). The lead member for Neighbourhood Management and Service Improvement argued that one of the next steps in develop-ing the Community Committee architecture was to expand the groups who attend and to ensure that they were more representative of their neighbourhoods (Interview, 28 February 2008). It is the job of local community development workers to identify underrepresented neigh-bourhoods and to seek out individuals willing to found residents’ or



tenants’ groups. However, it is difficult to see how the City Council can ensure that individuals who represent groups at Community Committee take information back and bring issues and opinions for-ward. Other councils have resolved this by having elections for street representatives (for example, Walsall). This has been rejected by Salford as both anathema to strategic coherence and an invitation to multiple conflicts (Interview, leader, 21 August 2008).

The activists at Community Committee often assert in meetings that the will of ‘the community’ supersedes that of councillors and assert their right to speak on the community’s behalf. The most potent deci-sions that Community Committees make are about the disbursement of its devolved monies. Legally, councillors must endorse the budget decisions made by Community Committees. This has been controver-sial for some activists in East Salford; from their perspective, these are funds to be disbursed by the community and they resent that coun-cillors have a veto (East Salford Community Committee, 25 January 2007). However, no example could be recollected of when the will of the community members was different from that of councillors. In spite of these observed tensions in meetings, in interviews, activists were more circumspect about the issue of representativeness. One argued, ‘you are talking about 45 people out of a population of some-where in the region of 33,000’ (Interview, 17 January 2008)..Another acknowledged the need ‘to have more groups’ (Interview, 25 January 2008), and another the absence of representatives from the signifi-cant minority populations of Eastern Europeans and French Congolese (Interview, 17 January 2008). At that point, activists agreed that the Community Committee could not be seen as representative of the entire community.

Activists also acknowledged that some of those who did attend were not necessarily trying to represent a broader constituency. ‘People have a beef about something and they get involved and then that goes somewhere else, some people dip in and out’, argued one (Interview, 17 January 2008). Another claimed that while some tried to represent their neighbourhoods, ‘I would say there are others who represent themselves’ (Interview 17 January 2008). Paul Goggins recognised the tension when Community Committees were founded, ‘We never went for an elected committee – that would have been a step too far for the Labour Group, a parallel authority – but, equally, how do you make the people who come forward as representatives account-able to the organisations that they claim to represent?’ (Interview, 18 January 2008).



The form and culture of meetings

Meetings are often belligerent in tone. Accusation is more likely than inquiry. Such accusations are not necessarily politically or ideologically inspired; they can be directed at officers or councillors and typically involve very local issues. Salford City Council has deemed it neces-sary to provide a code of conduct for meetings. One of the activists argued that she would not bring other members of the community to meetings because they constitute ‘a battleground’ (Budget Review Meeting, 1 March 2007). In interviews, activists acknowledged that meetings could be ‘scary’ (Interview, 17 January 2008), and ‘intimidat-ing’, but two of the three liked ‘the battle’ and ‘the passion’ and ‘the drama’. However, they acknowledged that, as one of them said, ‘I’ve seen people go, but they’ve only gone once, and it doesn’t surprise me’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). A senior officer referred to the ‘anarchy’ of East Salford, with ‘showboating’ and ‘council-knocking’ the norm (Interview, managing director Urban Vision, 25 January 2008). The neighbourhood manager recalled that the code of conduct for meetings ‘was needed in East Salford’ (Interview, 18 January 2008). This incivility might be operating to exclude a broader range of groups and individ-uals from participation in Community Committees.

Meetings follow a traditional format, with a chair working through a preprepared agenda. The agenda has standing items, including those for ‘community issues’ and Budget Group recommendations. Two of the activists interviewed found fault with this style. One argued that know-ing the jargon can be problematical and that it was easy to ‘get lost’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). Another complained that many ‘simply haven’t understood what was going on’ (Interview, 17 January 2008).

All complained about the number of items on the agenda, especially presentations on citywide matters.

The lead member for Neighbourhood Management and Service Improvement has recognised that the style of meetings needs to change to make participation more attractive (Interview, 28 February 2008). However, when asked about the issue, the current leader interpreted the question as one about increasing the formality of meetings (Interview, 25 February 2008), rather than completely changing the style. Community Pride and Oxfam had advocated participatory appraisal methods and participatory budgeting when they worked in Salford’s New Deal for Communities area within East Salford (Charlestown and Lower Kersal NDC and Oxfam GB, 2005). While there is undoubtedly a tension between the time and space needed for grassroots participation and the pressures upon councils for effectiveness, accountability and



speed in delivery, it can be difficult for politicians who have learned their trade in union, student and party arenas to grasp alternative formats to traditional meetings.

Valued spaces: Participation as scrutiny

It is worth exploring how the council and the community activists each see the value of the participatory space. Only one of the activ-ists interviewed was sceptical about the council’s motives in instituting Community Committees. She argued that the council ‘had to be seen to be doing it, so they’ve ticked the boxes’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). All were positive, however, about the council’s engagement with the committee. One said, ‘Salford City Council have tried extremely hard to engage’ and ‘I think it’s really exciting, it’s a forum where people are held accountable’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). Another argued that it put community activists ‘on a par’ with councillors (Interview, 17 January 2008). The third argued that ‘Some people have got the voice that they didn’t have before’ (Interview, 17 January 2008).

All were positive about their councillors. One argued that she liked the councillors, not least because ‘They always turn up and they always answer’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). Another said, ‘I think it’s great that the councillors attend’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). All asserted that they felt able to affect decision making in their locality. Activists are content with the parochial content of meetings and the limita-tions on decision making. One activist found the most useful aspects of the Community Committee access to ‘that network’ and the ‘know-ledge about what’s going on in my area’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). Another also saw its value in the local problem solving: ‘you are lis-tened to’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). The third, in responding to a question about what he wanted to change through his attendance, saw involvement as an end in itself: ‘The real thing that comes to mind is simply that question of participation and engagement’ (Interview, 17 January 2008).

Councillors, too, acknowledged the shortcomings of the Community Committee in terms of its representation of the wider community and in terms of the nature of the engagement. However, they were posi-tive about the role it played in the following respects. The budgets that Community Committees control are dwarfed by citywide spending, much of it ringfenced by central government. In this case study, deci-sion making has been transferred from officers, not councillors, to the Community Committees. While the sum total of devolved budgets represents a very limited transfer of decision making, this is seen as a



welcome development by the councillors interviewed, not least because they foresee an increase in their constituents’ contentment with the way services are provided and thus an increase in their contentment with their elected representatives. In this sense, participation enhances representation.

Councillors also expressed satisfaction with the fact that officers are held to account. As the current leader argued, Community Committees ‘help in terms of improving their understanding of their accountability and not just seeing it as the job of the councillor to be accountable to the local community’ (Interview, 15 January 2008).

While there are some exceptions – a senior officer referred to some councillors as being ‘resentful of activists’ (Interview, 25 January 2008) – both councillors and activists in general see each other as enhancing their respective roles. Each side acknowledges the legitim-acy of the other and their own shortcomings in representativeness. Two very vocal and often critical participants had the following comments on the issue of representation. One said, ‘I wouldn’t say the Community Committee necessarily represents the community. I think the coun-cillors still retain that legitimacy’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). The other argued that ‘the councillors are the genuine representatives’ and stressed ‘partnership’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). And the third said, ‘I think they can live together’ (Interview, 17 January 2008).

In meetings, councillors were reticent about asserting their mandate to govern. The current leader acknowledged that, while some council-lors ‘think they can make decisions in isolation’, in general, ‘councillors have become more adept at understanding the community’ (Interview, 15 February 2008). This might not be the result of involvement in Community Committees. First, the change from the old council com-mittee structure to a cabinet government has meant an emphasis upon ‘backbench’ councillors as ‘community leaders’. Second, there is a division among councillors; those who will work with the activists at Community Committee, and those who either resent the leadership roles these activists have assumed or who argue that they need to reach beyond these individuals to the wider community. In contrast to the current leader’s faith that Community Committees have deepened councillors’ understanding of communities, the former leader insisted that any councillor who was working properly would not need the Community Committee to communicate the community’s priorities. It should also be noted that while it has suited the agendas of central gov-ernment and other agencies to construct councillors as ‘the other’, they are, in general, part of the communities they serve. That is, in Salford,



at least, they are generally resident in the wards they represent and have come to serve as members of the council through community activism. In any case, local ward councillors, in a cabinet-driven council, can be almost as removed from the locus of governing in the city as their constituents.

The councillors so far interviewed do not appear to sense transference of legitimacy to the Community Committees, in part because they rec-ognise the limited experiment it represents. However, it is also because they feel secure in the fact that they will always have a role when irre-sistible insularity meets unmoveable parochialism. Even within one ward of the East Salford Community Committee, Broughton, there is latent and open conflict between the demands of the Jewish commu-nity and that of the non-Jewish community. Councillors see their role as mediating between the conflicting interests or perspectives of many communities, whether geographical or otherwise.

The city has negotiated a new target under the national Local Public Service Agreement 2 based upon the number of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their area. The city is also looking at ways of introducing a scrutiny function into Community Committees (Salford City Council, 2006). Again, this is an aid to backbench coun-cillors who can often feel that they too are battling a recalcitrant bur-eaucracy. As the leader argued, ‘Community Committees strengthen councillors in being able to put forward arguments at the Civic Centre’ (Interview, leader, 15 February 2008). Most participants already see the real value of Community Committees as residing in their – unofficial – scrutiny function. It is how activists approach meetings – with no agenda, save to hold the council to account for local action or inaction. It is how the leader sees them, with councillors ‘making themselves accountable at Community Committees’ (Ibid.). It is how the neigh-bourhood manager regards them: ‘Participation isn’t always about budg-ets. It’s about what services are needed, how they should be delivered and checking to see whether they are working (Interview, 18 January 2008). In spite of the acknowledgement of certain shortcomings in terms of the conduct of meetings and the lack of representativeness, all participants seem content that the Community Committee operates as a mechanism whereby some members of the community hold council-lors and officers to account for neighbourhood decisions.

Community participation and service delivery

Accompanying the establishment of Community Committees was a reorganisation of services to follow their geographical boundaries



because, as Paul Goggins remembers, ‘some of the ways we delivered services was useless’ (Interview, 18 January 2008). The council’s services are organised via directorates. If an issue involves more than one dir-ectorate, resolution can be problematic, in that directorates will argue about where responsibility lies.

One senior councillor made a radical claim for the impact of Community Committees upon service delivery. He argued that the chief executive’s department had been radically altered in 2006 because of pressure from Community Committees (Interview, 28 February 2008). This claim would surprise community representatives, since it has never been an explicit demand. However, the councillor argued that the centralising tendencies of the City Council’s chief executive’s department were unhelpful in terms of service delivery and had thus alienated Salford’s communities. The pressure for better services from Community Committees meant that structures had to change. The same councillor insisted that there had been a causal link between Community Committees and recent improvements in liaison between agencies and service delivery. However, the former leader argued that it was through councillors that change occurred within directorates (Interview, 27 February 2008). Other interviewees were more circum-spect. The current leader argued that Community Committees had made a contribution to the change in culture around delivery, ‘but were not the whole story of change’ (Interview, 15 February 2008).

Paul Goggins recalls that ‘a number of officials who had kind of been pen-pushing for years ... suddenly became quite excited’ about Community Committees and the accompanying reorganisation of ser-vices (Interview, 18 January 2008). A senior officer argued that his own awareness had changed. He argued that council budgets are not aligned with priorities at the local level. Budgets are driven by directorates and follow personnel and working patterns. The important point he made was that before his experience of Community Committees, he would not have had this awareness of the mismatch (Interview, 25 January 2008). The current leader suggested that Community Committees had led the council to focus on neighbourhoods; for example, the council now adopted a ‘spotlight’ approach to problems, where cross-service teams converged upon one problem in one neighbourhood. For example, in one area, a team addressed the problems of young people not in employment, education or training, and, in another, general worklessness (Interview, 15 January 2008).

All of the participants interviewed were positive about Community Committees in terms of outcomes. However, when challenged to give



examples, interviewees gave the following responses. One activist argued that she did not see any change (Interview, 17 January 2008), and another that ‘it was less about change’ and more about ‘keeping people in the loop’ (25 January 2008). The third also acknowledged that it was ‘unlikely’ that Community Committees made a difference to citywide policy. In terms of local policy, he was only able to give the example of a three-month delay to a change from housing grants to loans (Interview, 17 January 2008). Officers gave examples of consultations at Community Committees: in one case, East Salford demanded con-sultation about the rationalisation of local primary schools (Interview, neighbourhood manager, 18 January 2008); and in the other (Interview, managing director Urban Vision, 25 January 2008), East Salford demanded consultation about flood defence plans. The leader gave the examples of better-designed local parks and the highways’ devolved budget (Interview, 15 February 2008). The lead member who devolved part of the highways’ budget was convinced that the city would see a reorientation towards road safety when the Community Committees, as opposed to traffic engineers, take those decisions (Interview, 5 March 2008). The director of engineering argued that the emphasis upon safety in decisions had continued between engineers pre-devolution and com-munities post-devolution, although he seemed to hint that communi-ties had funded a number of smaller schemes, whereas engineers might have applied themselves to solving larger problems with larger, though fewer, schemes (e-mail correspondence, 5 August 2008). In short, the impact of Salford’s participatory experiment is limited.

As the last section makes clear, the activists and councillors inter-viewed are satisfied with the current architecture for participation. That is, they are content with the Community Committee’s de facto role as a mechanism for scrutiny. There might be an increasing num-ber of neighbourhood issues where the activists might wish to have their voices heard, but their role remains one of ex post facto over-sight and one that is firmly located in service delivery at the neigh-bourhood level. It is uncertain if pressure at this level – complaints about neighbourhood services – translates into improvements in service delivery. The City Council is hedged in with financial constraints and, where services do get better, this can be the result of other pressures, for example, the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment of Councils. Decision making is confined to the highways’ and other devolved budgets which represent modest sums of money. However, the experiments here in actual decision making, as opposed to the consultation, dialogue or argument which happen in the main



Community Committee meetings, show that the process has not been ideally constructed to deliver the best outcomes.

Participation: Skills, leadership and structures

Paul Goggins remembered that Community Committees were sup-posed to be about finding ‘solutions that were part formulated by local people and implemented by local people’ (Interview, 18 January 2008). However, a lack of organisation and leadership means that, not only are Community Committees not as representative of communities as they could be, but that outcomes are not optimised. Participation can be burdensome and thus the onus lies with the council to provide lead-ership and process. Although the council has the ambition to extend and deepen participation in Salford – as evidenced by its partnership in this research, given that there are resource implications – it remains to be seen whether or not the council has sufficient political motivation to improve the participatory experience since those who do participate seem content with current arrangements.

Plans for the development of the Community Committee structure include provision for more training for members. The activists inter-viewed argued that they had developed their own skills and confi-dence. One argued that she had lost her awe of councillors (Interview, 17 January 2008), and another recalled a time when he knew he was talking ‘absolute gibberish’ and argued that he now thinks ‘about the appropriate way to achieve something strategically’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). A few members do have well-developed skills, but in observations of meetings, there was little evidence of experiential learn-ing in negotiation, public expression or conflict management. This was a frustration for the activists themselves. As one said, while some people ‘can get their point across’, there are others where she finds her-self thinking, ‘For God’s sake, sit down’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). Another activist noted that one missing skill among participants was that of listening (Interview, 17 January 2008), as did a senior officer (Interview, 25 January 2008).

However, the leader was anxious about the danger of being seen as ‘patronising’ in the way the council approached the issue of training: ‘I don’t think we should say that they haven’t got skills, rather I think we need to find a way to encourage them to be articulate and to talk to people about what they want to achieve’ (Interview, 15 February 2008). Paul Goggins argued that the Labour government had ‘still not done enough’ in terms of developing capacity and skills (Interview, 18 January 2008). Given the lack of skills in conflict management and



listening, and the lack of participatory consciousness, leadership and organisation for deliberation assume greater importance if the partici-patory potential is to be optimised.

At the heart of the Community Committee’s decision making is the Budget Group. Organisations can make applications to the Budget Group for funds for community projects. These are the focus of deci-sion making within the group. Ideally, and the hope of the instigators of the Community Committee system at the Civic Centre, the Budget Group would address the community’s priorities, as reflected in the Community Action Plan, and make decisions accordingly. The Budget Group would be proactive in commissioning work. However, East Salford’s decision making is overwhelmingly reactive, with the Budget Group sorting its way through ad hoc applications for funds. The aver-age amount each group receives is £1,400. The vice-chair of the group reported their aim as being ‘to try to help as many small groups as possible’ from an annual fund of £140,000 (East Salford Community Committee, 23 November 2006). Each application is supposed to meet at least one of the city’s seven pledges: improving health; reducing crime; encouraging learning, leisure and creativity; investing in children and young people; promoting inclusion; creating prosperity; and enhan-cing the quality of life. The priorities most supported were encouraging learning and leisure and investing in young people. The least funded was creating prosperity, perhaps because it is much more a function of the City Council operating at a strategic level (Budget Review Meeting, 1 March 2007).

The Community Action Plan is too dense a document to provide a basis for decision making; problems and priorities are lost in the detail. As Bill Taylor, the area coordinator for East Salford (and managing director of Urban Vision, which delivers highways and planning), remarked, it is a problem which has yet to be ‘cracked’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). This is recognised by the City Council as an issue, especially with the introduction in April 2007 of Local Area Agreements (the prior-ities agreed between central government, the council and the council’s partners). Information would also need to be provided in terms of the potential solutions available. Solutions to, say, youth nuisance, are not necessarily obvious. This does not speak to a lack of skills among com-munity members; again, the onus is upon the council to share expertise on potential solutions.

Even if the East Salford Budget Group could get to that point, there is a marked resistance among the vocal activists to the notion of com-missioning additional services from the City Council or other agencies.



Of 40 funded applications in 2006–07, only 5 were from statutory agen-cies (Budget Review Meeting, 1 March 2007). This seems to be caused by both mistrust and misunderstanding of local government finance. The common refrain is that, ‘they should be doing that already’ (Ibid.). Officers have asserted the need for leadership here, in that there needs to be a process of defining problems, setting priorities within the Community Action Plan and thinking through potential solutions. How the leadership of the process is to be provided is unclear. There needs to be much more education of communities about how central government finances the City Council. The constraints – the ringfenc-ing, the bidding processes – are difficult to communicate and it is a task that requires skill and repetition.

Decisions can be idiosyncratic. For example, in observing the alloca-tion of the highways’ budget in East Salford (Devolved Budget Subgroup meeting, 7 March 2007), there was time for deliberation, but it was unorganised and the process lacked orientation. Unlike in another Community Committee area where the neighbourhood manager has instigated a process of prioritisation of potential schemes with the wider community, participants in East Salford were simply engaged in a process of granting or not granting approval within a subgroup of the committee. Subsequently, those schemes at the end of the list were not funded, as the money had already been allocated to those listed earlier. Thus, the community might or might not have improved its environ-ment. The process was certainly community-led, in that the city’s most senior engineer, who was present, spoke only when asked to do so and did not proffer unsolicited advice as to priorities or the effectiveness of the solutions proposed. There was local knowledge from the commu-nity representatives and there was technical expertise, but there was no organisation or leadership in extracting local and technical knowledge and bringing the two together for the best outcome.

The area coordinator also referred to the absence of structure as a major weakness of the system. There should, he argued, ‘be a model for decision making that is rolled out to all Community Committees’ (Interview, 25 January 2008). There was a lack of organisation around getting communities to think and plan for their priorities. Thus, instead of telling committees they had £100,000 to spend in any given year on highways, communities should be asked to order their priorities, not simply in a mad scramble to spend that money in one year, but by the orderly programming of projects beyond the year. The process lacked focus upon outcomes and ‘a structured way of looking at problems’ (Ibid.). The responsibility for such organisation lay with officers who



needed ‘facilitation skills in bringing together technical knowledge with local knowledge’ (Ibid.). Neighbourhood officers, as the interface between the council and the community, were those most in need of such training. Thus, while councils can be under pressure from both central government and communities for fast and cost-effective out-comes, here it is less the case that that urgency suppresses deliberation, but much more that a lack of skills, leadership or organisation compro-mises both effective deliberation and outcomes.

The lack of investment in process and organisation can have impacts not just on outcomes for communities but upon democracy. For 2008, a participatory budgeting event was held by East Salford, urged by the leader, following feedback from the author about the limitations of the traditional meeting approach to priority-setting. However, there was no system in place for ensuring that block voting was avoided. As such, a prospective conservative councillor organised members of the Jewish community to attend, and that neighbourhood’s wish list of projects drew the most votes. Officers were then forced to find a mechanism for respecting the outcomes of the process they had organised while avoid-ing conflict between the Jewish and non-Jewish areas.

The councillors interviewed acknowledged that leadership and par-ticipation are interdependent yet in tension. A space for participation has opened up, but it is a space that needs organising. When the issue of structure or organisation was put to politicians, all acknowledged the issue but also asserted a difficulty. Paul Goggins summarises their view: ‘Structures and process are important’ but ‘one of the risks here is that it will become an end in itself; there’s a job of work to be done and people have to get on and do it’ (Interview, 18 January 2008). However, this lack of thinking about how to organise the participatory space means that many are excluded from an uncomfortable arena, outcomes can be compromised and unfair and a deeper participation about a more extensive agenda is impossible.

Leadership is crucial here. The context constantly needs framing. The leader argued that Community Committees have ‘actually ena-bled people to have a better understanding of the choices at the coun-cil with the realisation that you have a limited budget’ (Interview, 2 February 2008). However, there was no evidence that participants had acquired this knowledge and, in their resistance to commission-ing additional services from the council, evidence that the reverse was the case. Prioritisation is necessary when choices have to be made, and this necessarily requires a planning process that is more than a set of agenda items.



As the neighbourhood manager argued, ‘Time is probably the scarcest of all resources’ (Interview, 18 January 2008), and as one participant said, ‘activists get battered’ (Interview, 17 January 2008) by the demands placed upon the ‘usual suspects’ who commit themselves to meetings in uncomfortable venues at the end of the working day. Decision mak-ing entails other burdens too; a senior officer noted that Community Committees had not, for example, appreciated their responsibilities as commissioners of work under the highways’ devolved budget, especially those relating to health and safety legislation and the appointment of designers and contractors. Given these burdens, it could be argued that it is the responsibility of government – whether central or local – to design and manage appropriate processes for decision making. There is a marked contrast between the way decision-making and planning processes are taken so seriously at the Civic Centre and the acceptance of the often ad hoc organisation of engagement with the community.

However, while councillors, officers and committed activists might point to flaws in the current system around parochialism, unrepresenta-tiveness and unfairness, there is, as already argued, a widespread general satisfaction with the status quo. Arguably with a different process, not only would more people find the space inviting, but also outcomes could be improved. In interviews, one activist expressed concern that partici-patory budgeting would be costly and slow down decision making – ‘another distraction’ (Interview, 17 January 2008) – while another was fatalistic about current arrangements. He argued, ‘Maybe you accept that there are people who simply have no interest in that kind of activity’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). One officer noted that, ‘Basically, the com-munity and the councillors want the same thing’ (Interview, 18 January 2008); and another that neither community nor councillors knew how to negotiate with directorates to solve problems. The attitude of both could be summarised as ‘get it sorted’, he said (Interview, managing dir-ector Urban Vision, 25 January 2008). In short, there are few partici-pants who see the need to change the space, because those who attend are reconciled (and might even enjoy) a combative arena or are unable to see an alternative process for decision making.

Conclusion

Although the City Council plans to introduce a scrutiny function into Community Committees, it is interesting that the participants inter-viewed see themselves as already engaging in that activity. As one said, ‘It’s that accountability’ (Interview, 25 January 2008); and another, ‘It’s



an opportunity to scrutinise’ (Interview, 17 January 2008). A senior City Council officer lamented that Community Committee mem-bers’ demands were parochial and suggested that there was a poverty of ambition accompanying other indicators of deprivation in the city (Interview, 27 February 2007). Unless the reasons for this – mistrust of institutions, a lack of experience or consciousness – are addressed, genuine participation is absent because alternative futures are never explored. However, all interviewees – councillors, activists and officers – agreed that Community Committees were effective in influencing the implementation of policy at a neighbourhood level. The managing director of Urban Vision went further and argued that Community Committees gave local activists the ability to ‘pull policy makers out of the Civic Centre’ (25 January 2008). However, this is reactive inquiry rather than proactive agenda setting and is very much located at the neighbourhood level.

The activists cited previously have maintained their critical voices from meeting to meeting. The current lead member for Customer and Support Services argued that Community Committees have never achieved what he wanted from them when he instituted them as leader in 1994. Working against a backdrop of ever-shrinking resources and powers under a Conservative central government, Councillor Hinds wanted to ‘politicise’ local people to work in partnership with council-lors in defending services. He asserted that he had failed in his pur-pose (Interview, 27 February 2007). In this sense, those involved in Community Committees have maintained their autonomy by remain-ing apolitical in terms of the broader context, albeit critical of neigh-bourhood services.

Salford City Council began its experiment in participation before any central government pressure was apparent and has since deepened its engagement by devolving actual, albeit limited, decision making to its communities. Its cooperation in this research demonstrates its commit-ment to improve that engagement. Ironically, what is needed is some strategic direction from the Civic Centre about systems and processes for engagement across all Community Committee areas. The fact that the council has not thus far done so might be because those community activists who do participate are content with arrangements and there is a natural desire to be seen to be responsive to ‘the community’. It is argued here that the lack of thinking about how to organise the par-ticipatory space means that many are excluded from an uncomfortable arena, outcomes are not optimised, and a deeper participation about a more extensive agenda is precluded.



Bibliography

Charlestown and Lower Kersal NDC and Oxfam GB. 2005. No more sticky dots: making progress with Participatory Appraisal in Salford (1 October), http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/ukpoverty/ (Accessed 1 June 2008).

Henderson, Steve, Bowlby, Sophie, and Raco, Mike. 2007. Refashioning Local Government and Inner-City Regeneration: The Salford Experience. Urban Studies 44, no. 8: 1449.

Indices of Deprivation. 2004. http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/englishindices (Accessed 11 January 2008).

LGA Labour Group. 2007. Labour, Leadership and Locality: Distinctive approaches to place shaping. London: LGA Publications.

Salford City Council. 2006. The Development of Neighbourhood Management. Salford: Mimeo, 12 May.


229

10ConclusionParticipation as a Field of Study and Practice: A Modest ContributionJenny Pearce

In the Introduction, we distinguished two frameworks for understand-ing our case studies: ‘participatory governance’ and ‘participatory dem-ocracy’. An initial task of this conclusion is to discuss how far these illuminate differences in the participatory experiments we tracked. The Introduction also identified two research goals. The first was to learn more about the prospects for participation as a democratic option for society and thus contribute to participation as a field of study in its own right. The second was to elaborate the meaning of what is some-times referred to as ‘real’ participation or participation as meaningful practice. In 1969, Sherry Arnstein in the US produced a conceptual tool with this in mind, the much quoted ‘ladder of participation’ which distinguished between nonparticipation, tokenistic participation and citizen participation (Arnstein, 2007). Arnstein’s argument was about more than the tool, however. The author recognised that the ladder was a deceptively simple approach to ‘powerlessness’ and ‘powerholders’ (Ibid., p. 236). While these categories rightly permeate our studies, we also learn how the governed as well as the governors create their own structures of power. These also impact on how far experiments generate new possibilities.

Our experiments can be seen either as dynamic processes, which generate turning points, reversals and advances from which we can constantly learn; or as spatially and temporally limited constructs. This is similar to the way that urbanisation as a process differs from the city as a ‘thing’ (Harvey, 2007, p. 228). Harvey reminds us of the risks of fixed form arising out of social process: ‘The ways that particu-lar “thing-like structures” (such as political-administrative territories, built environments, fixed networks of social relations) precipitate out of fluid social processes and the fixed forms these things then assume



have a powerful influence upon the way that social processes can operate’ (Ibid.). How participation is ‘framed’, in the past as well as the present and by whom and for what, will thus significantly impact on its practice and future potentialities. If there is one clear conclu-sion from our research, it is to recognise this interplay between ‘pro-cess and thing’ (Ibid.). It encourages us to reflect on how to liberate agency for change from structures which contain it in the name of an understandable human desire for stability and safety or less benign purposes of control. Such structures will express and breed power asymmetries and vice versa, that is until we change our meaning and practice of power. In the meantime, the goal is neither to ‘bracket off’ these asymmetries (Habermas, 1992) nor to create structure-less space, both of which ask us to pretend that they are not there in either actual or latent form. The challenge is to develop principles of ‘democratic structuring’, as the women’s movement pointed out some decades ago (Freeman, 1970).

Participation and its ‘subject’: Competing frameworks

Citizen participation is a categorical term for citizen power. It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliber-ately included in the future. It is the strategy by which the have-nots join in determining how information is shared, goals and policies are set, tax resources are allocated, programmes are operated, and benefits like contracts and patronage are parcelled out. In short, it is the means by which they can induce significant social reform which enables them to share in the benefits of the affluent society’. (Arnstein, 2007, p. 235)

In the Introduction, we traced how the ‘participatory citizen’ resur-faced as a component of democracy. However, it became entan-gled with a range of other new or revived political concepts, such as ‘governance’ and ‘civil society’. ‘Governance’ shifted thinking away from centralised, top-down decision making and emphasised the horizontal management of complex relationships between agen-cies, institutions and actors. ‘Civil society’ focused on a conceptual realm between state and market, that of ‘associated citizens’. All these concepts attached themselves to distinct philosophies of state and market relationships and the role of the individual within the social context.


Participation as a Field of Study and Practice 231

Neoliberalism, social market capitalism and anti-capitalism are phil-osophies present in some form in each of our case studies. Broadly speak-ing, and there are variants, the first sees the citizen as ‘consumer’, the second as ‘rights bearer’ and the latter as a collective ‘people’. Each also has a distinctive approach to the ‘associated citizen’. Neoliberalism tends to construct civil society as a third pillar of a triadic model of society, alongside market and state, which guarantees state accountability and limits its interventions. It also takes functions of service delivery away from the state and nonprofit economic activity away from the market. The discourse of ‘Third Sector’ actively impacted on associations from Porto Alegre to Bradford, and reshaped their self-understanding and role in participatory process.

Social market capitalism sees associations as generators of viewpoints and actions which not only hold state and market to account but can defend rights and challenge abuse of power. Medellín has some compo-nents of this. Its experiment aimed to build an inclusive and plural civic public sphere within the capitalist city. This contrasts with the more radical original vision of the ‘plebeian public sphere’ of Porto Alegre (Baierle, 2003), also within the capitalist city, but one which would assert democratic and workers’ control over it.

Orthodox anti-capitalism has historical adversity to pluralities, derived from a Rousseauian fear that they may undermine the ‘general will’ of the larger collectivity of equals. However, conceptualisations of civil society influenced by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (as was the Brazilian left), see associations as a site of struggle against hegemonic capitalism and social movements as part of an activist and networked civil society, which diffuse and contest power rather than concentrate it in an institutionalised ‘sector’. The role of associations in a post-capitalist society tends to be conceived in terms of expres-sions of ‘popular power’. In Caracas, such expressions are also a means to challenge capitalism, but not the Venezuelan state, which is in itself understood as an expression of peoples’ power, a revolution without a revolution. Only in Caracas was the city part of a national political pro-ject of transformation based on such ideas. At the time of our research and apart from Caracas, neoliberalism dominated the national policy framework and its impact can be seen in all our case studies.

The relationship between the ‘associated citizen’ and the ‘participa-tory citizen’, what we might call the ‘subjects’ of participation, is an ambiguity which traverses the distinct visions and has been explored particularly in the Brazilian literature (e.g., Houtzager, Lavalle and Acharya, 2003). There is only one example amongst our cases (Porto



Alegre) where participation is conceived of in terms of direct citizens’ participation. Others focus on participation through associations, or a mixture of direct and indirect participation. Participation did not sup-plant elected representation in our cases studies, although Chavista Venezuela aimed to move in such a direction. In all cases, participation raises new questions about representation.

Each framework also has a distinct understanding of the goal of par-ticipation. Arnstein offers a goal which claims to distinguish citizen participation from other kinds. In our case studies, stated goals vary: from inviting selected voices from the ‘Third Sector’ into partnerships in order to improve service delivery, to efforts to broaden who those voices are, to co-responsibility between users and deliverers of services, to deciding budgets. All claim a broader goal around social inclusion and, in the Medellín case, violence reduction.

Behind these stated goals are the competing normative constructs. Although we reduced them to two, the reality is more complex. Participatory governance was tinged with aspirations for participatory democracy in the UK; participatory democracy was eventually converted into a form of participatory governance in Porto Alegre; participatory democracy was a component in new ways of approaching governance in the midst of conflict in Medellín; participatory democracy shared con-ceptual space with the national project of socialism in Caracas. The com-plexity highlights the contingent possibilities which our experiments tried to explore and which are captured by David Harvey’s dialectical approach to space, time and process. Space and time are defined by social processes, but also themselves constitute social processes. We should, he argues, therefore ‘abandon the view of the urban as simply a site or a con-tainer of social action in favour of the idea that it is, in itself, a set of con-flictual heterogeneous processes which are producing spatio-temporalities as well as producing things, structures and permanencies in ways which constrain the nature of the social process’ (Harvey, 2007, p. 229). Our participatory experiments were about distinctive and contested spatio-temporal social constructions, the character of which in turn impacted on participation as a social process. Our task now is to review what we learnt about the potentialities for more participative democracy.

Participatory democracy

Porto Alegre stands out in our case studies for the vitality of this dialectic over a good many years. The vitality owes a lot to the ori-gins of the experiment in an interaction between anti-authoritarian social movements and a political party still connected to them, but



looking to extend its social base. The participatory budget set out from a set of premises which created spaces of participation and an annual cycle, based on direct participation and principles of popular sovereignty. Methodology was very important (Interview, Ubiratan de Sousa, 16 September 2006), and heed was paid to ‘democratic structur-ing’: such as deliberation, forms of decision making and voting with self-regulation and annual review of procedures by participants. Local government was not able to overrule the priorities democratically decided by participants; mandates of representatives could be revoked and were annual. Principles of differential need, transparency of infor-mation and an understanding of the totality of the municipal budget were established, and there was clarity on competencies and responsi-bilities for implementation. As these principles were disseminated and people saw improvements, participation increased year on year. This was meaningful participation which transferred real decision-making power on budget priorities to the citizens in the poorest neighbour-hoods. These principles of participatory democracy applied to budget making, were aligned with a representative system which did not see the transference of power as a threat, which for a while even convinced sectors of the political opposition and stimulated the democratisation of other spheres, such as education.

However, the Porto Alegre process did reach limits in terms of fur-ther domains of transformation, such as linkages with city planning, structures of inequality, inclusion of the very poorest, deeper political consciousness amongst participants, and active involvement of the middle and wealthier sectors of the city. It clearly was not irreversible and was gradually overwhelmed by the political priority given globally, nationally and eventually locally to market forces. Porto Alegre was not a ‘city-state’. Participatory activists themselves entered the contract cul-ture as needs shifted from infrastructure to livelihoods, laying the basis for the resurgence of clientelism and community gatekeepers under an administration who no longer saw the poor as participatory subjects. For at least 16 years, however, an experiment took place based on par-ticipatory principles supported by the local state and which effectively improved the quality of life for poor people in a city of 1.5 million residents.

Medellín combined the principles of participation by individual citi-zen and ‘associated citizen’. It too paid great attention to methodology. Intense efforts were made to analyse and change procedures in the light of practice and through dialogue with participants. Like Porto Alegre, there was strong commitment from newly emergent city leaders, and



there was a similar gradual acceptance and ownership from the polit-ical opposition. The mayor and his administration exposed themselves to assemblies of participants in ways which demonstrated the serious-ness of their commitment and respected community priorities. There was more of an attempt in Medellín to involve the city as a whole, including the middle classes and civil servants, who were appealed to as citizens with a voice in the transformation of the city alongside their political bosses and the poorest residents. The experiment helped renew community leadership, however ‘community oligarchies’ continued to inhibit that process. Participatory democracy in Medellín was a risky adventure, given the high degree of violence. The organised expres-sions of this violence impacted on participatory space; but participatory space also impacted on the wielders of violence, with limited, though difficult to sustain, progress in conversion of violence into politics.

In Caracas, ‘society’, had been the participatory subject of 1999 (Garcia-Guadilla, 2007, p. 111), but this subsequently divided along polarised and antagonistic class lines, particularly after the wealthier classes supported the failed coup attempt against Chávez in 2002. The middle and upper classes tended to take up the mantle of ‘civil soci-ety’ in contrast to other countries of Latin America, where it rallied movements of the left against militarism and authoritarianism. They also emphasised their commitment to representative democracy with participation as a complement, whilst the popular organisations began to articulate a project of direct democracy as an alternative to represen-tative democracy (Garcia-Guadilla, 2007, p. 113).The gradual parting of the ways between representative and participatory democracy thus mirrors the escalation of class conflict in Venezuela, and gradually the conception of the participatory subject becomes much more firmly the ‘People’ rather than ‘Society’.

State encouragement of community activism has had a huge and beneficial impact on the poor neighbourhoods of Caracas, as Lopez (this volume) describes. However, there are tensions between the Chavista State’s efforts to organise its base of support in new participatory insti-tutions on the one hand, and the self-organising dynamics which might sustain the process regardless of who is head of the state on the other. Caracas does not have the long history of activism which preceded and shaped the participatory budget experiment in Porto Alegre. Harvey’s argument that spatio-temporality constructs process and vice versa is particularly relevant. Chávez was seeking rapid solutions to problems of urban infrastructure which would bypass the bureaucratic impedi-ments of state capacity as well as new forms of popular organisation



which would mobilise support for his project. Participatory spaces and therefore participatory process reflected these potentially contradict-ory goals, favouring the communal councils as expressions of popular power over the OCAs as autonomous organs of inter-neighbourhood self-government. Chávez’ personal standing with the poor can over-ride their willingness to demand effective delivery from the state, as happened when our research partners in the water roundtables decided not to demonstrate outside the presidential palace after a mudslide had destroyed not only their homes but the water improvement project they had spent months working on. On the other hand, people may make misguided decisions on the use of public funds; the state has to hand real decision-making power over to encourage participation, while safe-guarding these funds; participation becomes a ‘complicated balancing act’ (Ellner, 2009, p. 14).

Parties as well as the ‘associated citizen’ play a role in our experiments. In Latin America, particularly Brazil, with its diverse range of partici-patory experiments under different parties, scholars have explored the variables which shape the experiments and their outcomes (e.g., Abers, 1996; Avritzer, 2009; Goldfrank, 2007; Wampler, 2004). Mass or electoral party identity; governing and opposition party relationships; relation-ships between movements and parties and willingness of movements to cooperate with rather than disrupt the experiment are some of the fac-tors they have identified. Our contribution to this debate is to suggest also that the nature of the normative project matters (something which itself comes out of historical struggles, of course), or the vision of dem-ocracy, the market and the ‘subjects’ of the process. To what extent does the participatory architecture emerging from these competing visions enable those ‘subjects’ to shape and reshape processes, gaining as they do some confidence in their capacity to act and a willingness to do so with the interests of others in mind?

Participatory governance

By contrast to our Latin American experiments, where varied concep-tions of participatory democracy were relatively high on the agenda, the UK examples privileged participatory governance. Participatory governance offered ‘controlled inclusion’. The ‘participatory citizen’ as well as the ‘associated citizen’ were discursively recognised as ‘subjects’ of participatory experiments, and the poor as beneficiaries. However, the ‘community’ was also to be ‘empowered’. The outcome, at least from the evidence of our case studies, was often to counteract creative potential with contradictory mechanisms of control and management.



These reflected the difficulties inherent in central and local govern-ment relationships, and conflicting political positions between and within political parties. It would be wrong to lay this simplistically at the door of New Labour. Our case studies suggest that there were struc-tural impasses embedded in the entire political system and the political class. As a member of HRACA in Manchester expressed it:

There is a hierarchical or pyramidal power situation in this country which is so engrained, and I don’t say that’s right, I’m not putting any moral value on it, but I think that is there and if it works it works perfectly OK and it does actually save a good number of people from being hassled or overworked. It’s downfall is that it does concentrate decisions, power and voices in those who would probably be vocal anyway. (Interview, 9 November 2006)

Change becomes extraordinarily difficult in the face of multiple forms of vested interest at all levels, including within the voluntary sector organisations and even the ‘community’. Enabling and empowering are blocked when no one who has power, however limited, really wishes to hand it over. New Labour aspired to modernise decision making and rekindle interest and faith in representative democracy through more participative space. However, the kind of activism which pushes for democratic change, informed by a body of ideas and mobilising tradi-tions, was absent. The sparks of this which remained were weak in the face of the formalised architecture of participation; or critical partici-pants had themselves lost the connections with realities of disempow-ered and marginalised communities.

In the early years of New Labour, the commitment to ‘change’ over ‘control’ was greater and the Community Empowerment Networks reflect this. They were mechanisms for linking the ‘associated citizen’ with the new partnership spaces in the most deprived authorities. We worked with them in two cities to illustrate the struggle to turn govern-ance into democratisation, and the local as well as national forces which acted to reverse this. Our third city of Salford, whose leadership went further than the central government and our other cities in devolving decision making, still embodies structural impediments to participatory democracy. These remain throughout society and with the ‘governed’ as well as the ‘governors’. The former have been constructed as subjects of a representative democratic system, not of a participatory one. Their relationship with the elected state centres mostly around complaining, receiving, pressuring and demanding and, intermittently, voting. The



demise of autonomous expressions and formative political experiences outside the state has diminished this repertoire. Parochial attitudes can impede the transforming impact on this culture of new participatory space, unless the space is shaped with this transformation in mind. By contrast, in both Porto Alegre and Medellín, participatory budgeting fostered interaction across neighbourhoods and even citywide.

The logic of participatory governance is to selectively include and foster relationships which accommodate to, rather than challenge, deci-sion makers. It cannot deal with critique and innovation generated by the participative process itself. In our UK case studies, the cities were all struggling with the aftermath of de-industrialisation. Traditional solidarities amongst working-class communities had been fractured, along with self-confidence and aspiration. The minority ethnic work-ing classes built on cultural solidarities to survive economic decline. Narrow visions, lack of experience of social interaction, mistrust of power holders and lack of confidence in themselves have limited grass-roots capacity to make effective use of opportunities to participate. The middle classes seem increasingly distanced spatially and socially from the enclaves of poverty in their cities. While they have built new asso-ciational forms which express the search for social improvement and reform, these are often well-funded and professionalised organisations, a layer of mediation between politics and people but one which does not reduce the distance between them. In such historical conditions, the ambiguity of New Labour’s construction of the ‘citizen’ as both consumer and participant produced a confusing message which those local government leaders with little commitment to the latter easily subverted. Nevertheless, by tracking with participants their use of the spaces which opened up under New Labour, we could identify processes from which we can learn. Despite all the flaws and problems we have identified, it was important to start from reality.

Frameworks, structures and process

Our research suggests that we are still some way from knowing how to prioritise ‘process’ over ‘thing’ without distortion by either dom-inating power or structurelessness. Multiple challenges to people and planet can be met by demands for more order ‘from above’ or more participation ‘from below’. The instrumental and delivery approach to participation fails to recognise the slow pace of human learning. Spatio-temporal expectations shape the participatory process, which becomes mired in a frenetic and competitive effort to quantify and count out-puts. These outputs are positively valued against the less measurable



value of releasing and engaging more and more talent in the search for solutions to problems. We need the ‘people with cheque books’ who can deliver, argues the leader of Bradford Council. Thousands of houses must be quickly built, says Chávez. Rather than ‘subjects’, the poor eas-ily become the ‘crowd in the city’, a phrase which (independently of each other) appears in both our Porto Alegre and Manchester case stud-ies. While no one denies the scarcity of resources or the urgency of need, participatory process can ensure solutions to problems are adequate and encourage people not to expect the ‘quick fix’. While participation can slow things down, it can also ensure they are done properly, as a Salford local government officer expressed it:

I think we get more local input ... I don’t think we could necessarily say that Community Committees slow processes down, but when you involve partners, whether it’s communities, agencies, other directors or whatever, the very fact that you’re entering into a partnership means that you have to make decisions in line with the partnership timescales. So instead of me being able to sit here and say, ‘Right, I’ve got this money. Section 106. Spend it there, there, and there’. I might not make the best decision on my own, but you would be able to make it much quicker. It might not be the right decision. That’s the beauty of getting the local community in. You hope you get the right decision. Perhaps not as quick, but you will definitely get a bet-ter right decision. (Interview, 18 August 2008)

In this section we have seen how macro-frameworks impact on who participates and whether participation is an open process of continu-ous becoming or a fixed construction only changeable through disrup-tive intervention. Yet we have argued strongly that we need to take all experimentation seriously as learning opportunities which can deepen our understanding of participatory practice. Before exploring what we have learned, the next section explores the objections to participation which still inhibit our willingness to experiment more.

Participation as a field of study

Participation enthusiasts often forget that the argument is very far from won and that they have to work very hard to win it. The crisis of representative democracy may be universally recognised. How it should be replaced or complemented is not. In the Introduction we heard serious misgivings about participation from Robert Dahl and



Vivien Lowndes: Assembly democracy will still only enable the few to speak; powerful majorities will drown out the minorities; participants cannot think long term as well as short term; they cannot consider the interests of others as well as their own; elite manipulation of direct democracy may be unavoidable.

Gerry Stoker (2006) has also constructed a robust case against ‘over-prescription’ when it comes to citizen participation. A democratic sys-tem, he argues (p. 154) ‘does not require the participation of all the people or all of the time. ... We need a politics for amateurs because, for most people, politics is not their first choice of activity. ... Advocates of engagement over-prescribe particular forms of engagement and they misjudge the extent and nature of the engagement that people want.’ He takes issue with the emergent strand of democratic theory around deliberation, and while he sees some value in it, often, he argues (p. 156), ‘the goal in politics is not so much consensus but more a will-ingness to fudge and make a messy compromise that enables all sides to move on and live to come back and fight another day’. He questions the heavy rule-bound character of some efforts to construct delibera-tive spaces. Stoker’s response to the disenchantment with democracy is to call for a reasonable and realistic approach, which recognises the need for inputs from government and citizens to address the complex-ity of modern governance, but which does not have to be intensive or deliberative.

These are reasonable objections, which cannot, we suggest, be con-tested only theoretically. We need to build a field of study which makes use of empirical research as well as theoretical proposition, and in a way which builds with participants, feeds back to them and encourages as wide a debate as possible, as well as more experimentation. It suggests that our tools for theorising participation remain quite inadequate and still based on a relatively narrow range of historical examples which, apart from Athens’s century or more of citizens’ rule, were mostly short lived. Nevertheless, they continue to inspire. Porto Alegre was a ‘sym-bolic multiplier’ of experiments which spread throughout the world, from China to the UK. However, the arguments for participatory dem-ocracy cannot easily break through the constraints of antagonistic normative worldviews; ‘common sense’ interpretations of how rela-tionships between government and governed ‘must be’; unchallenged assumptions about what people want and what they will do if given the opportunity to participate; fears of chaos, of loss of existing legit-imate decision-making norms and of ill-informed ‘mob’ rule. The his-toric dominance of representative democracy will not easily be shaken,



despite its decreasing legitimacy, as ‘the worst form of government apart from all the others’, in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase. In our own study, we have seen that some of the problems associated with participatory decision making can be overcome if there is the political will and imagination to do so. In the final section, we summarise our learning.

Participation in practice

The ladder juxtaposes powerless citizens with the powerful in order to highlight the fundamental divisions between them. In actual-ity, neither the have-nots nor the power holders are homogeneous blocs. Each group encompasses a host of divergent points of view, significant cleavages, competing vested interests, and splintered subgroups. The justification for using such simplistic abstractions is that in most cases the have-nots really do perceive the powerful as a monolithic “system,” and power holders actually do view the have-nots as a sea of “those people,” with little comprehension of the class and caste differences among them. It should be noted that the typology does not include an analysis of the most significant roadblocks to achieving genuine levels of participation. These road-blocks lie on both sides of the simplistic fence. On the power hold-ers’ side, they include racism, paternalism, and resistance to power redistribution. On the have-nots’ side, they include inadequacies of the poor community’s political socioeconomic infrastructure and knowledge-base, plus difficulties of organising a representative and accountable citizens’ group in the face of futility, alienation and dis-trust. (Arnstein, 2007, p. 236)

People often differentiate between system maintenance forms of par-ticipation, identified by loose language such as ‘involvement’ and ‘consultation’, and participation which generates ‘change’, a lan-guage which is also loose and aspirational. In our research we tried to sharpen this by focusing on particular contexts and opportunities for influencing change and the difficulties this entailed. Caution is required in generalising from our case studies. But our methodology of working with change agents, coupled with an in-depth focus over time as well as space of their actions, tells us things which cannot be ignored if we are to be serious about building the case for participa-tory democracy. This section identifies the key themes which emerge across our experiments, using our case study chapters and the body



of interviews they are based on. In that sense, they can be considered the most robust affirmations we can make from our research about participatory practice, in that they rise across and above contextual specificities. Our research does not overcome all the objections to par-ticipation, nor does it celebrate unequivocal achievements. However, it does reveal possibilities. For each problem which arose through participatory experimentation, at least partial enlightenment also emerged, which in turn, it is hoped, will provoke more experimenta-tion and research.

Grassroots experiences of participation

It is often argued that most people do not wish to participate in deci-sion making. Our research also found a range of responses on what motivated people. At the grassroots, motivations are often very specific, as Box 10.1 illustrates. Improving the neighbourhood, gaining access to services, helping others, feeling greater control over life, supporting a particular cause, and the pleasure of social interaction emerge. Our research participants tended not to have prior agendas of wider change when they began to participate, but they welcomed new forms of par-ticipation which promised decision-making power.

Box 10.1 Why participate?

I’m still struggling to work out what they all do (LSP, CN4M). I’m also a bit suspicious, all these groups, it’s more meetings that we need to attend and it all takes up time which I haven’t got, and really I want to spend my time focusing on trying to stop them (HRACA member, Manchester).I just think it gives me knowledge about what’s going on in my area

(Community Committee member, Salford).Yeah, I love the drama of it (Ibid.).I absolutely enjoy them. I think they’re great. I enjoy Community

Committee. I enjoy the banter. I enjoy the battle (another member).I’d say the outcome is about people having the opportunity to have a

slightly greater degree of control over things that affect them and that affect their community. So that they’re not simply the object of change or being affected by change, but being able to affect change (a third member).

I have collaborated a lot with neighbourhood associations because I like to work for others. ... I don’t like to see humiliations within my communi-ties. ... I don’t like to see a person suffering because his house is collapsing, I give a hand ... (OCA participant, Caracas).

When I began to work for the community as a neighbour, it was because of lack of public services in this sector, we had no water, no roads ... through



For many, this narrowness of motivation limits the possibility that par-ticipation could ever have a wider democratising role. Yet, this fails to take into account the awareness and self-esteem which interacting with others can foster.

In our research team, we often talked about ‘participatory con-sciousness’; the sense, in other words, that the act of participating and interacting with others can generate a new level of self-understanding and broader awareness, some kind of transforming experience with transformative effects. Our research did find evidence of this, as Box 10.2 illustrates. The case of the rubbish recyclers of Porto Alegre also illustrates the converse; Navarro (this volume) traces the conse-quences for self-esteem and relationships of the shift inwards of the workers, as the city’s participatory project ceased to engage with the most impoverished and least politicised, and they in turn ceased to see themselves as participants. Participatory space can enable people to think differently about themselves and their relationships with others. The experience from the OCA in Caracas suggests that self-organisation based on principles of horizontality can be particularly affirming. Participatory spaces can become more meaningful when people bring prior histories of self-organising to them. Also, experi-ence in one space can lead people to want to take part in others and even to create their own. Participation can have its own multiplier effects.

participation we improve our quality of life ... get solutions to our problems from the institutions (MTA participant, Caracas).

We have participated because we believe that resources should reach the people who need them (another MTA participant, Caracas).

In general, personally, I am participating in this because in some way it was an attempt to explore a new way of participating (community partici-pant in PB, Medellín).

Box 10.2 Participation as a transforming experience

I started to participate because we needed repairs and services. I ended up feeling really passionate about the process. I believe that it can be used as a tool for those classes less favoured. I felt more of a citizen in this when we started off, at the beginning of the PB. I felt this empowerment’ ( community leader, Porto Alegre).I mean, when I first went there, I wouldn’t have said I wouldn’t have dared

stood up and say anything. I would have been ‘Oh my god’ quaking in my



voice and everything and you know ... I would never have said anything, but now I think, well actually, it’s my right. But I think, you know, I think a lot of people wouldn’t. I think, you know, I’ve seen people go, but they’ve only gone once. And it doesn’t surprise me (Community Committee mem-ber, Salford).

And I love it when people when the community has a point. I mean, some-times I go there and I think, you know, I think ‘For god’s sake, sit down’. You know, but I think for me, I like to see that ... that people there are people in the community that are so intelligent and ... I don’t know whether there’s an assumption that if you live here, that you’re stupid. And I like that. I like to see that people can get their point across. And that, you know, local mums or, you know, that people that have lived here all their lives that they are astute and very sharp and I think ‘Good on you’ (Ibid.).

And I think the more people get involved, they naturally get involved in more and more of the agendas and they see how a lot of it starts to interact (local government officer, Salford).

I feel that once you’ve given people that ownership in the process, I think you’re a step ahead in terms of like making a difference. And the other proc-esses like, it’s been decided for you, and people think, oh well, what the hell, you just sort of like you got no choice. So I think that’s what the difference is, I think something like this gives a ... changes the mindset in terms of people’s thinking (participant in Bradford PB).

I remember vividly how it was when I first joined ... I found it really hard, it was something I had had no experience of, taking part in meet-ings, to come in from the outside, they had long meetings and I remember thinking, these people can really talk, whereas I couldn’t say anything, but gradually, I got used to it, and now I don’t mind going to meetings, in fact sometimes they are interesting and now I can say things (member of HRACA Manchester).

We have changed in the sense we have matured a lot; we feel responsible for our communities, to improve our communities, well, we have strength ourselves to make infrastructural improvements, to administer them; we don’t have to wait for the Municipality to resolve things for us’ (MTA par-ticipant, Caracas).

I am 75 per cent different to what I was in 2000, and the difference between us and other members of the Mesa, is that we have a vision for the future (another MTA participant, Caracas).

The relationship between the OCA and the community is quite partici-pative, because we call people together and we take ... we all take decisions, that’s why the OCA communicates with its leadership board, because the board ... we are all equal ... the OCA is a ... we are all OCA (OCA participant, Caracas).

I think [participation] has improved, it has improved quite a lot, because through forming the Water Roundtables, from there, the Urban Land Committees have also formed ... (MTA participant, Caracas).

In the process of participatory budgeting, I have seen how leaders stop see-ing that their actions are only tied to their particular interests (community activist, Medellín).



However, we also found that there were many factors which inhibit participation or interrupt the potential for greater self-understanding and awareness of others. The obstacles our research participants identified to participation varied according to context. Some of the inhibitors, particu-larly in the Latin American case, are to do with the impact of corrup-tion, violence and insecurity and mistrust in the integrity of community and political leaders. In the UK, established norms of meetings were very off-putting to participants; long presentations were particularly disliked. Organisers’ fear of conflict also constrained meeting dynamics, as well as participants’ fears of ‘looking stupid’. Bullying and self-seeking lead-ership styles are cross-contextual factors which negatively influence the quality of participatory space and willingness to participate. Leadership must go beyond self-interest and nurture a sense of concern for others. Participation must also lead to a response and an outcome if it is to multi-ply and sustain itself. There is much mistrust to overcome. Most of our research was with poor communities or was about participation aimed at such communities. The exception was middle-class residents in Medellín’s Comuna 11, but these had a history of activism in environmental and human rights movements. Although there are exceptions, including in Caracas where some communal councils have sprung up in middle-class areas, in general wealthier citizens did not participate very actively, surely a topic for further research. These obstacles to participation are conveyed through the voices of our research participants in Box 10.3.

Box 10.3 Reasons not to participate

And being afraid to say something out of turn and everybody going ‘er’ and. I, yeah, not and I don’t know about being frightened by any come-backs, but … For me, it’s about looking stupid. If I say something stupid, they might think, well where – ‘Who the hell’ because I know we laugh at people (Community Committee member, Salford).There are people who hate meetings, who would never even think about

going to a meeting. So as long as you have that kind of structure, it will never be suitable for them. And maybe it doesn’t have to be suitable for them (another member, Salford).

I’m aware, have been aware of arguments of people refusing to go back, because of some people acting as bullies … I’m aware of probably instances where people simply haven’t understood what was going on (Ibid.).

The way that the committees work and the regime they’re embedded within requires a lot of meeting skills, committee skills, and it really requires … the ability to deal with spreadsheets, and to understand the technicality of gov-ernment policy and to keep on top of the various waves of regimes that pour out of … the initiatives … of government. All of which are extremely time consuming and soul destroying (VCS participant, Bradford).



Thorny questions about participation

Not only have participation sceptics produced a range of arguments against participation, our research also raised a number of problem areas.

The role of the ‘associated’ and ‘individual’ citizen

Experiences of self-organisation and collective action play an import-ant role in participation. By creating their own participatory spaces, people gain skills which can be brought into spaces created ‘from above’, making them livelier and more responsive to participants who are already sensitive and aware of how politics and power oper-ate. Such experiences can be important to preventing elite and party

I remember they had a consultation meeting. I remember standing at the back and feeling like a complete outsider, most of the people there were pro-fessionals, people who were paid to be there and it was held during the day-time. The guy stood at the front and did his presentation, full of ideas about the future and about other areas. It didn’t seem relevant … it was as if it had already been decided (member of HRACA, Manchester).

Park? Sports field? Road? That is in a very bad state. Insecurity? Don’t even talk about that one. In other words, all the problems are present. What are the solutions that are proposed? Well, many things are now being proposed and we have our own solutions, but also we need an echo from the corre-sponding authorities to each problem, we need an echo … (member of OCA, Caracas).

What happens is that people stop coming for one thing or another, the assemblies … people don’t come; when it’s not that it’s raining, when it’s not that there was … some problem in the barrio … we have a lot of insecurity, then always for one thing or another [participation] has declined (another member MTA, Caracas).

Well, the Technical Water Roundtable with the community … it’s that the people are very sceptical also, because people, well … they have said too many lies to the communities … and now when you come to them with a proposal, with a suggestion, you don’t get the receptivity of the past … we work very hard, for that reason, because they don’t believe in you. But yes, as we have worked in a form which doesn’t … which is based on truth, on the basis of truth, not of lies, then the community has shown receptivity to us … (member MTA, Caracas).

If there are corrupt leaders in a community, the community rejects them in some way, there are many ways of rejecting a leader, even silence is rejec-tion, non-participating … (community activist, Medellín).

This is what one dares to say, that this is what has left the country in a mess … violence has much to do with this and that’s a reason why in the comuna there has never been a process of participation as there is today, because of violence (another community activist, Medellín).



manipulation of direct participation, and enabling the poorest to pur-sue their agendas and influence processes. Poor women were able to use PB in Porto Alegre to gain confidence and then, through AEPPA, press their claim to qualify as popular educators in the peripheral neighbourhoods so that

militants of the social movement, or residents from the periphery, poor people ... will be qualified and are going to work with our chil-dren. So it will be another group of workers, who are not middle class, who reach the periphery. (Interview, ex-Minister of Education under the PT, 28 July 2006)

However, our research also shows that organisations can act to pre-vent the participation of others. This was the reason that PB in Porto Alegre opted for direct participation, while recognising the import-ance of groups and movements. One of the features of the shift to participatory governance in that city has been the reversal of this and increasing weight placed on associations of the ‘Third Sector’ to bid for contracts. In Latin America as well as the UK, groups can easily become self-referential, interest seeking and distant from those who do not choose to associate. Associational cultures often reproduce exclusionary practices and attitudes as much as state cultures. The conclusion of one member of Salford’s Community Committees was that:

I think you’d need to move away from the requirement of being nom-inated by constitutive groups. Simply because, probably the majority of the community, probably the vast majority, don’t get involved in the constitutive groups. And so, can never have a voice’. (Interview, 25 January 2008)

A more participatory democracy would need to promote actively free and fluid interactions between individuals and groups as well as group solidarities. It would encourage the ‘associated citizen’ to look to non-associated citizens as well as the state.

Representation and participation

Participation does not do away with questions of representation. This is true whether the vision is for an entirely participatory democracy or one which complements such democracy with the representative form. Where participation is based on organised groups, there are issues of



how participants are chosen and how they communicate with their group, as this Salford Community Committee member points out:

How then do you make people who come forward as representatives accountable ... to the organisations they claim to represent? So that was a difficult balance. Yes, encourage people and organisations to come forward in a self-selecting way, how do you make them account-able? But don’t elect them? Because you give them an authority that is then almost on a par with councillors and we didn’t want that. (Interview, 17 January 2008)

The Community Empowerment Networks in Manchester and Bradford struggled with this question, and in Manchester, CN4M consciously called those who sat on thematic partnership spaces from the VCS ‘par-ticipants’ not ‘representatives’. In Caracas, the term vocero, or spokes-person, was used to make a similar distinction, and in Porto Alegre, democratic structuring required feedback, embedded rights of recall, rotation of tasks and time-limited mandates. However, as we have seen, this was not sustained once participation ceased to be the focus of the local administration. Democratic structuring needs to embed itself and participation, particularly of the poorest, become expected and natural.

How can the participatory sphere be a legitimate public arena?

Our Latin American cases suggest that representatives could become reconciled to and even welcome a stronger participatory sphere. In the UK, however, one of the most repeated objections to participation is that elections provide a mandate and therefore give legitimacy to deci-sions; budget decisions where there is no accountability to an electorate are problematic. As the leader of Salford Council put it:

Now, participation is incredibly important ... but what I don’t want us to run away with the idea ... that participants somehow have a superior mandate to councillors in that respect. I think I pointed out I think that the maximum meeting we’ve had ... at the community meeting was just over 100 people I think, and I pointed out that in one ward last year, 2,000 people voted which is 20 times what actu-ally is our Community Committee. (Interview, 21 August 2008)

Individual legitimacy can be won, of course, through hard work, knowledge and skills, moral behaviour and reputation. However, if the idea is to explore the potential of enlarging the arena of participatory



democracy, even if not to replace representative democracy, at least to complement it, then the legitimisation of participatory spaces becomes an issue. The most obvious starting point is that of selection meth-ods for participants. Even direct democracy, as discussed, involves representation. However, the form of selection does not have to be election. The idea of lot or sortition could well be an alternative form of selection, as it once was for the ancient Greeks. The advantage is that by randomly selecting citizens for office, for service or for part-nership and other bodies, the opportunity to participate is impartially diffused in society. The principle is embodied in the (legitimised) jury system in the UK and isolated experiments in civic lotteries have taken place, such as for Citizens’ Assemblies in Ontario and British Columbia in Canada between 2004 and 2006 (Dowlen, 2008). Although such a system could still be used by individuals with partisan connections, this would break the spirit of it, which if accepted would be a way of refreshing party systems and others heavily dependent on ‘associated citizens’.

Democratic intelligence

At the end of the day, the quality of the participatory space will also contribute to building legitimacy and acceptance of participatory democratic innovation. Democratic intelligence refers to the learning which accumulates as people interact with each other as they engage in public decision making. It encompasses the idea that ultimately, par-ticipation is a new way of seeing the ‘Other’. It assumes that the best societal outcomes emerge as we begin to value the ‘Other’ as we value ourselves. In some of our case studies, there were references to ‘skills’ for participation which could be taught. In Manchester, Community Pride ran a ‘School for Participation’; in Porto Alegre, CIDADE were con-stantly training people in how to engage with PB. There is no doubt that training and courses can contribute to democratic intelligence. Sometimes, people do have a natural democratic intelligence, such as strong empathy and willingness to hold back opinion so that others can speak. This form of intelligence is often gendered, as women are more socialised into supporting roles at the community level rather than pro-tagonistic ones in a decision-making arena. Listening, as this member of Salford’s Community Committee points out, is a particularly import-ant component of democratic intelligence:

I think, one skill is listening, so that they actually understand what is being said and then don’t just reject out of prejudice. I think very



often people don’t listen enough, so they don’t actually make an objective decision. ... I think the skills around consideration, so that even though it might not be one person’s priority, they respect the need in others. (Interview, 17 January 2008)

One of Dahl’s objections to participation in the densely populated modern city is the sheer numbers who attend assemblies, so that there is time for only a few to speak. Here, however, democratic structur-ing can possibly play a role in limiting time for interventions. In Porto Alegre, people could only speak for three minutes in the PB council, although this principle was not extended to other spaces. Breaking down to smaller groups can also build more inclusive space, followed by rapporteur summaries to plenaries, something increasingly common in conferences. There is a growing volume of literature and manuals on how to facilitate group dynamics and participation, which offers tools for democratising participatory spaces, as well as promoting ‘open spaces’, so that people can build agendas there rather than respond to pre-established ones. The growing theoretical and practical literature on deliberation is also providing many new insights into how to gener-ate discussion, including where there is radical disagreement, as well as how to learn to compromise. In Salford, a member of the Community Committee felt that reasoned argument was a means of enhancing the legitimacy of the participatory space:

I wouldn’t use the word ‘transfer of legitimacy’. I don’t think there’s been a transfer, I think the councillors still retain that role of legit-imacy, but I think there has been a recognition of the value of Community Committee. ... I think there’s evidence of a willingness to learn to members of committee, particularly some members of committee and particularly where structured arguments are used. And I would see that as, in one sense, reasoned discussion. (Interview, 25 January 2008)

Democratic intelligence accumulates through practice and only as long as the space itself nurtures it and can, in turn, respond flexibly to new learning. This means that time and commitment to participation must be there, something which may only emerge from convincing evidence that participation generates something tangible and reward-ing. In Porto Alegre, the figures for participation rose only once it became clear that it did mean real benefits. We face a challenge there-fore. Democratic intelligence is needed for participatory space to be



meaningful, but will only evolve once the participatory space proves over time that it can be meaningful. Porto Alegre benefited for a long time from committed city leadership, which meant that there was time for mistakes to be made and democratic intelligence to form.

Beyond ‘militant particularisms’

What then is the significance of community mobilisation? The con-cept I wish to use here is the one that Raymond Williams tentatively suggested, and which he then shrank away from, but which I want to resurrect. It is what Williams calls ‘militant particularism’. This idea suggests that almost all radical movements have their origin in some place, with a particular set of issues which people are pursu-ing and following. The key issue is whether that militant particular-ism simply remains localised or whether, at some point or other, it spills over into some more universal construction. ... It seems to me that the notion of community, viewed in this way, can be a positive moment within a political process. However, it is only a positive moment if it ceases to be an end in itself, ceases to be a thing which is going to solve all of our problems, and starts to be a moment in this process of broader construction of a more universal set of values which are going to be about how the city is going to be as a whole. (Harvey, 1997, reprinted 2007 p.230)

A very strong argument against participation is that people often use it to defend very particular interests, and these are often based on prej-udiced views as well as the promotion of partisan interests. Political leaders, often rightly, fear that this could limit their capacity to pro-tect minority interests, for example. The leader of Salford Council gives this example:

Well, I think not all decisions can be made at a local level, I’m quite clear about that, because for example, ... in Salford some years ago we did have to have somewhere for gypsies to go, a suitable site for gypsies. We couldn’t possibly leave that to every local area to say whether they wanted it or not wanted it, because I would practic-ally guarantee that every area would have said that they didn’t want it. Somewhere had to be chosen and even after that we had to go through a process of consultation about safeguarding our local com-munities, but somewhere, you know, we had to make a decision. (Interview, 15 January 2008)



We have quoted amply from Salford in the last few sections, but Miller (this volume) argues strongly that the city has found it hard to overcome parochial mindsets. An effort to experiment with participa-tion involving the Jewish community of the city failed when that com-munity voted only for the interests of its own. Other social groups in the city have found it hard to move beyond their own interests and think of the city as a whole. In Bradford PB, there were fears of some-thing similar, but in the end the Asian community was more partisan amongst itself than towards the ‘white’ community. In Medellín, there is evidence that there was a real shift in perception through the struc-turing of the PB process, which led neighbourhoods into taking a more cross-comuna vision, and eventually a more citywide one:

It’s a process of renovation that’s happening, I think that equally, people are thinking in the strategic, I think that communities are thinking, despite the project as such, yes, the project of the neigh-bourhood, they are also thinking, in the macro, project of the comuna or corregimiento and of the city. (community activist from Zone 1, May 2005)

This shift beyond the particular was visible also in the number of com-munities in Medellin who prioritized newspapers for the comuna in the PB, in a notable process of identity formation. Harvey’s quote tells us that militant parochialisms can be the foundation for a new and broader vision. The key point is that the democratic structuring must nurture this and have the capacity to weight priorities and exchange viewpoints. There will always be many different views on an issue, and turning to Salford once again, this local government officer sums up very well the need to accept peoples’ varied experiences and multiple perspectives on how to solve problems:

You know, so they’re not necessarily all going to have the same vision and I wouldn’t expect people to do. If you’ve – I don’t know, let’s take young people. If you’ve been brought up in Duchy or Broughton as a young person, you’re going to be exposed to certain experiences. If you come in from a migrant workers’ family or from an asylum seeker’s family that’s perhaps escaping persecution by government agencies abroad or whatever, you’re going to have a completely dif-ferent set of experiences. There is no way you can necessarily have the same vision. Everybody can have the same vision as far as, ‘We



want to live in an area that’s peaceful, everybody gets on, everybody can earn a good living and there’s no hassle’. That’s – that’s fine. But when you get down to the individual vision of ‘This is what we want to see happen’, you can’t expect everybody to come with exactly the same agenda. We’re all creatures of our experiences and history. If we didn’t learn from what we’ve done in the past, we’d be a bit of a sad case. (Interview, 18 August 2008)

The trick is to seek continuously ways to relate our own experiences to that of others and improve our capacity to make fair judgments when experiences and interests conflict. The Athenians took the view that individual judgment improves when we are given the opportunity to exercise it in collectivities.

Conclusion

This research has tried to draw out the potentialities, record the trans-forming moments as well as recognise the limitations of new participa-tion spaces. There is a lot of motivation to participate, but equally many inhibitors. Participation can be a ‘school for citizenship’ (Abers, 1996) as well as a way of generating a change-oriented society in which all are involved. However, this requires us to think carefully about the demo-cratic structuring which could enable this and which recognises and addresses power asymmetries. The scope for abuse of power narrows as more people learn how to recognise it. We can then shift from a view of participation as ‘empowerment’ to one of ‘transforming power’, so that participation becomes a dynamic experience of social interaction which continuously brings out the best of each participant rather then reproduces the domination of one over the other.

Our research suggests that participatory dynamics have to be con-stantly renewed if participants are not to become as distanced from the broader society as representative democracy. This involves changes in the broader society, not just in the participatory spaces. Without improved education, better livelihoods and incomes, social mobil-ity, greater equity and less violence, participation may still create new elites. The poorest must be seen as subjects of these changes. And while participation should contribute to them, it is the dialectical relationship between ‘process’ and ‘thing’ which will ensure the ongoing dynamic of transformation. The outcome of more participation cannot be pre-determined and controlled if it is to attract people used to looking to self-selected leaders and elected representatives to solve problems. Over



the last two decades, although neoliberalism has been one of the frame-works under which new forms of participation have emerged, it has also constrained them and aligned them with market-driven values. The economic recession of 2009 was a painful reminder of the fallibility of the view that the ‘market knows best’, and of the elected representa-tives who promoted it.

As the idea of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ returns in the first dec-ade of the twenty-first century in the wake of economic and political crises, it will hopefully encourage more attention to how this can be exercised. Our experiments do not tell us about how participatory dem-ocracy might work at a more national or global level, or which decisions are best made through direct, indirect, or representative democratic forms. They do, however, offer insight into the conditions which make participation feasible, self-generating, meaningful and progressive and which do not. Over time, more and more sectors of society could be per-suaded that the future is brighter and more sustainable if all the people, but especially the poorest, are included in shaping it. The revival of the ancient principal of the equal right to take part would not only revital-ise our democracies but also encourage everyone to take responsibility for the challenges which face the planet in the 21st century.

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Houtzager, P., Lavalle, A.G., and Acharya, A. 2003. Who Participates? Civil Society and the New Democratic Politics in Sao Paulo, Brazil. IDS Working Paper 210. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

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255

action research, 35, 37AEPPA, see Popular Education

Association of Porto Alegre (AEPPA)

agenda sharing, 47anonymity, 44anti-capitalism, 231Antímano Parish, 102, 105,

108–9apathy, 115–16Aristotle, 3, 6Arnstein, Sherry, 229, 232, 240assembly democracy, 4, 239associated citizens, 230, 231, 235,

245–6associational democracy, 8–10Athenian democracy, 3, 5–6, 239authority, private sources of, 13autonomy, 61, 112–14, 120, 122,

138, 150, 198, 227

Baierle, Sérgio, 81Baldó, Josefina, 109–10Barber, Benjamin, 5barrios, 101–5

regeneration of the, 108–24

safety issues in, 116BCP, see Building Communities

Partnership (BCP)Blair, Tony, 25, 29Blears, Hazel, 26Blunkett, David, 26Bolivarian Circles (CBs), 120–4Bolivarianism, 100–1, 106, 114–17,

120–4Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 77, 83–4, 88Bradford, UK, 16, 180–204

CNet, 186–8, 194context of, 182–3co-production of knowledge in,

184–5image of, 17

implementation challenges in, 45–6, 47

innovations and case studies, 41local issues, 180Local Strategic Partnerships, 185–6participation in, 180–1, 185–8participatory budgeting in, 188–91,

201–3political leadership in, 181professionalised participation in,

188–202socioeconomic data, 19–21Voluntary and Community Sector

in, 181, 184, 191–5Bradford Resource Centre (BRC), 183,

188Bradford Vision, 185–9, 195Brazil

civic constitution, 53grassroots struggle for democracy

in, 52–4national politics, 53–4participatory institutions in,

17–18see also Porto Alegre, Brazil

brokerage system, 7Building Communities Partnership

(BCP), 198–9bureaucracy, 114, 151, 214, 219

Cameron, David, 29capital

cultural, 84ebb and flow of, 12economic, 84forms of, 83–4political, 77, 84, 89social, 9, 10, 84, 183symbolic, 84, 96–7

capitalism, 3, 9, 10, 16, 23, 29, 100, 101, 231

Caracas, Venezuela, 16, 23, 231, 234–5

Index

9780230_229440_13_ind.indd 2559780230_229440_13_ind.indd 255 12/7/2009 2:18:38 PM12/7/2009 2:18:38 PM

256 Index

Caracas, Venezuela – continuedbarrios of, 101–5, 108–24global reputation, 16–17implementation challenges in, 46innovations and case studies, 41,

100–25participatory research in, 105–8political administration, 102politics in, 104–5Self-Managing Community

Organisations (OCA) in, 117–20social consortium in, 109–10socioeconomic data, 19–21, 102–5Technical Water Round-Tables

(MTA) in, 106, 108–11, 117–20urban problems in, 108–9

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 53Carpintero barrio, 102, 106Castoriadis, Cornelius, 55Catholic Church, 53, 76, 82, 87Catuche Consortium, 114CCs, see Communal Councils (CCs)CENs, see Community Empowerment

Networks (CENs)Chácara do Primeiro, 60–1, 67–72ChangeUp initiative, 155Chávez, Hugo, 100, 104, 109, 119,

120–4, 234–5CIDADE, see Urban Studies and

Advisory Centre (CIDADE)cities

global, 59, 154inner, 16post-industrial, 162

citizenassociated, 230, 231, 235, 245–6as consumer, 231participatory, 12, 16, 230, 231,

235–6as rights bearer, 231

citizen participant, 12citizen participation, 14, 51, 229, 230,

232, 239political representation and, 141–6see also participation

Citizens’ Assembly, 110citizenship, 73, 78

bureaucracy and, 151conflict and violence and, 151–2

representation and, 150–1Civic School, 61–2, 66–7civil disobedience, 138civil society, 8–9, 12, 230

participatory, 231–2re-imagined, 16–17in UK, 18, 25

clientelism, 72, 143–4, 147CN4M, see Community

Empowerment Network for Manchester (CN4M)

CNet, 186–8, 194Cold War, 8collective action, 11, 243Collor, Fernando, 53common good, 9Communal Council Law, 116Communal Councils (CCs), 101,

122–4communitarianism, 25community, conception of,

211–13Community Action Councils (JACs),

128, 135–8, 141–6Community Action Plans (CAPs),

209–10, 223community associations, 12, 66, 73,

157see also specific associations

Community Committees, 205–7, 210–15, 217–19, 226–7

form and culture of meetings, 216–17

formation of, 211–12opinions concerning, 217–19representativeness in, 213–15service delivery and, 219–22skills, leadership and structures,

222–6community control movement, 5Community Empowerment Network

for Manchester (CN4M), 157–60, 164–6, 171, 175, 247

Community Empowerment Networks (CENs), 27, 165–6, 186, 236–7, 247

Community Engagement Development Officer (CEDO), 158


Index 257

Community Engagement Strategy, 158

community oligarchies, 47, 66, 143–5, 151

Community Pride Initiative (CPI), 157, 169–74, 207

Community Water Councils (CCAs), 109, 111

consciousness, 36Conservative Party, 29Consultative Councils, 135–7,

142–3contract culture, 66cooperative inquiry, 35–45co-producing knowledge, 34–49

in Bradford, 184–5in Caracas, 107cooperative inquiry and, 36–9in Manchester, 157in Medellín, 130–2participatory research methods

and, 34–6in Porto Alegre, 59–61, 83–6in practice, 39–48in Salford, 208–11

counterpublics, 10creativity, 138–41CTUs, see Urban Land Committees

(CTUs)cultural capital, 84cultural theory of power, 77

Dahl, Robert, 4, 29–30, 238–9, 249data collection, 42–3decentralisation, 13, 15, 61–2decision making

by communities, 199–200community participation in, 205,

222–6top-down, 8

deepening democracy, 79de-industrialisation, 17, 182–3, 237deliberative democracy, 12democracy

assembly, 4, 239associational, 8–10Athenian, 3, 5–6, 239deepening, 79deliberative, 12

direct, 22, 29–30liberal, 8, 13participative. see also participatory

democracyradical, 2–3representative, 1, 3–8, 13, 236,

239–40strong, 5struggle for, in Brazil, 52–4workplace, 5

democratic awakening, 8–13, 15democratic engineering, 22democratic experimentation, 4–5

see also participatory innovationsdemocratic intelligence, 248–50democratic radicalisation, 51democratic structuring, 230developing countries, national

liberation struggles in, 5direct democracy, 22, 29–30direct participation, 54–7, 199–200disengagement, 28Dutra, Olivio, 82

East Salford Community Committee, 210–11, 214–15, 223–4

Eastern Europe, 8ecclesiastical communities, 53–4economic capital, 84education, popular, 61–7elected officials, 7, 199–200elections, 6, 13European Union, 13experiential knowledge, 38, 43extended epistemology, 38

Fajardo, Sergio, 132fascism, 28feminist transformatory

research, 35field diaries, 42–3field researchers, 40, 42–5, 47financial crisis of 2009, 29Fraser, Nancy, 10free citizen, 26Freire, Paulo, 61, 159

gender relations, 83Genro, Tarso, 89


258 Index

global cities, 59, 154global South, 7, 8, 11, 35, 172governance, 230

defined, 14neighbourhood, 25neoliberal, 57–9participatory, 13–15, 235–7in Porto Alegre, 79spaces for, 15

government officials, see officialsGramsci, Antonio, 95, 231grassroots participation

building sustainable, 112–14experiences of, 241–5in Manchester, 157–63see also participation

Greek city-states, 3, 5–6

habitus, 77Hamilton Road Area Community

Association (HRACA), 157, 167–9, 175, 177

hermeneutics, 36higher education, access to,

140–1Hopkins, Kris, 181House of Lords, 6human agency, 96

import-substitution model, 101India, 35industrialisation, 16inequality, 12inner cities, 16inter-subjectivity, 37Italian city-republics, 6

JACs, see Community Action Councils (JACs)

JALs, see local administrative councils (JALs)

jury selection, by sortition, 6

knowledgeco-producing, 34–49experiential, 38, 43practical, 38presentational, 38, 44propositional, 38, 43

La Pedrera barrio, 102–6, 108, 111, 115, 118

Labour Party, 18, 160land regularisation, 57language, 36Latin America

democracy in, 17industrialisation, 16politics in, 23see also specific countries

Leese, Richard, 164left-wing parties, 23Levellers, 4–5liberal democracy, 8, 13Libertador barrio, 102local administrative councils (JALs),

136, 141–6local authorities, 27, 199–202local solidarity governance, 51, 52Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs),

25, 185–6lot, 6

magistrates, 6Manchester, UK, 16, 154–77

City Council, 154, 159, 160–1, 171

City Hall, 164–5, 171, 174, 177Community Pride Initiative (CPI),

169–74context of, 154–6co-production of knowledge in,

157‘culture of distances’ in, 174–7disconnects in, 154grassroots participation in, 157–63Hamilton Road Area Community

Association (HRACA), 167–9implementation challenges in, 46innovations and case studies, 41poverty in, 155–6regeneration narrative, 161–2socioeconomic data, 19–21vision for, 154Voluntary and Community Sector,

154–6, 160–9, 174–7Mancunian Agreement, 158, 159market capitalism, 231market economy, 25


Index 259

market liberalism, 8Marx, Karl, 5Marxism, 231Medellín, Colombia, 16, 127–52,

233–4, 251civic politics in, 132–5context of, 127–30co-production of knowledge in,

130–2demographic growth in, 127emergence of ‘community’,

135–50implementation challenges in,

47–8innovations and case studies, 41municipal actors, 132–5Municipal Council, 132–5, 141Neighbourhood Assemblies (NAs),

135–8paramilitary groups in, 148–50participatory innovations in,

138–41Planning and Participatory

Budgeting Programme in, 127, 132–52

political and social system of, 128–30

public administration of, 146–8socioeconomic data, 19–21violence and crime in, 128–30

mediation, 7Merry, John, 206, 208micro-politics, 77–8, 88–97middle class, political engagement

of, 11Miliband, David, 26militant particularism, 250–2Mill, John Stuart, 3–4Montes, Julio, 110, 119, 121Movement to Socialism (MAS),

104MTAs, see Technical Water

Round-Tablesmunicipal schools, 61–2, 78

National Front, 128national liberation struggles, 5national state agendas, 196–7nation-states, 5, 8, 13

Neighbourhood Action Planning (NAPs), 186–7

Neighbourhood Assemblies (NAs), 135–8, 142

neighbourhood associations, 66neighbourhood forums, 201–3Neighbourhood Renewal Funding

(NRF), 185–9neoliberal governance, 57–9neoliberalism, 23, 29, 231New Labour, 14, 18, 24–7, 29, 156,

170, 181, 186, 206, 236–7non-governmental organizations

(NGOs), 12, 18non-governmental public action, ixnonparticipation, 229

OCAs, see Self-Managing Community Organisations (OCAs)

officialselected, 7local, 199–202selection of, 6service delivery by, 199–200

paramilitary groups, in Medellín, 148–50

Paris Commune, 5parochialism, 219, 250–2participant citizen, 15participant observation, 42–3participation

barriers to, for the poor, 95–7in Bradford, 180–1, 185–8citizen, 229, 230concept of, 1–2direct, 54–7, 199–200as field of study, 238–40frameworks, structures and process,

237–8goal of, 232grassroots experiences of, 241–5inequality and, 12lack of, 115–16ladder of, 229in Manchester, 157–63motivations for, 241–2national agendas for, 196–7obstacles to, 244–5


260 Index

participation – continuedpolitical representation and, 141–6in Porto Alegre, 81in practice, 240–52problem areas for, 245–52professionalised, 188–202recognition of ‘real’, 28–9representation and, 246–7researching, 34–49in Salford, 205, 211–26scepticism about, 199–203service delivery and, 219–22as social process, 232spaces for, 14structural barriers to, 78subjects of, 231–2sustainable grassroots, 112–14tokenistic, 229as transforming experience,

242–3in UK, 180

participative action research, 35participatory budgeting (PB)

in Bradford, 188–91, 201–3decline of, 72–3direct participation and, 54–7effects of, 56emergence of, 52–4introduction to, 51–2in Medellín, 132–52National Strategy, 196neighbourhood improvements

through, 67–72neoliberal governance and, 57–9popular education and, 61–7in Porto Alegre, 51–74, 78, 79, 81in Salford, 207women and, 63

participatory citizen, 12, 16, 230, 231–2, 235–6

participatory consciousness, 242participatory democracy, 2–3, 13–15,

232–5in Brazil, 17–18in Caracas, 100–1experiments in, 5, 22–8legitimacy of, 247–8prospects of, 29–30

size and time constraints, 3–4in Venezuela, 114–17

participatory governance, 13–15, 24, 52, 229, 235–7

participatory innovationsin Bradford, 188–202in Caracas, 41, 100–25in Manchester, 41, 154–6, 160–9,

174–7in Medellín, 138–41politicalisation of, 116in Porto Alegre, 52–9, 78–83in Salford, 205, 211–26

participatory learning and action, 35participatory planning, 145participatory research

in Caracas, 105–8cooperative inquiry and, 36–9critical reflections on, 34–49in Manchester, 157in Medellín, 130–2methods, 34–6see also co-producing knowledge

participatory rural appraisal, 35participatory skills, 8participatory spaces, 15, 29, 192–3,

217–19, 235, 236, 242participatory subject, 54partnerships, 192–3Pateman, Carol, 5People’s Power, 5Perimetral, 79Petare Parish, 102–4, 105phenomenology, 36Planning and Participatory

Budgeting Programme (PB), 127, 132–52

challenges to participation, 146–8citizens’ creativity and technical

expertise in, 138–41citizenship and, 150–2municipal actors, 132–5Neighbourhood Assemblies (NAs),

135–8paramilitary groups and, 148–50tensions and conflicts, 141–6

polis, 5–6political awakening, late-twentieth-

century, 8–13


Index 261

political capital, 77, 84, 89political engagement

poverty and, 95–6social class and, 10–11

political parties, 1, 235political power, 6political representation, citizen

participation and, 141–6political systems, changes in, 7–8politicians

alienation of, 7cynicism about, 1

poorbarriers to participation for the,

95–7non-participation by, 12

popular education, 60, 61–7Popular Education Association of

Porto Alegre (AEPPA), 43–4, 59–67, 246

Popular Front, 52popular organisations, autonomy of,

112–14popular sovereignty, 73Popular Training Institution (IPC),

131–2populism, 23, 28Porto Alegre, Brazil, 16, 231–3, 239

community movements in, 53contract culture, 66co-producing knowledge in, 59–61,

83–6governance in, 79innovations and case studies, 41living conditions in, 80municipal innovation in, 52–9,

78–83neighourhood improvements in,

67–72participatory budgeting in, 51–74,

78, 79, 81popular education in, 61–7rubbish recycling units in, 76–97social organisation, 80–1socioeconomic data, 19–21

post-industrial cities, 162poverty, 78

barrier of, 83–6in Bradford, 180

in Manchester, 155–6political engagement and, 95–6

power, 44, 54, 56, 72, 74, 81cultural theory of, 77imbalances, 48political, 6

power dynamics, 40, 77power structures, 77, 229practical knowledge, 38presentational knowledge, 38, 44professional citizens, 57professionalisation, resistance to,

169–74professionalised participation,

188–202propositional knowledge, 38, 43Public Companies of Medellín,

127–8public disengagement, 28public sphere, 9Putnam, Robert, 9

Radical Cause (Causa R), 104radical democracy, 2–3reality, social construction of, 36recycling units (RUs)

administration of, 84–5co-production of knowledge and,

83–6establishment of, 82members, 87–8, 94–5micro-social processes within, 77,

88–95in Porto Alegre, 82–97

regeneration narrative, 161–2reinsertados, 148–50representation, 3–8, 246–7

citizenship and, 150–1concept of, 1non-democratic element of, 7

representative democracy, 1, 3–8, 13, 236, 239–40

republican ideal, 73research

agenda sharing, 47cooperative inquiry, 36–45data collection, 42–3feedback processes, 43implementation challenges, 45–8


262 Index

research – continuedparticipatory. see participatory

researchresearch participants, 42, 47, 48researcher, subjectivity of the, 37revolutionary chaos, 55Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7Ruben Berta Recycling Association,

86–95Russia, revolutionary, 5

Salford, UK, 16, 205–27City Council, 206, 208–9, 211–13,

221, 226–7Community Committees, 205–7,

210–27context of, 206–8co-production of knowledge in,

208–11image of, 17innovations and case studies, 41militant particularism and, 250–1parochialism in, 219participation in, 205participatory budgeting in, 207participatory innovations in,

211–26representativeness in, 213–15service delivery in, 209–10,

219–22socioeconomic data, 19–21

Self-Managing Community Organisations (OCAs), 101, 106, 110–14, 117–20

self-organisation, 243self-reflection, 37shared meanings, 36social capital, 9, 10, 84, 183social class, political engagement

and, 10–11social consortium, in Caracas,

109–10social construction, of reality, 36social market capitalism, 231socialism, 100sortition, 6spatio-temporal social constructions,

232, 234–5squatters, 113

state, role of, 106state socialism, 8, 13strong democracy, 5strong publics, 10subjectivity, in research process,

37, 39Sucre barrio, 102suffrage, 7supra-national entities, 13symbolic capital, 84, 96–7

Tarso Genro administration, 51Technical Water Round-Tables

(MTAs), 101, 106, 108–11, 116, 117–20

territoriality, 194Third Sector, 9, 14, 25, 27, 66, 181,

231, 244see also Voluntary and Community

Sector (VCS)tokenistic participation, 229trade blocs, 13trade union membership, 10transparency, 44

UK jury system, 6UK parliament, 7Unión barrio, 102, 106, 110, 112United Kingdom

civil society in, 18national policy, 196–7New Labour in, 14, 18, 24–7, 29,

156, 170, 181, 186, 236–7participation in, 180participatory experiments in, 24–8participatory governance in, 236–7welfare state, 18see also Bradford, UK; Manchester,

UK; Salford, UKUnited Socialist Party of Venezuela

(PSVU), 116universal suffrage, 7university access, 140–1Urban Land Committees (CTUs), 101,

119–24urban regeneration, 17urban renaissance, 161Urban Studies and Advisory Centre

(CIDADE), 59–60, 70


Index 263

VenezuelaBolivarian project in, 114–17, 120–4building sustainable participation

in, 112–14inequalities in, 101–2oil revenues, 101participatory democracy in, 100–1,

114–17populism, 23see also Caracas, Venezuela

Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS), 12, 25, 208

in Bradford, 181, 184, 191–5introduction to, 154in Manchester, 154–6, 160–9,

174–7political leadership and, 200–2role of, 197–9in UK, 27

voluntary associations, 17voter turnout

decline in, 1local vs. national, 25

Ward Forum Planning Group, 169welfare, 14welfare state, 18Whalley Range Forum, 157Williams, Raymond, 250women, participation by, 63Workers Council, 5Workers’ Party, 23, 52, 58, 67, 76,

79, 82working class, associations, 10–11working men’s clubs, 10workplace democracy, 5World Bank, on participatory

budgeting, 51–2, 58


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