P47- Renewing Participation Practices in Urban Governance
PANEL Organizers :
• Van Hulst Merlijn (m.j.vanhulst@uvt.nl), Tilburg University (Netherlands)
• Laws David (d.w.laws@uva.nl),
• Bartels Koen (k.bartels@bangor.ac.uk), Bangor University (United Kingdom)
• Verhoeven Imrat (i.verhoeven@uva.nl), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
• Agger Annika (aagger@ruc.dk), Roskilde University (Danemark)
• Durose Catherine (c.durose@bham.ac.uk), University of Birmingham (United Kingdom)
• Ingmar Van Meerkerk (vanmeerkerk@fsw.eur.nl), Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (Netherlands)
SUMMARY
This practice seminar and panel focus on the theme of Renewing Participation Practices in Urban Governance. In cities, residents, public officials, politicians and other stakeholders deal with important governance issues: hyperdiversity, sustainable development, the decentralization of care and welfare, urban planning, to name but a few. They encounter each other as they engage in different forms of cooperation and struggle to improve their lives, to address problems and social concerns, and to create and sustain workable forms of democratic engagement. While commonly captured under the header of “participation”, we believe that the associated conceptual framework does not fully explain what is going on in these practices. Citizens, social entrepreneurs and other civil society actors are not only involved in influencing policy decisions but are also taking over welfare state and other tasks previously performed by government. In this context participation becomes a misleading term as practices are pragmatically “reinvented”, losing their prior status as supplementary programs for enhancing legitimacy. Participation in the broader meaning we suggest, requires (new) skills such as the ability to seek progressions in situations with stale mate, the ability to navigate between a number of positions, interests, values and points of view and to span the boundaries between informal governance practices and formal institutions of policy and politics. These reinvented participation practices also comprise ways to cope with the tensions raised when innovation develops in the shadow of routine or improvisation and bricolage sprout next to engrained rituals. They entail new forms of engagement, enacted through storytelling, listening, arguing, reflecting, bridging and negotiating, in efforts to cope with the uncertainty, diversity and change that stakeholders encounter in cities.
KEY WORDS
Participation, policy practices
ROOM
Faculty E2.9
SESSION 1 (practice seminar) : 9/07/15 : 09:00-10:30
Chair: David Laws (d.w.laws@uva.nl), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Practice Seminar
Social innovation as government-participation? Dilemmas and lessons on new participatory practices in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
Metze Tamara (t.metze@uvt.nl) Tilburg University (The Netherlands)
Merlijn van Hulst (m.j.vanhulst@uvt.nl) Tilburg University (The Netherlands)
Gabrielle Haanen, Tilburg City
Discussants: Bartels Koen k.bartels@bangor.ac.uk (UK) & Imrat Verhoeven (i.verhoeven@uva.nl), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
SESSION 2 : 9/07/15 : 14:00-15:30
Chair: Merlijn van Hulst (m.j.vanhulst@uvt.nl), Tilburg University (The Netherlands)
Discussant: Imrat Verhoeven (i.verhoeven@uva.nl), University (Country) & Catherine Durose, (c.durose@bham.ac.uk) University of Birmingham (UK)
Encounters with an Open Mind: Transforming Welfare Governance through Social and Democratic Innovation
Bartels Koen, k.bartels@bangor.ac.uk (UK)
Prompting participation: strategies of how urban leaders mobilize stakeholders in area-based initiatives
Annika Agger, aagger@ruc.dk (Denmark)
Participatory democracy in local cultural policy: Grassroots versus top-down dynamics
Miglioretti Pierre, pierre.miglioretti@iepg.fr (France)
