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4.2.
Socially Creative Strategies, Participatory Governance and
Socio-economic Citizenship
Collective self-management practices, not only in the workplace but also for service delivery
in health, education, and housing, can foster innovative solutions to exclusionary dynamics. In
their concrete agency, they stress a distinction, which has been blurred in liberal thought and
in the praxis of welfare regimes during Fordism: public vs. state property. This distinction is
highlighted by the cases of citizen’s governance of Porto Alegre and the Tower Colliery.
Whereas in the former, the state was reorganized in a way to reinforce its public nature by its
democratization, the latter case points towards the socialization of private property, opposing
the concept of the nationalization of private property, which has been the dominant social-
democrat practice during Fordism (Przeworski 1980).
Nevertheless, the partnership arrangements with so-called “third sector organisations” also
point out various problems: in connection with the tendencies towards privatization, the third
sector is sometimes treated as a cheaper alternative to the service provision by the state due to
its reliance on voluntary or low-paid work. As the majority of these voluntary or low-paid
workers are female, outsourcing of state functions can exacerbate income disparities between
men and women (Appel et al. 2003). The growing importance of the third sector has led to the
professionalization and bureaucratization of big service-providing NGOs (Fyfe 2005: 550ff.).
Furthermore, problems concerning accountability occur, as Smith, Mathur and Skelcher
(2006) show in their analysis of British third sector involvement in the provision of services,
which has been promoted by the state via the “Private Finance Initiative” (Kerr 1998;
Wakeford/Valentine 2001; Khadaroo 2005). In addition, the state continues to play an
important role in initiating and steering the partnership. Last but not least, the decentralization
of activities poses the danger of localism. Many social problems need to be solved on regional,
national or international levels and cannot be tackled effectively on the local scale
(Mohan/Stokke 2000; Defilippis et al. 2006; García 2006: 753).
There is often a class bias to participatory settings: experiments with new forms of democratic
municipal governance and decentralization of public power to boards of schools and
kindergartens are directed towards the middle class. Participatory settings are often
“dominated by élite-citizens often making strategic political alliances against other local
actors” (Pløger 2007: 7; cf. also Andersen/Pløger 2007). Thus, “participatory democracy could
lead to élitist democracy or technocracy” (García 2006: 751) – a tendency which can easily be
worsened by the peripheral “inclusion” of critical social movements into participatory settings,
which can be manipulated in new populist settings (cf. {Laclau, 2005 #1905}). If participation
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occurs for micro decisions while macro decisions are taken within elitist arrangements, it can
lead to a “new tyranny” (Cooke/Kothari 2001). Participation should therefore be attentive to
socioeconomic development, and not exclusively to politics.
Under such conditions, participatory settings have the potential to improve the integration of
local ideas and needs, the use of local knowledge and creativity as resources, an early
identification of possible conflicts by the government, which stems from better insights into
positive and negative consequences for the affected citizens (Pløger 2007). The case of Porto
Alegre points out, that the potential concerning socially innovative strategies for social
inclusion is expanded, if the participatory process is (1) open to all affected persons instead of
being restricted to an “enlighted elite”, (2) if the participants possess decision-making power
instead of a mere consulting position and (3) if the decisions within participatory settings
concern socio-economic development. Furthermore, the democratization of the municipal
budget in Porto Alegre also hints at the connection between material and formal democracy. A
certain level of material security (time and money to participate) is a necessary precondition
for participation. Participation in decisions directly related to material security can provide the
basis for inclusive strategies as collective learning and empowerment processes are likely to
occur.
These possibilities and problems make Swyngedouw (2005: 1993) insist that “socially
innovative arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are fundamentally Janus-faced,
particularly under conditions in which the democratic character of the political sphere is
increasingly eroded by the encroaching imposition of market forces that set the ‘rules of the
game’”. Therefore, socially innovative practices have to be promoted carefully, as they can
also lead to new forms of social exclusion.
We propose that socially creative strategies need to engage with the notion of the public
sphere as a socio-economic and political space, defined in terms of processes rather than of
geographical borders, in which citizens have an incentive to lay aside “particular” interests and
to adopt a “public interest” perspective. This was shown in different ways by the case studies
of Porto Alegre and the Tower Colliery. In the first case, lobbying activities continued to exist,
but as they were discussed within open settings, where formerly excluded parts of the
populations were well-represented, instead of being negotiated by “enlighted elites” behind
closed doors, this opened the space for the democratization of the local state. As decisions
concerned the municipal budget as a whole instead of selected parts, such as in the case of LA
21 in Vienna (Novy/Hammer 2007), the danger of only attracting the self-proclaimed experts