comparative report on local governance …...local governance and local methods of co-production of...

COMPARATIVE REPORT ON

LOCAL GOVERNANCE EXPERIMENTS

David Alcaud & Natacha Gally

David Alcaud & Natacha Gally– CIR – August 2005 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 4

1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND........................................................................... 9

Problematising Subsidiarity and Governance .................................................................................................. 11 Consequences for KN and governance in action .............................................................................................. 25

2. LOCAL GOVERNANCE AND INTERACTIONS WITH INHABITANTS........ 28

2.1. The Network Partecipando, example of participative initiative. ...................................................... 28

2.2. Case study: the experimentation of the “Contract of Quarter” in Brussels. ................................... 29 2.2.1. Organization of the “Contracts of Quarters”: ................................................................................... 29 2.2.2. The actors involved: designed delegates and problems of representation:...................................... 30 2.2.3. Critical conclusions of the experts: ..................................................................................................... 31

2.3. Critical assessment of interactive practices with the inhabitants:.................................................... 32 2.3.1. Critical factors: ..................................................................................................................................... 32 2.3.2. “Good practices”: ................................................................................................................................. 33

3. LOCAL GOVERNANCE AND LOCAL METHODS OF CO-PRODUCTION OF PUBLIC POLICIES: ................................................................................................. 35

3.1- First Approach: Development and integration through employment..................................................... 35 3.1.1- “Making the best of the City”: the co-production of public policies in the REGENERA network.

................................................................................................................................................................ 35 3.1.2- Case Study: The Quarter of La Mina, in Sant Adria de Besos. ....................................................... 36 3.1.3- Critical conclusions of the REGENERA network............................................................................. 37

3.2- Second approach: public/private partnership in the co-production of urban regeneration policies.... 38 3.2.1- Private investment in neighbourhood regeneration: the Partners 4 Action network. ................... 38 3.2.2- The experimentation of the integrated approach: the case of Copenhagen.................................... 39 3.2.3- Critical conclusions. ............................................................................................................................. 40

3.3- Critical assessment of co-productive projects. .......................................................................................... 42 3.3.1- Critical factors...................................................................................................................................... 42 3.3.2- Good practices. ..................................................................................................................................... 43

4- IN THE NAME OF LOCAL GOVERNANCE: INNOVATIVE PROGRAMMES AND EXPERIMENTATIONS............................................................................................. 46

4.1- The ‘bottom-up’ approach at the micro-projects level............................................................................. 46 4.1.1- Working with inhabitants at every stage of the project: the Citiz@move network. ...................... 46 4.1.2- A relatively successful micro-project: inclusion of people of foreign origin in Aalborg (Dk). ...... 47 4.1.3- Critical assessment and lessons learnt................................................................................................ 48


4.2- The association of every stakeholder in a knowledge environment: the “territorial cohesion” approach. ............................................................................................................................................................. 49

4.2.1- “Knowledge at the base, from the base, for the base”: the SPAN vision of territorial cohesion... 49 4.2.2- The creation of a new territorial space: the example of the «Pays» Rémois & «Pays» des Crêtes

Pré-ardennaises in Champagne-Ardennes «Region», France........................................................... 51 4.2.3- Critical assessment and lessons learnt................................................................................................ 52

4.3- Lifestyle and local governance.................................................................................................................... 53 4.3.1- In touch with daily life of the inhabitants: the ReUrba² network. ................................................... 53 4.3.2- “A new heart for Bow”: the transformation of St. Paul’s Church in East End London. .............. 54 4.3.3- Critical assessment and lesson learnt. ................................................................................................ 55

4.4- Critical assessment and examples of good practices:................................................................................ 56

PRACTICAL OUTCOME.......................................................................................... 59

GOVERNANCE IN ACTION AND THEORY OF LOCAL CITIZENSHIP.................. 63

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................... 73

Introduction ________________________________________________________

The purpose of this preliminary report is to draw a comparative panorama of the

existing experiments with regard to local governance in the field of urban policies. The

report presents significant examples of “good” and “less good” practices implemented by

existing projects and networks, and this synthesis aims at providing the KN partners with

empirical data, allowing us to take lessons from what colleagues do.

As we know, looking at urban policies in a local perspective raises various theoretical

and empirical difficulties. Therefore, it appears important to briefly recall few definitions

related to the concepts used in our analysis.


First of all, as the KN stressed in the kick-off meeting, what is called the “local” is not

a concrete and well-defined space. Across Europe, different understandings of the notion

“local level” exist, encompassing areas from the district to the urban area in its broadest sense

(collaboration between cities).1 In addition, the plurality of relevant spaces encompassed by

the ‘local’ is not only geographic, but also political (problems of representation) and social

(integration and identity matters). Concomitantly, the ‘local’ level encompasses a multiplying

number of actors, interacting through complex relationships. Subsequently, the local level

being hardly reducible to a one-dimensional space, the notion of government appears less

relevant to report the practices with regard to urban policies.

To answer this complexity, the KN network’s approach is based on the concept of

“local governance”. In this respect, it is worth remembering that the term of “governance” is

a versatile, controversial though widely used concept, as David Alcaud briefly emphasized

during the Kick-Off meeting.

Throughout this report, the definition of local governance was taken from P. Le Galès:

“Ability to regulate internally the interplay of interests and to reconcile them in view

of their representation externally” (Le Galès, 2001)

According to this definition, what is at stake is the negotiation between different actors, not

necessarily sharing the same interests, in order to find a good equilibrium which would

eventually allow considering the local scale as a consistent and relevant interlocutor.

As extensively expressed by the literature, the relevance of the concept has increased

over the last decade, on the basis of two main motives:

- Firstly, “local governance” is supposed to allow a better adaptation of the public

interventions to the local particularities.

- Second, the concept of local governance goes together with a reflection on

Democracy and the so-called “crisis” of the representative system.

Somehow, these two propositions are closely linked together, being based on the same

assumption: the local level allows a proximity to the daily life of the people, and facilitate

the comprehension of the different actors and their respective interests. 1 See the case of Lyon, in « Intercommunalité et démocratie locale. Dédale et le citoyen », in Territoires, n°434 (2), Janvier 2003.


Because it is not sufficient to focus on the local level to access to a productive

proximity with regard to urban policies, the KN consortium points out the necessity to adopt a

bottom-up perspective. Therefore, the notion of “governance in action” is at the core of our

action, meaning that our main objective is to link together the different stakeholders of urban

policies, involving citizens, investors and members of the local government.

As stressed by David Alcaud during the meeting of the KN partners in Almere the

success of such an initiative is related to our ability to create “social cohesion”. The local

governance has to take into account the representations and the perceptions of the different

actors involved in urban policies matters, in order to understand the construction of their

relationship to ‘local policy’. The equilibrium between the diversity of interests can only be

found from this comprehension.

As reported by this paper, different initiatives have already been implemented in this

perspective. They all try to involve the different actors of the civil society (“investors”, from

associations to enterprises) together with the political authorities in the decision making

process. Some of them have encouraged the participation of the “users” in order to favour the

emergence of a local legitimacy. This report therefore also aims at stressing the

difficulties faced by these initiatives, pointing out the main issues at stake, the existing

good practices and the major challenges to take up for the KN partners.

Consistently with the description of the KN project, the notion of local participation

was used as the cross cutting theme, providing us with tools and methodology for local

governance.

According to P. Loncle and A. Rouyer, this concept can be approached from two

different manners (Loncle & Rouyer, 2004): a “consumerist” approach , which consists

mainly in collecting information and managing with the different interests, and a

“participative” approach, which suggests – with the notion of ‘empowerment’, the activation

the users. In other words, the participative conception of local governance implies creating a

new political and social space, in which every interest would be integrated. This point of

view includes the “inhabitants” at the core of the process as a “creative resource” (Loncle &

Rouyer, 2004). In other words; the inhabitants are not only “users”: they “experience the


place” (Estèbe, 2002), in the sense that they influence and are influenced at the same time by

their daily environment. Eventually, what is at stake is a real production of territory,

together with the management of identities within the local sphere.

In order to present a synthetic overview of “good” and “less good practices” as regards

local governance in urban policies, the authors chose a progressive outline, going from the

general existing forms of interactions with the inhabitants, to more specific practices

presented as innovative experiments. Due to the lack of an important enough documentation,

and the collection of the necessary material being in process, the authors did not adopt a

systematically thematic approach. The five sectors initially highlighted by the consortium,

namely public services, regeneration issues, insecurity matters, transport accessibility and

cultural policies are exemplified as much as possible in the report and will be subject to

further investigation.

In order to take advantage of this overview in a productive manner, we should be able

to go beyond the – though already complex – descriptive level. In this respect, the first part

of the report will develop some theoretical background which appears essential to the CIR in

the program of work we are facing in KN.

The second part will begin the empirical review of existing experiments concerned

with the interaction with inhabitants. On the basis of existing projects, this second part

stresses issues related to the nature and the forms of local participation. From information to

consultation and dialogue, problems related to the representation, the segmentation and the

instrumentalization of citizens’ participation are pointed out.

Going a bit more in details with more specific practices of local governance, the third

part of the report explores initiatives of co-production of public policies. Focusing on the

way to build an active collaboration between the stakeholders of the ‘local governance

triangle’ defined by the KN partners (users, government and investors), this part emphasizes

the diversity of interests at stake and the multiplicity of scales for action in local urban

policies. It highlights the problems related to the management of the relationships linking the

actors, such as the needs for regularity and durability, which imply the creation of structures


of co-production and the definition of rules. The question of leadership is stressed as key

issue for the success of initiatives based on the co-production of public policies.

Eventually, the fourth part investigates experiments conducted in the name of local

governance and presented as innovative. Illustrating the concepts of “bottom-up approach”,

“territorial cohesion” and “lifestyle”, it points out the advantages and problems brought by the

notions of “integrated approach” and “empowerment of inhabitants”.

The “practical outcome” section tries to sum-up the stakes highlighted in the report,

pointing out good practices and their constraints, and indicating key challenges to take up for

the KN project.

The report concludes with a theoretical reflection on the notions of Governance in

action and Theory of local citizenship, considering these concepts in the light of the presented

experiments.

The authors hope that this report will be the first step towards a capitalization of

existing practices, and that the KN partners will find here a good tool to learn from the past

and the existing experiments in order to improve their own practices.


1. Theoretical Background ________________________________________________________

The CIR has developed an expertise on local governance and citizenship since its

foundation in 2000. Most of the following ideas have been developed in projects, articles and

conferences by the researchers involved in the field, and especially John Crowley, who has

then inspired Emmanuel Brillet, Elise Feron, Anne-Sophie Hardy and, eventually, David

Alcaud, who invites the readers to read the works of these researchers.

As the partners of the KN project know, the ideas of subsidiarity and governance lie at

the heart of current debates about the future of democracy in the European Union. A closer

examination of the terms on which subsidiarity and governance are used, especially by the

institutions most committed to their blossoming, points to some serious difficulties, as already

stressed by David Alcaud during the Kick-Off meeting, difficulties which remain largely

unacknowledged in current debates about constitutionalisation.

Take first subsidiarity, which, having been conjured up as a response to fears about the

excessively centralising ambitions of the Delors Commission has now been given legal form

in the Treaties. It operates at two different and complementary levels. On the one hand, in

those areas that lie outside its exclusive competence, the Community, in line with the

principle of subsidiarity, acts only and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action

cannot be adequately achieved by the member states and are therefore more effectively

attainable (in view of the scale or effects of the proposed action) at the Community level2. On

the other hand, the preamble of the TEU commits the member states to the principle of

subsidiarity (defined more vaguely as the principle that power should be exercised “as close

as possible to citizens”), i.e. not just for EU purposes, but also with respect to their own

internal affairs. There is some evidence that the language of subsidiarity is used in national

2 Article 5 TEC, inserted by article G of the Treaty of Maastricht. This looks like a reference to a principle de-fined elsewhere in the Treaty but in fact is the legal definition for EU purposes, as article 2 TEU makes clear. The reason for the rather odd drafting is presumably that the principle of subsidiarity is indeed regarded as de-fined outside the Treaties (historically in Catholic ecclesiastical doctrine), although not, of course, in any legal sense.


debates about levels of territorial competence, but references to decentralisation, devolution,

autonomy, local citizenship and democracy, etc., seem to be much more common

Nonetheless, we can at least assume that, via the idea of subsidiarity, a connection is made

between issues of EU democracy and issues of democracy within member states, in other

words that what is at stake is some idea of European democracy in a broad sense.

The relative absence of the concept of subsidiarity in member states’ ongoing efforts to

recalibrate and decentralise political power (“scaling”) points to the difficulty of the current

definitions of subsidiarity and governance in accommodating democratic requirements such

as citizen participation. In section I, through an examination of these terms and their

dependence on an unproblematised concept of efficiency, we wish to suggest that there are

tensions at work between the functional dynamics of contemporary governance and its

participatory logic.

Sections II and III explore at the local level the interactions between (1) functional pressures,

which push for each problem to find its most effective level of intervention (from the

neighbourhood for community policing, through the urban area for most transport issues, the

nation-state for welfare systems and the world for global warming) and at the same time for

stable administrative structures that may detract from ideal patterns of sectoral efficiency; and

(2) participatory pressures, which combine substantive questions of interest representation,

symbolic questions of inclusiveness, technical constraints of asymmetrical information, and

background issues of systemic legitimacy. As we shall show, the very idea of the “local” is far

less clear than it appears at first sight, and the difficulties in local scaling – in what we would

call for these purposes “locating the local” – have parallels at all levels of policy and

democratic government, including the European. These are important theoretical and practical

questions that, hitherto, neither subsidiarity nor prevailing ideas of governance have

adequately addressed.


I

Problematising Subsidiarity and Governance

Surely subsidiarity is a Good Thing. Who, after all, would insist that the Community should

act when it is not effective that it should do so, or that power should be exercised further than

is necessary from the citizens affected by it? But this is a trap: the point of a critical

assessment of subsidiarity is not to promote “anti-subsidiarity”: rather to suggest that are

difficulties with the notion that make both subsidiarity and any opposite or converse of it

equally inadequate. The difficulty lies entirely in the apparently innocent words “effective”

and “efficient”.

Taken seriously, subsidiarity requires case-by-case consideration (or at the very least ongoing

consideration of classes of issues) of what is likely to prove efficient. This raises the question

of who is to make the assessment, given that, in principle, it is a virtually impossible task, and

who is to adjudicate in cases of disagreement. Quite apart from the profoundly destabilising

administrative effects of variable competence, it is very difficult to see how subsidiarity could

be made into an applicable legal principle.3

More fundamentally, even if subsidiarity could be made to work in its own terms, there are

serious objections to it on normative democratic grounds. Efficiency is not a value-free

concept, but one that presumes a prior definition of which objectives are collectively valuable

and of which criteria are appropriate to assessing their attainment. In depending on an

unspecified idea of efficiency, subsidiarity is either empty (if objectives and assessment

criteria are left to ongoing political debate) or undemocratic (if they are thought of as fixed in

advance). This contrast is of course slightly overdrawn at a theoretical level, but the practical

significance of the problem is clearly illustrated by the parallel ambivalence that affects

attempts to define governance for the specific purposes of European constitutional

development.

3 Cf. Renaud Dehousse, “Le principe de subsidiarité dans le débat constitutionnel européen”, in Magnette, La constitution de l’Europe, pp. 151-160; and along the same analytical lines, although with very polemical intent, Laughland, The Tainted Source.


If we take, for present purposes, the 2001 White Paper of European Governance as a reference

for current policy discussions, it is apparent that we are faced with an uncertainty about

subsidiarity, which is hardly mentioned in the document, a lack of clarity about governance,

and a persistent conceptual difficulty in articulating considerations of “efficiency” with

democratic objectives. The “definition” of governance offered by the 2001 White Paper, in

the first place, is barely comprehensible. “ ‘Governance’ means rules, processes and

behaviour that affect the way in which powers are exercised at European level, particularly as

regards openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence” (p. 8). This is

both extremely wide (there are few social rules, processes, and behaviour, that are unrelated to

“the ways powers are exercised”), and arbitrarily narrow (why only at the European level?). It

is also normatively loaded, although “as regards” is too weak a copula for the reader to be

sure how the desirable features listed relate to the concept itself.

Certainly the Commission’s decision “to launch in early 2000 the reform of European

governance as a strategic objective” seems hardly compatible with its own definition.

“Behaviour” is not typically amenable to “reform” in this sense. What is at stake here is not,

primarily, the diagnosis of the state of European democracy. The White Paper’s statement of

it is in fact fairly consensual. “Many people are losing confidence in a poorly understood and

complex system to deliver the policies that they want. The Union is often seen as remote and

at the same time as too intrusive” (p. 3). Policy delivery cannot be considered in the purely

technocratic terms that are implicit in the thrust of subsidiarity, as the generic response a few

paragraphs later makes clear: “Democratic institutions and the representatives of the people,

at both national and European levels, can and must try to connect Europe with its citizens.

This is the starting condition for more effective and relevant policies.” Even here, however,

effectiveness (qualified by relevance) is defined as the ultimate objective. The “connection”

is, indeed, to be viewed in participatory terms, and not just in terms of symbolic

legitimisation, as is apparent from subsequent discussion in the White Paper of the need for

policy-making to be “more inclusive and accountable”. However, these criteria are not

regarded as alternatives to efficiency, or even as independent principles that may be in tension

with efficiency, but as preconditions for it (p. 8). These general considerations feed into the

formulation of the five (supposedly complementary) principles of “good governance” that the

White Paper seeks to promote: openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and


coherence (p. 10). The word subsidiarity is hardly mentioned, even in the context of

discussion of such issues as the sharing of competencies between levels of governance (pp.

34-35). It is clear, nonetheless, that the potentially anti-democratic spirit of the concept of

subsidiarity is at work in the entrails of current debates on governance.

What remains of the inadequacies of these discussions and concepts, however, is a very real

set of difficulties. There is, effectively, no way of thinking about levels of competence within

systems of governance that can be articulated solely in territorial terms. Yet, in the absence of

some kind of territorial articulation, it is difficult to see how to make sense of the necessarily

“multi-level” character of the European polity. In order to clarify this discussion, we need a

sharper conceptual vocabulary. Democracy has traditionally been thought of in terms of a

fundamental two-part question: who are the “people” and to what extent must they “rule” for

a system to count as democratic? This question, obviously, is neither incoherent nor obsolete.

However, it captures only part of the issues raised by the most characteristic contemporary

concerns. However defined, “peoples” have a geography shaped, among other things, by their

institutions. Whether and how they should be subdivided for certain purposes is, therefore, an

open question. Furthermore, “rule” is indeterminate without specification of its objects and of

what, in practice, it consists of. In order to make sense of this more expansive approach to the

political theory of democracy, we need to bring within a single analytical framework three

distinct yet closely related ways of describing the “shape” of a political system. For present

purposes, we relate them to three key words.

• Scale: at what level can democracy function, and what if any is the strictly territorial di-

mension of such a “level”? What pressures shape the practical realisation of the potential

scales of democracy, and how do they operate? How do different levels interact,

especially when they cannot be clearly defined in territorial terms?

• Scope: are there functionally differentiated sectors or issues that are “inappropriate” for

democratic decision making (either on normative grounds or for analytical / technical

reasons) or inaccessible to democracy (for empirical reasons that may very well be

deplorable)?

• Mode: does the traditional concept of “government” provide an adequate template for

analysis of democratic systems, given uncertainties and dynamics of change about scale


and scope? How can the competing or complementary idea of “governance” be framed in

such a way that it can make empirical sense of the question whether contemporary

democratic systems are increasingly characterised by governance? Insofar as there is an

observable shift towards governance, is it contingent, or functionally driven? Is it

deplorable, desirable, or normatively indifferent? Should it be promoted or encouraged,

and if so how?

Connecting these definitions to the previous discussion, the defect of current thinking on what

we shall call “scaling” is a failure to problematise efficiency. We wish to suggest, not that the

concept is meaningless, nor that, for any set of collectively defined objectives, efficiency in

their attainment is not ceteris paribus desirable, but rather that, it is at the root of an insoluble

tension between the functional dynamics of contemporary governance (viewed as a problem-

solving and resource-allocation system set within a social context that has its own dynamics)

and its participatory logic (when governance is viewed as system for the revealing and

construction of collective preferences and for the arrangements of disagreements about who is

to speak for whom). These tensions derive not simply from the fact that the various dynamics

point in different directions, for they are not in fact strictly independent. One of the problems

with which a system of governance, viewed functionally, has to cope is precisely its own

legitimacy as a participatory system. And legitimacy is not, as the White Paper sometimes

suggests by default, some kind of supplement, which might be desirable but not functionally

crucial. On the contrary, many areas of policy depend for effective implementation on the

active participation of affected citizens. As the prevailing Euro-language correctly

emphasises, relevance is an aspect of both participation and efficiency.

II

Since 2002, France has been actively implementing Act II of the Decentralisation Law4 via

the establishment of a body of regulation5 whose role is to guide the development of new

administrative structures. These structures are groupings of municipalities that form a new 4 The first decentralisation laws, called the Mauroy laws, were established in 1982-83, just after the socialists came to power. 5 Of note: 1. The Law of June 25, 1999 relative to territorial orientation and development, the Voynet Law; 2. The law of July 12, 1999 relative to the reinforcement and simplification of inter-municipal co-operation, the Chevenement Law; 3. The Law of December 13, 2000 relative to urban solidarity and renewal, the SRU Law.


decision making echelon in terms of territorial development6. The development of these

municipal agglomerations is favoured to the point where it has become possible to found such

an entity without the unanimous support of the concerned municipalities. More recently,

decentralisation has been furthered via a constitutional reform whose aim was to affirm the

role of fully functioning local collectives (collectivités locales de plein exercice)7 by

inscribing in Article I of the constitution the principle that France is doted with decentralised

organisation. This implies: 1. the adoption of the principle of subsidiarity – the word is

explicitly integrated into the text of the constitution – as the principle guiding the division of

competencies between the central government and local collectives; 2. the introduction of the

“right of experimentation” which allows local collectives to waive certain laws and

regulations that impact the exercise of their competencies; and 3. the right not only to receive

revenue from local taxation sources but also the right to receive a portion of the national tax

revenue.

The result is a ‘new architecture of power8’ whose main reason for existing seems to be that it

responds to the demands of functional efficiency. This is the case with the growing trend of

municipalities grouping together into municipal agglomerations, a trend which responds to a

functional logic that is clearly identifiable inter terms of planning, and easily justifiable in

terms of efficiency. This is also the logic behind the experimentation rights conferred on local

collectives (especially régions), which aim to “test the efficiency and the consequences of

national public policy, before generalising them through legislation, in order to modify them

or follow up on them9.”

From such developments arises the inevitable tension between functional and democratic

dynamics. The drive for functional efficiency is having an impact on regulation. Will this be

accompanied, on the democratic level, by the implementation of new innovative programs 6 Inter-municipal structures are not fully functioning local collectives (collectivités locales de plein exercice), but rather public establishments of inter-municipal co-operation (établissements publics de coopération intercommunale, EPCI) constituted according to the characteristics of the regional labour pool. (bassin d’emploi). Their representatives are internally appointed by the councils of the member municipalities and are not elected democratically. Neither are they responsible to any given electorate. 7 France has three forms of “fully functioning (meaning democratically elected)” levels of administration: communes (municipalities), départements, and régions. For the first time, the latter two forms received constitutional recognition. 8 From a speech by President Jaques Chirac to Parliament on July 2, 2002. 9 Presentation of a constitutional amendment relative to the decentralised organisation of the French Republic.


aiming to locally promote, especially at the inter-municipal level, citizen participation and

identification with this new administrative structure?

Inter-municipal structures, conceived as an ad hoc tool for territorial development at the level

of human resources, are not fully functioning local collectives (collectivités locales de plein

exercice), but rather state institutions: their representatives are designated internally by the

municipal councils of the member municipalities and are not democratically elected. In other

words, the members of this body, termed a “public establishment of inter-municipal co-

operation (établissement public de coopération intercommunale, EPCI)” have the status of

delegates, not representatives. Therefore, although a growing part of the competencies once

the domain of municipalities is now exercised by these structures, these groupings are free

from any mechanism of direct democratic accountability. For this reason, explains Jean

François Foucault, president of Club COM and communications director for the municipal

agglomeration of Mantes-en-Dyelines (CAMY), “inter-municipal structures have existed up

until now under a second-rate democratic system”.

“Politically incomprehensible second rate techno-structures10”, municipal agglomerations

suffer unquestionably from a democratic deficit. Although the municipality remains the site of

democratic legitimacy, a large portion of economic power is given to inter-municipal

structures. It is this growing hiatus between responsibility and efficiency that is posing a

problem. Local communication professionals have even willingly conceded that “the so-

called neutrality of the inter-municipal structure is an illusion or figure of speech that masks

the competition between municipal and inter-municipal strategies11.

These structures, which often imply profound changes in the socio-demographic balance and

the socio-geographic orientation of the municipalities involved, raise the question of the

relationship between the distribution of local collective identity and that of institutional

membership. The identity of place – the citizen as resident – is, on the same level as

democratic responsibility or administrative efficiency, a dimension of “locality”. The danger

10 Ibid. 11 Serge Hégly-Delfour, communications director of the SAN of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, cited on www.intercommunalités.com.


that haunts all administrative reform based solely on a functional logic is precisely the

pressure it places on the relationship between lived space and administrative space. From this

point of view, the democratic election of inter-municipal delegates could constitute a positive

step towards reconciling the feelings of identification by the population with municipal

agglomerations.

To this respect, there was some hope for remedy from the Law of February 27, 2002 relative

to local democracy, part of the regulatory framework directing the development of inter-

communality. However, in its final version this law fell far below initial expectations. Thanks

to the efforts of the mixed equality commission12, the article which provided for the

democratic election of members of inter-municipal structures was discarded. The reason for

this was that some local elected officials, especially those from communes and départements

are hostile to inter-municipal structures, and want to delay the legitimisation that would be

accorded with the democratic election of its members. In fact, such a legitimisation of the

inter-municipal structure may signify, in the medium to long term, the disappearance of

existing democratically elected collectives (communes, départements), which would become

superfluous. For this reason, Members of Parliament, conscious above all to satisfy their peers

(they often themselves wear two hats, as MPs and regional elected officials), pushed back all

reforms of the voting procedures for inter municipal structures. Thus, as concerns the

development of inter-municipality, it is clear that the advantages gained at the functional level

(as a level of intervention) do not necessarily correspond with advantages at the democratic

level (as public space).

Fiscally inspired privatisation strategies for electoral regions (fiefs électoraux) and/or the

corporatist strategies of some politicians and regional bureaucrats, combined with a lack of

political will on behalf of legislators13, plays against not only the systemic legitimacy of the

French political power structure, but also against a coherent structuring of decision making

echelons posing the risk of redundancy, and a working, efficient portioning out of

12 The mixed equality commission is composed of equal parts deputies and senators in order to find common ground on amendments to be taken before definitive adoption of the bill by the lower house of private members’ and government bills (la chambre basse des projets ou propositions de lois). 13 It is easier to add levels of administration than it is to remove them.


competencies to different levels, which would imply the privileging of consensus building

over functional efficiency.

The rearranging of local administrative structures confirms the fact that regional councils and

the European Commission have risen as major players with significant influence in relation to

the French state. In addition, the restructuring of the territory in terms of inter-municipal

groupings seems to have opened new directions in thinking about how the political fabric of

the country should be organised. On the one hand encouraging inter-municipal formation and

on the other hand granting these formations (“pays” in rural zones and “agglomérations” in

urban zones) responsibilities and decision making competencies to the detriment of the

département14. The recent framework laws on territorial rearrangement and sustainable

development may signify the medium to long term disappearance of traditional administrative

structures such as the municipality (commune) and the département15.

The département is actually an administrative structure inherited from the French Revolution

and conceived more in order to control the territory than to develop it16. Départements can no

longer be considered as the ideal level for developing structural activities at an intermediary

level (between communes and régions). Constituted in terms of a given labour pool, public

establishments of inter-municipal co-operation (EPCI) are therefore conceived in terms of a

rationalisation of the local public services as well as being ad-hoc tools for territorial

development. The idea here is that départements progressively cede their powers and their

role to an ensemble of inter-municipal structures forming “pays” in rural areas and

“agglomérations” in urban areas. Ex-prime minister Pierre Mauroy, mandated in the autumn

of 1999 by Lionel Jospin to preside over a parliamentary commission on the future of

decentralisation, called for the “inter-municipal revolution”. Arguing for the necessity of

“creating viable local collectives, at least in the economic sense”, Pierre Mauroy predicts

within ten years the development of an inter-municipal structure composed of all

municipalities with less than 3000 inhabitants. In the context of a redefinition of municipal

administrative structures, he calls for the “redefinition” of the role of the département. 14 In fact, it is at this level, and not at the departmental level, that development policy whose implementation is related to the “territorial section” of the contracts between the state and the region is formalised. 15 Inherited from the Middle Ages and the French Revolution, respectively. 16 Départements were originally circumscribed according to the distance that the prefect could travel in a day on horseback.


“Redefinition”, but not disappearance because, as we have seen, local resistance (at the

municipal and departmental levels) remains strong and this point of view has some supporters

in the national parliament. Although legislators have judged it desirable – and ‘efficient’ – to

give inter-municipal structures powers that previously belonged to départements, democratic

legitimacy remains the property of the commune and the département. However, communes

suffer from a deficit in terms of democratic accountability and of the visibility (and clarity) of

their activities. Resistance to Mauroy’s “inter-municipal revolution” and legislators’ lack of

political courage and clarity have resulted in a proliferation of territorial administrations with

widely varied levels of intervention. The “location of the local” in France occurs between a

traditional form of territorial governance, obsolete from a functional point of view but

democratically legitimate (fully functioning local collectives), and another more recent system

conceived as an ad-hoc tool for territorial development, but lacking any direct democratic

accountability or responsibility (public establishments of inter-municipal co-operation, EPCI).

The development of inter-municipal structures adds to the complexity of the administrative

landscape and obscures the pertinent administrative level for both the implementation of

territorial development public policy (functional logic), and the privileging of citizen control

over and identification with the decision making process of administrative structures

(participatory logic).

Therefore, in France, the gap between efficiency and responsibility arises from the difficulty

inherent in the marriage of two imperatives – the functional and the democratic – which

operate on both the temporal and geographical level. On the geographic level, the new

municipal agglomerations – which are a manifestation of the imperative towards functional

efficiency – do not coincide with the borders of fully functioning local collectives

(collectivités locales de plein exercice) which came into being twenty years ago with the first

set of decentralisation legislation (municipalities, departments and regions). The introduction

of municipal agglomerations thus introduces a cleavage between functional and democratic

territorial divisions, as well as disrupting current patterns of territorial identification.

Historically speaking, fifteen to twenty years have passed since the decentralisation laws of

1982, which participated in a process of democratic revitalisation of the traditional territorial

administrative structures, and the passing of this new body of regulation facilitating the


development of municipal agglomerations, which seeks to respond to new functional

pressures in terms of territorial development. This interval is both too long and too short. Too

much time has elapsed for established administrative levels to be easily dissolved and

replaced with others conceived according to a different logic and to different priorities, and

too little time has elapsed for the dismantling – even partial – of one territorial structure in

favour of another not to be forcibly opposed in the short and long term by local

representatives and civil servants of the concerned regions.

France, from the perspective of her territorial division and structure, finds herself in a

situation of transition between two separate logics, the functional and the democratic.

Democratic election of inter-municipal delegates would be certainly one step towards the

reconciliation of these two logics, but such a reform, as we have seen, would herald the

disappearance of the departement in the medium term due to the fact that representative inter-

municipal structures – at least the larger ones – would in this case be performing double duty

(on the functional and the democratic levels).

Finally, the disintegration of administrative structures, the growing heterogeneous legal status

of local jurisdictions (shared between fully functioning local collectives (collectivités locales

de plein exercice) and municipal agglomerations (établissements publics de coopération

intercommunale), as well as the relative weakening of citizen control are a major source of

confusion. The confusion in the decision making process and in the implementation of public

policy is due to the necessary redundancy of competencies found in the different levels of

administration. Confusion exists in the coherency of mandates for local officials, whose

responsibilities may be shared between several jurisdictions, a scenario which leaves less

control in the hands of citizens (due to the fact that delegates of municipal agglomerations are

designated by municipal council members). Finally, confusion exists in the identification of

citizens with this new inter-municipal level of governance which has been conceived as an

extension of a centralised system of administration as opposed to a space with any local,

democratic resonance in which citizens live and deliberate.

Therefore, the tensions related to local administrative structures (functional and democratic)

exacerbate the tensions related to the separation, in local structures, of a space for citizenship


(espaces de vie) and a space for administrative intervention. The fragmenting of local

structures unhinges administrative space and lived space, rendering public policy incoherent

and complex. This process is also a source of dispersion of competencies which makes it

difficult to locate decision making procedures, which adversely affects relationships between

elected official through the confusion of interests, which renders opaque democratic

accountability, and which leads to procedural obfuscation due to the overlapping of domains

of responsibility17.

III

The French democratic system has been constructed as representative and centralised. The

objective of the successive decentralisation laws, since 1982, has been the introduction of

increased efficiency by bringing closer together levels of decision making and the execution

of decisions, in other words by bringing decision making closer to the people affected. More

broadly, a parallel objective of decentralisation is to introduce the notion of legitimacy by

implicating citizens in the political system. The “local” in this formulation becomes the

political level the most efficient and the most legitimate, leading to the appearance of the

notion of “local citizenship”. However, the ideal of local citizenship in France has no legal

significance, because the right to vote locally is not more inclusive than the right to vote

nationally, and decision making remains the province of elected officials.

The question is, therefore, whether it is possible to develop a concept of “local citizenship”

that might be coherent, usable, and useful. The condition of coherence is that local citizenship

should be identifiably a species of the genus civitas – one that includes other manifestations

that differ from it in scale (e.g. national citizenship) or in structure (e.g. social citizenship),

but have nonetheless a genuine family resemblance. For such a concept to be usable, it must

be possible, on the basis of it, to develop empirical research protocols capable of ascertaining

whether it is actually extant in any particular habitat. And finally, the exercise might as well

be useful, in the sense of telling us something about complex societies that we might miss if

the concept of local citizenship were not deployed.

17 cf. Olivier Abuli, “Commission Territoires : le schéma de cohérence territoriale à l'ordre du jour”, article available online at: http://www.intercommunalites.com/adcf/document1563.htm.


Justifying Participation

We can distinguish three main justifications for the valorisation of local political

participation:

a) Logic of legitimacy. There exists a democratic belief in citizen participation: elected

officials consider that citizen participation validates their decisions, and citizens

consider that a decision taken without their having been consulted is highly suspect. In

addition, all groups of citizens, not only the majority, can access the decision making

process – the legitimacy of public decisions is not due to approbation by a majority

but rather to collective deliberation via political participation. Finally, participation

carries with it pedagogical virtues. Mill felt that in universal suffrage, participation

would create more rational, informed and civic minded citizens.

b) A democratic logic. Through the transmission of information, citizens can express

their opinions on decisions that concern them, in their capacity as users of public

services. The decision taken will thus be more in line with their expectations and

needs (for example, in terms of the opening hours of a local public service such as a

post office or police station). However, this logic can take on a cynical managerial

cast; decisions taken by citizens cannot be rationally contested by them. In this sense,

participation could be a method for avoiding debate.

c) Logic of identity. Participation allows for the integration of all citizens, including

individuals who do not have the legal status of citizen. A number of people are legally

or socially excluded from this status, such as non-nationals and youth under the age of

18. In addition, some groups have been shown to have reduced access to the exercise

of their citizenship due to social factors, such as youth between 18 and 25 years old

and women. Political participation allows for those legally and socially excluded to

overcome those barriers and have an impact on their political surroundings.

Participation finds both its justification and its potential realm of application at the local level,

which both “structures daily life and proximate experience, and allows for the apprehension


by the citizen of the totality of a particular space for action and reaction. The local is a site for

democratic education, where ordinary citizens exert influence on the management of all levels

of public life, where the fruits of ones labour are immediately perceptible, and where

individual and collective responsibility is clear and graspable18.”

Problems with Participation

a) What weight should be accorded to participation in the decision making process?

Although French democracy is representative, participatory structures are the

exception to the norm. One example of a participatory structure is in the Parisian

suburb of Morsang-sur-Orge where the participatory budgetary issues introduced at

the Porto Allegre Summit were tested. However, confining citizens in the role of

furnishers of information could have an undesirable effect if their opinions are not

taken into account, which risks their further estrangement from the democratic

practice. In addition, participants in this sort of program tend to seek to influence

decisions from the perspective of their own self interest (the NIMBY syndrome – Not

In My Back Yard). One of the virtues of the system of elected representatives is their

capacity to transcend particular interests and take rational decisions.

b) Participation in decision making processes necessitates certain capacities on behalf of

the individual. Firstly, a proficiency in the common language (this could pose

problems for non-nationals) and the ability to reason effectively is required. Also

required is a certain understanding of the problematic under discussion as well as an

ability to understand the potential solutions. All participants should possess a minimal

political competence, or at least a belief in their own capacities. Therefore, the

pedagogical virtue of participation is confronted with the necessity for a minimum

level of pre-existing knowledge and a set of qualities that will not be equally

distributed (on this topic, see critiques ranging from the feminist Nancy Fraser to

Habermas).

18 Bertho, A. and Y. Sintomer. La démocratie locale en question, in Futur antérieur, vol. 38, n°4, 1996.


c) These ideal conceptions of the local depend on the a priori existence of the local

level: because there is a space of community, the possibility exists for that space to

become a space for political participation. Presupposed here is a certain feeling of

belonging, a neighbourhood or town-level sense of identity, which would then allow

for the development of political participation19. For example, the Association of Local

Elected Officials For Democracy (Association des élus locaux pour la démocratie,

ADELS), when involved with neighbourhood committees feels that the most

important question to pose is whether or not the decision to create the committee came

from the initiative of the residents.

However, this identity is extremely variable in France. There exist working class

neighbourhoods forming “urban villages20” and that benefit from a coherent sense of identity,

being characterised by extensive family roots and highly developed social networks. On the

other hand, many neighbourhoods are heterogeneous in terms of physical housing as well as

the social categories of its inhabitants. In these cases, identity is fragmented according to

building, street, social class, etc. In addition, these streets or buildings can be positioned

between two communes or even two départements21. The problem posed here is the

identification of spheres of belonging (which may transcend the commune), of democratic

participation (the neighbourhood), and political legitimacy (two communes or sometimes two

inter-municipal structures may be of varying political stripes).

Citizenship derives from the investment of oneself and ones interests in a given locality.

Participation, interests, and identity are mutually constructive elements of local citizenship.

19 Neveu, C., s.d. Espace public et engagement politique. Enjeux et logiques de la citoyenneté locale, Paris, L’Harmattant. logiques politiques collection, 1999. 20 Ganz, H. J. The Urban Village, Free Press, New York. 1962. 21 This poses a number of practical problems for municipal policies.


IV

Consequences for KN and governance in action

The ideas sketched here about the difficulties inherent in the attempt to define a “local”

territorial scale of government and administration has a broader application to the European

process as a whole. There is no doubt a sense in which the Community and Union come “on

top” of the member states with their (very different) internal structures. Certainly the

structures of democracy are not explicitly at stake in considerations of harmonisation, and in

any case it is hard to imagine any kind of political coalition providing support for a version of

European constitutionalism going “all the way down”. Differences in the territorial and

functional architecture of political systems within the European Union are likely to remain

significant for an indefinite period. Nonetheless, the view of the EC and EU as “add-ons” is

not really tenable. Regardless of whether one adopts a generically functionalist or

intergovernmental approach to the interpretation of Europe, it remains true that the

development of the EC and EU is closely related to, and may in some respects be causally

responsible for, shifts in the internal structure of the political systems of the member states.

On this basis it is possible to extend the points sketched here with reference to local

dimension of political scaling to other levels, including the EU.

Therefore, the central concept with which to address the reshaping of contemporary

democracy is necessarily citizenship. Many aspects of the interactions between the functional

and participatory dynamics of political systems that have been briefly explored here may be

taken as giving grounds for the fear that the current blurring of traditional democratic shapes

– of which Europe is merely one important site – is an erosion of democracy itself. Certainly

prevailing cynicism about conventional forms of representative government – even among

people who are otherwise strongly committed to politics – presumes such an argument and

has some fairly plausible grounds to do so. We may be entering a world in which political

systems have some of the traditional features of democracy – competitive elections,

constitutionalism, the rule of law, dispersal of power, public opinion –, but within which,

nonetheless, it is impossible to be in any real sense a citizen.


With respect to the general question of the role of citizenship within the democratic order, we

have offered some evidence to support the rejection of one currently fashionable claim : the

claim that the obsolescence of the nation-state makes the “local” – possibly in specific

conjunction with Europe – a more viable level of democratic citizenship and one that is

perhaps uniquely valuable because of the nature of people’s belonging to a democratic

society. In order to assess the broader significance of this argument, we need to consider how

an understanding of local democracy can contribute more broadly to contemporary political

theory, within the terms of the conceptual framework sketched in section I.

Obviously, the question of local citizenship is primarily a matter of scale. However, it is

important to keep in mind that the dimensions of scale, scope, and mode, intersect and

influence each other reciprocally. Much of the literature suggests that “local” democracy

might be closer to people not just in the trivial sense that it involves geographically less

extended territories, but more profoundly in being a different kind of democracy – addressing

different questions and doing so in different ways. The defence of the innovative or even

transformative character of local democracy often turns on positive claims about civil society,

voluntary organisations, and grassroots politics. Similarly, and for the same reasons, it

encapsulates a critique of ideas of sovereignty, the general will, and political leadership. In

such arguments, it is the quality of citizenship and not simply its geographical extent that is at

stake.

Our approach here has not directly been normative. Rather, we have explored the extent to

which the idea of a specifically local form of citizenship is coherent in terms of political

sociology interpreted theoretically. This is precisely why the exploration has broader

implications for the nature of citizenship in general. There is of course no reason,

descriptively, to quarrel with the claim that contemporary democracies, especially in Europe,

have a “multi-level” character. Nor, however, can we dispense with consideration of how the

levels fit together. It is analytically implausible that they should be strictly cordoned off, if

only because of the powerful mechanisms of functional and institutional integration that cut

across them. And even if it were possible, it would be deeply problematic for normative

reasons. Whatever those levels may be, they involve individuals and collectives that are

normatively indivisible. The very idea of a “public” domain presumes that people cannot


cogently or defensibly act as (say) workers without reference to their simultaneous status as

(say) parents, taxpayers, atheists, Socialists, or whatever. Without such an idea of the

“public”, the idea of a collective decision is drained of all meaning: politics, to the extent it

exists at all, is reduced to a succession of fragmented sectoral “policies” that make no overall

sense and are likely to function chaotically in practice. It is difficult to see what remains of

democracy – as distinct from effective and lawful representative government – in such a

“depublicised” world.

Whatever one may think of such a development normatively, it constitutes an analytical

challenge to the theory of democracy. The mere aggregation of the various statuses and

positions that a person may occupy within society cannot suffice to underwrite the public.

Nothing guarantees their coherence, and nothing, internally, offers any compelling reason to

attempt to achieve it. If the public depended solely on the existence in society of some kind of

psychological disposition towards public-spiritedness, then it would, as everyone is aware, be

deeply fragile. What offers some prospect of coherence is, necessarily, the existence of

citizenship as itself a status that provides both reasons and a basis for public-spiritedness, not

as a psychological disposition, but as a peculiar kind of obligation that is underwritten by

institutions and learned practices and susceptible of being freely subscribed to because it

provides within itself a certain kind of normative justification. To partake of the public is, by

definition, to be a citizen. It is a complicated trick of course, but not one that is

incomprehensible or uninstantiated. As a direct consequence, multi-level democracy cannot

dissolve into a fragmented set of democratic levels or arenas without thereby ceasing to be

democratic at all. And one of the links between levels – which both cuts across them and

makes their tendency to drift apart problematic – is precisely citizenship.

The following section analyses interactions between the “public” and the government,

focusing on the attempt to bring a new type of citizenship to the foreground.


2. Local governance and interactions with inhabitants ________________________________________________________

As we already underlined, the paradigm shift from the notion of ‘government’ to the

‘governance’ approach places local participation at the core of the elaboration and

implementation of urban policies. Indeed, numerous urban projects have concretely

experienced this interaction with inhabitants; some of them even designing inhabitants’

participation as their main objective. In order to draw up a representative panorama of these

practices, a great amount of information is thus needed, dealing with the nature of these

interactive processes, the methodology used for their implantation and the obtained results.

Unfortunately, these documents are not always directly available. The collection of additional

material being in process, this part of the report was chosen to present significant initiatives of

interaction with inhabitants on the basis of the available material. The projects conducted

within the Partecipando URBACT-Network give an overview of the variety of identified

interactive practices.

2.1. The Network Partecipando, example of participative initiative. “From urban renewal initiatives to budget allocation decisions, all processes of information, consultation and involvement of inhabitants will be at the centre of the activities envisaged by the project through the analysis, comparison and exchange of the policies implemented by the local authorities.”

http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=9205 At the core of Partecipando are the notions of exchange of ideas and communication.

The participation is seen as “real” when there is a regular and durable interaction between the

different actors concerned with urban policies, namely the politicians and the inhabitants. The

idea is thus to create a framework for discussion and point of view expression, a space of

exchange based on a participative notion of citizenship. The Partecipando project emphasizes


the necessity to include inhabitants at each and every stage of the project: from elaboration of

the problem to implementation and management of the solution.

The project aims at developing a “concertation space”, where resources are delivered

and shared with the inhabitants in order to implement a “circulation of knowledge”. Namely,

it is about explaining the bureaucratic process and the time it can take to implement a project,

to establish a wide and clear diffusion of information related to the advancement of the

project. As we see, the action promotes a will to overcome the hierarchical mode of

representation, accompanying and animating an equalitarian process, highly visible for every

inhabitant.

The project stresses the importance to elaborate a common language, beyond the

technical administrative language, in order to facilitate the access to participation to every

inhabitant (Elaboration of a glossary). The will is to allow the appropriation of the project by

the population, ideally involving them concretely in its implementation.

2.2. Case study: the experimentation of the “Contract of Quarter”

in Brussels.

Eight urban areas are involved in the Partecipando Network: Bordeaux (F), Brussels

(B), Cosenza (I), Grenoble (F), Naples (I), Newcastle (GB), Paris (F) and the Reggio Calabria

(I). During the first phase of Partecipando, thematic experts had realized local inquiries in

order to report local practices of participation and feed the work of the network. Among them,

the experiment of the “Contracts of Quarter” in Brussels emerged as significant with regard of

the problems aroused.

2.2.1. Organization of the “Contracts of Quarters”:

Subsequently to the thematic Workshop held in Brussels, in October 2004 on

“Communications and training of actors”, the partners have pointed out the interesting

experiments of the “Contracts of Quarters”:


The “Contracts of Quarters”, developed in Brussels22 are composed of 5 thematic

areas:

1) The creation of social housing, in order to answer the need of certain household to

access to better living conditions despite their lack of sufficient income to live in a

decent accommodation available on the market

2) The creation of housing under a convention (so-called average housing), in order to

lower the price while encouraging private investment in the area, allowing a certain

degree of social interactions.

3) The development of partnership mechanism between the public and the private

sector in order to involve owners in a social regeneration of the housing.

4) The implementation of initiatives related to the creation and development of public

spaces. This part of the project deals with rehabilitation of urban infrastructure, from

road to parks.

5) The social regeneration of the quarter from the infrastructures to economic

regeneration of the quarter, supporting social initiatives. It can go beyond the realm of

the development of the quarter, for instance regarding professional formation or

development of cohesion between the generations…

2.2.2. The actors involved: designed delegates and problems of representation:

The actors involved in this participative initiative are representatives named by the

inhabitants during a “plenary meeting” of the quarter organized by the municipality. In case

of absence of the representative to the following meetings, a sanction is applied, namely the

change of representative after three absence in a row. It has been observed that the less

involved actors are the young people from 18 to 30 years old. The question of the capability 22 You will find complete information on the experiment of the « Contrats de quartier » in Brussels, in the Report from B. Francq, on the local inquiry conducted in the area of Brussel-capital, http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/LI_Bruxelles.pdf.


of the representative to fully represent the population is thus very salient, and one can

wonder to what extent the associations can take over this function.

2.2.3. Critical conclusions of the experts:

As reported by the expert23, the successes of these practices are highly dependent on

the political will, the durability and the scale of the policy, the degree of precision of the

objectives to achieve, the mandatory participation and the implementation of meetings

between the various actors (politicians, institutions, associations, and inhabitants).

Nevertheless, some elements of criticism have been addressed to the experimentation:

The effects of the ‘affirmative action’ are not significant regarding the

population,

The very complex organization and procedures tend to create a segmentation of

the different initiatives

Consequently, the overall project lacks of visibility and linearity.

In addition, the mediation of the municipality can lead to different scenarios of

the role of the inhabitant: from a passive observer to a real active citizen. The

general impression is that even though one is allowed to express one’s own

vision, it is rarely taken into account, engendering an effect of despondency after

the first year of the project.

Finally the relationships between associations, inhabitants and administration are

complex and involve contradictory feeling such as trust and mistrust,

complementarity and competition: indeed, it could lead to a confiscation feeling

of the inhabitants.

23 The evaluation of the project has been made by the Urbact expert B. Francq, in the realm of the 1st phase of the project Partecipando. Local inquiries where conducted in the eight cities concerned by the project, in order to assess the state of play with regard to local participation. The reports of the local inquiries are available on the URBACT website, http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=9320.


2.3. Critical assessment of interactive practices with the inhabitants: .

As displayed by the example of the “Contracts of Quarter” in Brussels, there are

important limits to the active participation of inhabitants to urban projects. Among the eight

member-Cities of the Partecipando network, some recurrent difficulties have been pointed

out. Indeed, as argued by Yves Sintomer in his report on the participation practices in the

Grenoble urban area24, if the great diversity of initiatives, interests, and strategies can be

initially considered as an opportunity, the heterogeneity of practices is also potentially a real

obstacle to the success of urban local policies. Enrica Morlicchio observes the same situation

in Naples, describing the local policy for citizen participation as a “patchwork of initiatives

and actors (…) lacking of overall coordination”25.

2.3.1. Critical factors:

Producing the case studies, the experts have identified common obstacles, related to three

main problems at stake:

The question of the representation: every report has stressed the difficulty to

obtain a significant representation of the whole population. It is often hard to

mobilize the population from every socio-economic and cultural origin: thus the

participation initiative can only rarely touch outsiders and the poor middle class.

In this respect the role of associations is ambivalent, in the sense that they often

mobilize only already involved population such as militant, who are defending

the particular interests of a specific group instead of discussing the interest of the

community.

24 Sintomer Y, « Rapport pour le réseau URBACT. Projet ‘Partecipando’. Les Dispositifs Participatifs dans l’Agglomération Grenobloise », full version available at http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=9329 25 Morlicchio E, “Urban and ‘Ali Alle Vele – Napoli Local Inquiry” http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=9331


Consequently, the participation tends to be segmented along different sectors,

rather than being a real exchange process between the different actors. As E.

Morlicchio puts it, “integration took place between experts, between sectors,

between different social actors and between functions”26

Eventually, the heavy role of the politicians and the professionalization of the

debates can make inhabitants feel instrumentalized: Enrica Morlicchio reports

that in Naples, certain citizens consider the participation initiative as an alibi

used by politicians to legitimate their action. The latent climate of trust or

mistrust between the actors appears crucial for the success of the initiative. To

get involved in the process, the inhabitants need to be convinced of the real

impact their action will have on the final decision. Nevertheless, few examples

of real co-decision can be found, because there is no autonomous area where

inhabitants could involve in the decisional part of the process27. For instance,

there is no autonomous budget allowing (even a relative) autonomy of decision

being devolved to the inhabitants.

2.3.2. “Good practices”:

Acknowledging these difficulties, the experts highlighted some elements of good practices:

With regard to the nature of participation, the accessibility of the participation

appears as a crucial factor of success. Regarding Newcastle, Lyn Dodds and

Suzanne Powell point out the good capability of the project “New deal for

Communities” to implement effective communication operations, publicizing the

initiative notably by the diffusion of a Newsletter and a magazine distributed to

every household and translated in a range of different languages. Beyond the

quantitative scale of the inhabitants’ participation, the issue of its continuity is 26 Ibid. 27 “The aspect of participation in each stage of a project’s evolution”, thematic synthesis produced by the Thematic Workshop of November 4-6 2004, held in Grenoble. Full document available in French on the URBACT website: http://www.urbact.org/upload/mod/mod_news_5/pj/partecipando_lametro_synth_nov04_fr.pdf


also at stake: the regularity and the continuity of the inhabitants’ participation

seem to be a major condition for the initiative to be fruitful. This continuous

involvement of the population has been emphasized by the thematic experts as a

means to avoid the feeling of paying a “participation tax”28, only validating a top-

down initiative. Moreover, it is an efficient tool to avoid the decline of interest

generally occurring after the first stages of the project.

The forms of the participation are also reported as being decisive for the success

of the interaction. As noticed by Agnès Villechaise-Dupont and Sandrine Rui in

their inquiry on the Bordeaux urban area29, the participation processes often imply

a frustration of the inhabitants, who cannot observe the direct impact of their

expression, casting doubt on their real influence in the decision-making process.

They hint at the absence of real link between the concertation phase and the

final decision as the reason of this frustration. Therefore, it seems to be crucial to

establish clear and precise rules regarding the objectives to achieve and the

repartition of the responsibilities and powers. In other words, it is important to

inform explicitly the inhabitants about the extent of their role in the decision-

making process. It would then allow them to know how they can really matter,

improving the quality of the deliberation.

28 Morlicchio E, op. Cit. 29Villechaise-Dupont A. & Rui S., « Le Conseil Local de Prévention et de Sécurité de Saint-Michel et L’Atelier d’Urbanisme des Chartrons-Saint-Louis », Local Inquiry on Bordeaux urban area, http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=9322


3. Local governance and local methods of co-production of public policies:

Following the stakes raised in the two previous sections, stakes regarding inhabitants’

participation, we have chosen to focus on a few projects which have tried to go beyond the

stage of simple interaction. Their attempt is to implement a co-production of public policies,

not only including the different actors in the deliberative phase, but also involving them in the

final decision. The importance of the respective actors and the way they are involved in the

co-production of public policies vary significantly between the different projects.

3.1- First Approach: Development and integration through employment.

3.1.1- “Making the best of the City”: the co-production of public policies in the

REGENERA network.

“The REGENERA network seeks to appraise integrated urban development projects that emphasise bottom-up approaches and that highlight the co-production of projects by all stakeholders”. Workshop orientation document of the REGENERA network on the Greater Lyon, France.

The initial statement of the network is that discrimination and under-employment

concentrate in areas which are often undergoing physical transformation without benefiting

from integrated measures – going beyond merely upgrading the physical environment, and

where “gentrification, segregation, and the expulsion of the more underprivileged can and

does occur”.

Going beyond the first stage of interaction with inhabitants, REGENERA’s ambition is

to transform practices of both professionals and organizations in matters of urban

development. Integration of inhabitants in this process is crucial, meaning that their “social

and cultural capital” has to be exploited in order to create value. RENGENERA claims

adopting an innovative approach, mixing supply and demand policies approach with regard


to unemployment, that is to say focusing both on social help to inhabitants and on

attractiveness for economic investors and future employers. The network aims at developing a

truly cross-sectoral project based on shared diagnostics, in order to mobilize and render

coherent all aspects of local development.30

The Sant Adria de Besos meeting from the 17th to the 19th March 2005 has mobilized

the fourteen cities members of the REGENERA network on the thematic: “Development and

Integration through employment”. Each city has produced a case study, providing insight for

the general reflection and application to the quarter of “La Mina” in San Adria de Besos.

3.1.2- Case Study: The Quarter of La Mina, in Sant Adria de Besos.

In the quarter of La Mina, two types of programmes have been implemented: a first set

of initiatives is oriented towards local economic development, in the perspective of job

creation and economic activities revival in the quarter. The second part of the process is a set

of programmes of social and educational support, intending to re-integrate outsiders into the

socio-economic life of the quarter.

The measures as regard to local economic development consist of:

- Support to self-employment

- Mediation with potential employers

- Support to local business through help to management and efficiency.

- Legalization of the itinerant sale.

Regarding social and educational support, the main actions are:

- Fighting against absenteeism by associating the parents: working in contact with the

socio-educational structures of the quarter; creation of a “school for parents” providing

help and advice as regards to education. Simultaneously, organization of formal and

30 “Summary of the Sant Adria de Besos meetings on Economic development and integration through employment”, 17 - 18 – 19 March 2005.


informal education system for the children: help for homework and pupils facing

difficulties; support to sport and leisure activities.

- The consortium of the Quarter of la Mina also intervenes in matters of drug

addiction, with the creation of a socio-sanitary centre for the residents of the quarter,

welcoming and providing them with assistance to access to detoxification programmes.

For the year 2005, the projects of the consortium were oriented towards the theme of

the conciliation of familial and working lives. It planned to create a service to welcome

children in the morning before they go to school, a summer leisure centre for the 3 to 5

years old, and a structure allowing developing services and supporting to family with 0

to 3 years old children.

3.1.3- Critical conclusions of the REGENERA network31.

Regarding the inhabitants inclusion in the process of urban regeneration,

the implementation of co-productive initiatives requires the creation of adapted

structures. Indeed, the existence of a strong leadership is important because

parish councils tend to see themselves as not competent enough when it comes

to questions of employment. The strong involvement of public authorities is

thus a crucial factor of success, but their linkage with resident implies the

presence of a coordinator. In this respect, the example of the Consortium de la

Mina is pointed out as a relevant organization: with diversified sources of

financing, and seeking to “regenerate every aspect of the neighbourhood”, it

allows the development of an integrative policy both social and economic. It

impulses a collective dynamic whose consistency is assured by the

Consortium, allowing to better meet the needs of the inhabitants. The role of

every partner is clearly defined, creating a favouring climate for the

development of solidarity mechanisms. Despite the difficulty to launch small-

scale local initiatives in the face of the completion emanating from the 31The whole set of remarks in this part of the report are synthesis of the “Summary of the San Adria de Besos meetings on Economic development and integration through employment”, 17 - 18 – 19 March 2005. They result of the confrontation of the case studies on the thematic of development and integration through employment within the REGENERA network.


metropolitan area, economic competition in general and market forces, the

network highlighted the relevance of micro-projects, which appear to better

grasp the everyday-problems of the population and therefore tend to be more

effective when well co-ordinated.

Concerning the attractiveness for economic activities, the experts underline

two recurrent problems faced by the areas under regeneration processes:

namely the lack of suitable markets and the lack of security. To attract

companies, who are also potential employers, the living standard of the area

has to be raised, and the quality of the environment improved in terms of

accessibility and security. The experts recommend tax measures as a good

way to make such areas attractive. In this respect, the establishment of tax-free

urban areas in France (e.g. the “Zone Franche Urbaine” in St Etienne) has

proved to be efficient. The example of Glasgow is also evocated, Glasgow

where eight independent companies helped by the European Union settled in

run-down areas, instigating numerous economic development programmes.

Such measures can allow not only the improvement of the image of the area

but also the long-term development of quality urbanism.

3.2- Second approach: public/private partnership in the co-production of

urban regeneration policies.

3.2.1- Private investment in neighbourhood regeneration: the Partners 4 Action

network.

“Partner cities will seek to identify best practice in how public authorities (chiefly city councils) can work effectively in partnership with the private sector to ensure both new investment and long term sustainability in our urban neighbourhoods.”

Description of the Partner4action objective on the URBACT website: http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/document/show?location.id:=8051


Only few documents are available on the Network itself, on its orientation and position

toward Urban Regeneration as a whole32. Nevertheless, the relatively precise focus of the

network, private/public partnerships (PPPs), is of high relevance with regard to co-production

of public policies. Partners 4 Action aims at investigating five sub-themes related to PPP:

The description and critical evaluation of the different types and structure of PPPs;

The role of legislation, policy and financial incentives effecting PPPs;

The use of PPPs in housing as a catalyst for urban regeneration;

The use of PPPs in industrial and commercial (re)developments;

The use of PPPs in education, training & social facilities as a catalyst for urban

regeneration.

The network establishes a partnership between thirteen European cities: Amsterdam

(NTH), Brussels (B), Chemnitz (G), Copenhagen (Dk), Gera (G), Liverpool (GB), Lille (F),

Nottingham (GB), Porto (P), Budapest (H), Nicosia (CY) and Riga (Lat). As for the other

networks, the purpose is to exchange knowledge and share experiences in order to capitalize

on the basis of “good practices”.

As suggested by the three last sub-themes, the Partners 4 Action network adopts an

integrative approach towards Urban Regeneration, dealing with issues from a physical, but

also economic, social and cultural perspective. The Copenhagen case studies are illustrative of

the experimentation of such an approach.

3.2.2- The experimentation of the integrated approach: the case of Copenhagen.

The case of the City of Copenhagen is particularly interesting because two local

projects of Urban Regeneration were conducted in the same area, involving the same partners,

visibly trying to adapt their position to the successes and failures of previous projects.

The first project was implemented to develop new housing in the north west of

Copenhagen and to create a park for the residents in the neighbourhood. The initiative

originally came from a private investor, willing to build houses on the site. By the

intervention of the municipality, which established contact between the private developer and 32 The collection of additional information is still in process.


the local regeneration project (whose objective was to build the park), working groups were

implemented, including the developer, local residents and members of the neighbourhood

regeneration project.

After the end of the first project, the developer realized that it was difficult to sale the

constructed houses, because of the neighbourhood suffered under bad reputation and was not

seen as a nice place to live. Another project, this time related to the image of the quarter, has

been initiated. The will to create a partnership this time came from the private developer. It

resulted in the publication of a small book on the neighbourhood, the diffusion of advertising

campaigns on buses and the creation of a website on the partnership itself, in order to extend

it to other partners.

3.2.3- Critical conclusions.

The two projects in Copenhagen are presented as relatively successful: the houses and

the park are currently under construction and regarding the image initiative, although the

effects on the population are hardly measurable, the objectives of the project have been

achieved, namely the launch of the advertising campaign and the creation of the website33.

Nevertheless, looking at the obstacles met during the implementation of the project, he

experts report interesting practices as regards local governance in the co-production of public

policies:

The setting of formal rules for the partnership is seen as occurring too late:

It should have intervened at the first phase of the project. Involving different

33 See the “Description of Best Practices” for each of those project available on the URBACT website: For the building project: “Glud & Marstrand – housing and recreation in a neighbourhood” at http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Case_study_Copenhagen_Neighbourhood_regeneration_projects_EN.doc and for the image project: “I love North Best….Neighbourhood marketing – changing the image” at http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Case_study_Copenhagen_Image_Campaign_EN.doc


stakeholders, with different interests and objectives, the co-production of an

urban project is more efficient when the two partners are legally bounded.

According to the experts, the first project suffered under the lack of legal

conditions. Only regulated by an “unofficial PPP”, the project almost failed

because a compromise was difficult to achieve between the partners.

The process-orientated and durable character of the partnership is also

reported as a crucial factor of success: comparing the two projects, it appears

that the second encountered fewer difficulties because the partners involved

themselves from the beginning and contributed to the project on an equal basis.

Indeed, the implementation of a project is not timeless, and this is even clearer

when looking at informal relationship between the stakeholders.

A durable and trustful relationship between the partners is necessary: the

creation of a partnership between stakeholders with different backgrounds,

interests and objectives is not natural. Indeed, the degree of trust/mistrust

between them highly influences the outcome of the project. Compromising

between public and private interests implies that the partners acknowledge

their respective interests, and accept to share risks in order to achieve a

productive compromise. In the case of Copenhagen, it was at first difficult for

the public sector to enter into a partnership with a private developer because

the necessity of creating a local consensus for such a collaboration was seen as

a real challenge, barely successful. Conversely, the building of the second

project was made much easier by the relative success of the first one: Knowing

each-other from a previous operation, the partners were more likely to

associate from the beginning, because the private stakeholder had “gained a


trust in the neighbourhood regeneration project staff and residents that [had]

helped him overcome initial sceptical feelings”34.

3.3- Critical assessment of co-productive projects.

Similarly to practices of interaction with inhabitants, existing practices of co-production

of public policies are heterogeneous. But what emerges from the examples developed above is

the importance of the balance of power between the partners. Indeed, the problems reported

by the experts lie in the establishment of a fruitful relationship, which is not always achieved

because of the lack of common interests, shared vision and mutual trust.

3.3.1- Critical factors

Looking at the different experimentations with regard to co-production of public

policies, two main sources of difficulties can be identified:

The high diversity of interests is the first obstacle to the building of co-

productive public policies. As the examples of the PPP in Copenhagen displayed

it, what makes the potential innovative and fruitful character of a partnership is

the diversity of origin and visions of the different partners. But this is also the

main source of failure, when it cannot be overcome. In addition to the objective

diversity of goals, the nature of the relationships is also central to the success of

a co-productive project (trust/mistrust dimension). As illustrated by the example

of the “bourse d’achat collective” in Brussels35, the effective mediation between

34 Project Description of Best Practices, the city of Copenhagen, “I love North Best….Neighbourhood marketing – changing the image”. Available on the URBACT web site: http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Case_study_Copenhagen_Image_Campaign_EN.doc 35 Project description of Best Practices, « La bourse d’achat collectif d’immeubles », Brussels, document available on http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Brussels_case_study_Bourse_FR.doc


the different interests is a difficult task and hardly manages to achieve the initial

objective: the productive partnership for every partner. Thus, it has been

observed that linking the supply and demand of housing was not sufficient to

ensure the satisfaction of interests on the basis of an equitable compromise. This

casts doubt on the satisfactory character of meditative actions and suggesting the

need for another definition of co-production, and a reflection on the means to

assure a fair co-production, which would not be limited to the satisfaction of one

set of interests.

The multiplicity of sometimes overlapping scales of action also complicates the

achievement of co-productive urban policies. Indeed, urban policies take place at

different levels, from the smaller area (the quarter) to the European level.

Focusing on local level, we still find several potentially relevant levels of action:

the quarter, the municipality, but also the conurbation. A co-productive approach

needs a coordination of these scales: are there one (or several) level(s) of

relevant level of action? How should they be co-ordinated and how to distribute

responsibilities and accountabilities among them?

3.3.2- Good practices.

To answer the problems mentioned above, some good practices have been highlighted:

The regularity of the involvement appears as one of the most important

conditions to implement a co-productive project. The regularity is not only the

formal condition of efficiency and continuity but also heavily influences the

construction of the relationship between the partners itself. Indeed, meetings are

key moments in the co-production process, because they are the place where the

every partner constructs its representation of the others’ interests and position.

This is at the core of the trust/mistrust relationship, thus highly determinant for

the effectiveness of the project.


The creation of specific structures: As displayed by the two examples

developed above, the co-production of public policies requires clear rules

assigning their respective roles to the partners. But paradoxically, the existence

of a strong leadership – though obviously needed in terms of efficiency – can

also create tensions between partners, thus leading to lower the productivity of

the initiative. In order to interplay the different and often diverging interest, the

leadership needs to find its legitimacy36 and in this respect the creation of

structures of hybrid nature and specifically oriented toward the project appears

as a factor of success.

Indeed the setting of ‘local groups’ in the Copenhagen case displays the benefits

that can be taken out of the mix of the different partners (Private developer,

residents of the quarter and public organization), but also highlight the need for a

locally attached leadership. In this respect, the Consortium de la Mina is an

example of relatively satisfactory solution. Although it is financed by public

sources, they are diversified and allow the Consortium to finance non-profit

corporations, creating a collective dynamic with certain – though limited -

independence of the different stakeholders.

The integrated approach appears as a meaningful way to approach the co-

production of public policies in terms of local governance. Indeed, numerous

projects have shown the utility to adopt a multi-dimensional approach to achieve

productive partnership. Related at the same time to social, economic and cultural

issues, urban governance tends to suffer from the sectorisation of its

implementation. To be in touch with the reality, urban projects cannot set apart

one of these dimensions without jeopardizing their objectives. As we saw in the

case of the “Bourse d’Achat collectif” in Brussels, the project can deviate from

its initial objective when one of these aspects is neglected: due to the lack of

action favouring the acquisition of flat of little surface by modest household, and

of rules regulating the effects of the real-estate market, the rehabilitation of the 36 See the paper of the Urbact thematic expert Pascual Jordi, “Culture and the physical dimension of urban regeneration”, report the conclusions of the Seminar: “Culture and the physical dimension of urban regeneration”. Manchester, 8-11 December 2004. Urbact Network: “Cultural activities and creative industries: a driving force for urban regeneration”. Lead partner: Lille. http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Jordi_Conclusio…_Manchester.doc


housing did not really lead to increase the social diversity of the quarter and

sometimes even led to the creation of luxurious housing, and the increase of the

price level in certain areas. Within the URBACT programme, the MED-INT

network focuses on the integrated approach, trying to evaluate its different uses

across the Mediterranean area. Only few documents have been collected until

now, but this project could be subject to further investigation as soon as the

necessary material will be available.37

37 See the MED-INT homepage on the Urbact website : http://www.urbact.org/srt/urbacten/flb/minisite/show?location.id:=1732


4- In the name of local governance: innovative programmes and

experimentations.

____________________________________________________________

Besides the projects dedicated to the interaction with inhabitants and the co-production

of public policies, other initiatives presented as innovative have been conducted. This part of

the report presents three significant directions towards which these experiments are oriented.

4.1- The ‘bottom-up’ approach at the micro-projects level.

4.1.1- Working with inhabitants at every stage of the project: the Citiz@move network.

As Partecipando (see Part 1), Citiz@move is a URBACT project working on citizens’

participation. It is oriented toward three distinct directions, corresponding to three working

groups (WG):

- WG1, led by the City of Aarhus (Dk) deals with the integration of

people from foreign origin.

- WG2, whose lead partner is the City of Charleroi (B), is working on

articulation between citizens’ participation and governance at the local

scale.

- WG3, led by the City of Seville (ESP) focuses more precisely on the

elaboration of Information Technology tools (ITT) as means to include

citizens’ participation in urban planning development.


What appear as innovative in this network are not mainly the objectives of the projects,

which are now, to a certain extent, part of the common rhetoric of every projects dealing with

urban policies. Rather, the innovative dimension emerges from the way this participation is

envisaged, that is to say, from the tools serving the achievement of the objectives.

In this respect, the three working groups adopt a slightly different position. The

Information Technology tools developed by the third group would have deserved a detailed

analysis. The use of information technology tools such as access to internet in order to

stimulate local culture, integrate the immigrant population, organize new citizens’ networks,

and set-up on line communication fora is likely to appear as an innovative experiment as

regard to local governance. Unfortunately, due to the lack of available documents, this task

remains under process.

Nevertheless, within the Citiz@move network‘s Working Group 1, an innovative

approach has been identified with regard to real and concrete inclusion of inhabitants in the

elaboration, the decision making process and the implementation of a urban policy.

4.1.2- A relatively successful micro-project: inclusion of people of foreign origin in

Aalborg (Dk).

The innovative character of the Aalborg project as regards the inclusion of population

from foreign origin is presented as resulting from its micro-local scale. Indeed, its limited

objective was to renovate playgrounds that were worn down and did not maintain the safety

regulations. The action took place in the East of Aalborg, in a relatively poor district (average

income below the average of the city) where the non-profit housing makes a total of 66 % of

all housing and the detached houses 25 % of the area. The remaining built-up areas consist

mostly of student hostels. The population is of diverse ethnic origin, the district having the

highest rate of foreigners in the City of Aalborg. The 0-24 years old makes about 40% of the

residents and the elderly (above 65) makes only 6%.

The Aalborg project presents peculiar features:


A bottom-up initiative: the idea to renovate the playground came from a group of

mothers who proposed to take advantage of every inhabitant’s own skills to

implement the project. The citizens were managed and advised by the Aalborg

Urban Regeneration Centre, which also took a significanr part of the technical work.

Limited scale and scope: The project’s duration was time-limited: eight months,

from November 2001 to June 2002. It was extremely localized and the objectives

were particularly limited and concretely defined.

Active participation at the core of the implementation phase: the renovation of the

playground appealed to different types of skills and competences, each of them

being important and equally recognized during the project (From the administrative

tasks to the making of food and to the building itself).

The ambitions of the project are described as following:38

To renovate one of the existing worn down playground.

To create space and environment for more activities for the children and young

people in the area.

To create commonality in the area.

To create the feeling of co-ownership in the area.

4.1.3- Critical assessment and lessons learnt.

According to the report of the experts, the first lesson learnt from this experimentation is

certainly that empowering the inhabitant can really benefit to a local project. Indeed, the

notion of ‘pride’ is at the core of the Aalborg Urban Regeneration Centre’s discourse,

stressing the importance of the appropriation of the project by the inhabitants. This appears 38 See the paper of the Working Group 1: “ Study cases : Projekt F and the building of a playground by Aalborg Urban Regeneration Center”, available at: http://www.urbact.org/upload/urbdoc/Case_from_Aalborg_play_ground_analysis.pdf


as a strong contribution to the establishment of a mutual relationship based on trust and

acknowledgement of every participant’s skills and importance.

Moreover, the Aalborg Regeneration Centre was relatively administratively and

financially autonomous, making the decision “able to be taken ‘here and now’”. Together

with the daily contact with inhabitants, it has assured the visibility of the project, and

subsequently created a virtuous circle for efficiency.

Nevertheless, some difficulties occurred during the process, namely the drift of certain

participants toward less productive or even counterproductive attitudes. Not always

attending the meetings, or bringing disorder on the building site, some inhabitants

disappointed the others, allowing us to wonder about the real integrative potential of the

project for every resident.

Altogether, if the results of the project appear as a relative success, the question of the

transferability of such a micro-level project remains unanswered. The next experiment is an

attempt to extent the scale of co-productive actions, based on the concept of “territorial

cohesion”.

4.2- The association of every stakeholder in a knowledge environment: the

“territorial cohesion” approach.

4.2.1- “Knowledge at the base, from the base, for the base”: the SPAN vision of

territorial cohesion.

Strategic Planning Action Network (SPAN), part of the INTERREG IIIB programme,

was launched in March 2004 and will conclude in August 2007. Its aim is to promote an

innovative approach of urban policies: using a “research-action methodology”, its double

objective is to produce knowledge and alter the actual situation through action. The


originality of this methodology is to systematically associate an organisation on the ground

operating in a rural or an urban environment and an academic partner.

Thus, eight pilot areas have been designated in the ‘North West Europe’ area (as defined

by the INTERREG IIIB programme39): Walloon (B), the Republic of Ireland, Northern

Ireland (UK) and Champagne-Ardenne (F).

The partners associated to the network are:

Université Libre de Bruxelles - Institut de Gestion de l'Environment et

d'Aménagement du Territoire (ULB - IGEAT), Belgium.

Fondation Rurale de Wallonie (FRW), Belgium.

National University of Maynooth (NUIM) - Department of Geography National

Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Ireland

Southside Partnership, Ireland

Queen's University of Belfast - School of Environmental Planning, United Kingdom

Rural Community Network, United Kingdom

Université de Reims, France

Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Reims, France

SPAN summarizes its vision under the motto “knowledge at the base, from the base, for

the base”, assuming that “everyone knows what is happening around them and that this

knowledge constitutes a force for change”40. It focuses more precisely on Strategic

Territorial Planning and Multi-level Governance, two issues that were initially distributed to

two different transnational pools of expertise made up of practitioners and researchers. It is

worth noticing that, as indicated by the SPAN practitioners, these two areas have

“considerable inter-connectedness”. Subsequently, SPAN decided to go beyond this

39 For additional information about the INTERREG IIIB programme and definitions, see the following website: http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/interreg3/abc/voletb_en.htm 40 Presentation of the SPAN methodology on the SPAN website: http://www.span-eu.org/presentations_method.php


categorization and to merge to two poles. This gave birth to the notion of Territorial

Cohesion, innovative concept whose aim is to integrate the whole set of stakes related to

territorial policies.

4.2.2- The creation of a new territorial space: the example of the «Pays» Rémois &

«Pays» des Crêtes Pré-ardennaises in Champagne-Ardennes «Region», France.

The creation of the “pays” in France is an innovative experiment –though not so

recent41- defined by the LOADDT (the blueprint law on town and country planning and

sustainable development) or the “Voynet” Act of 25 June 1999. It displays an integrated

approach, constitutes a new framework for inter-municipal cooperation within a territory

with a coherent geographic, cultural, economic or social structure. Its aim is to lead and

rally the various public and private players in the territory.

Valéry Michaux, (Reims Management School) and Fabrice Thuriot, (Université de Reims)

underline the main innovative features of the “pays” as following:

• It replaces a sectorial system of scattered administrative areas of competence by a

unique common and intersectorial territorial strategy at a coherent geographic level;

• It represents a forward-looking process focusing on sustainable development in the

territory;

• And it involves civil society in devising this forward-looking, intersectorial territorial

strategy by the Development Council which comprises economic and associative

players in various sectors and eventually some elected representatives.42

41 The « pays » was already experimented in the 1970s in rural areas. 42 See the SPAN Newsletter, May 2005, p. 16. Available to download at http://www.span-eu.org/publications.php?PHPSESSID=6a81c122dbcd7b56ac9e87f794149e56.


There were two stages for the creation of the “pays des Crêtes Ardennaises”: the first

phase consisted in the establishment of a diagnosis of the territory (opportunities and

constraints), which was presented to every participant in order to give a common overview of

each others’ problems and expectations. The Second phase was the constitution of seven

“thematic commissions”, animated by skilled animators. Some sub-workshop spontaneously

emerged in order to go more in depth with some transversal issues such as transport, young

people, elderly, etc. A ‘Charter of Territory’ has been drafted, reporting the guidelines for the

development that had been expressed by the local civil society throughout the discussions.

4.2.3- Critical assessment and lessons learnt.

The case of the «Pays» Rémois & «Pays» des Crêtes Pré-ardennaises in Champagne-

Ardennes «Region» in France illustrates the often existing relative discrepancy between the

theoretical vision of a Network and its concrete realization. If the draft of the Charter of

Territory is a positive step, exploiting the synergy between the different stakeholders, the

‘integrated’ approach appears nevertheless difficult to implement extensively, and some

difficulties have been highlighted:

Firstly, mediators of the debates within the thematic commissions point out the

necessity to recall constantly and regularly the philosophical guidelines of the

initiatives. Once again, it is necessary to remember the rules and the framework

to avoid any deviation from the initial objectives.

Secondly, the initiative was clearly taken by local politicians and once the

charter had been written, the intervention of the inhabitants seems to be very

limited: the problem is then to find a means to maintain their interest and their

implication into the process.

Eventually, SPAN seems to provide an innovative vision of the territory, which would

deserve to be analysed more carefully. This approach based on a vision of the territory as a


coherent space (geographically, culturally, economically and socially), allows to include the

different levels of local governance.

4.3- Lifestyle and local governance. In the following experiment, the problem of the coherence is linked to the notion of

“lifestyle”. The ReUrba² network strongly emphasizes its innovative methodology which

develops a local governance approach in touch with the inhabitants’ daily lives.

4.3.1- In touch with daily life of the inhabitants: the ReUrba² network.

ReUrba² is a network co-financed by the INTERREG IIIB, which aims at developing an

innovative approach with regard to urban policies, “tentatively formulat[ing] some general

principles for urban renewal, which might be applied to other projects”. The attractiveness of

urban areas is at the core of the ReUrba² Network, which ambition is to make urban

environment “more appealing for those already living there, but also to attract new groups”.

The innovative character of ReUrba² lies once again in the methodology of the network. It

focuses on two specific issues: the lifestyle approach and the local governance in action.

As we know, the “local governance” approach is the result of a paradigm shift, trying

to answer the weaknesses of the concept of government. It consists of the inclusion of

new actors in the elaboration, decision-making and implementation process of public

policies: additionally to the government (municipal authorities, urban districts, and

regions), the participation of users (inhabitants, business people in the neighbourhood)

and investors of all nature (financial, but also social) is highlighted. The emphasis

goes no longer to the products of public policies but rather to the process of

production. In this respect, Reurba² points out the necessity for “the urban renewers

(…) to develop enterprise, collaboration, and the ability to organise. They have to

forge links that there would not have been otherwise.” Therefore, ReUrba² stresses two

means: public participation, and the implication of “social landlords” dealing with

the social and economic aspect situation of their tenants and the residential area.


The lifestyle approach is a demand-driven approach to urban renewal that claims to be

in touch with the inhabitants’ everyday-life. It argues that nowadays socio-

demographic and socio-economic characteristics are less determinant of people’s

behaviour than previously. Without defending the “hyper-individualization” of our

societies, the lifestyle approach points out the growing differentiation of preferences

and the necessity to grasp this evolution in various contexts. Therefore, the analysis of

the demand cannot refer to static “target-groups” anymore but has to be very

progressive and reflexive, in the sense that the initial formulation can/has to be

revised throughout the actions of the network.

4.3.2- “A new heart for Bow”: the transformation of St. Paul’s Church in East End

London.

This project’s idea emerged in 1997, when the St. Paul’s church was about to be

demolished. Indeed, the deteriorated and little frequented building, located in the low-income

district of Bow in East End London did not justify to be refurbished. However, the resident,

apparently strongly attached to the church initiated the idea to transform it into a lively

community centre. The main features of the project were the following:

The mobilization of a bottom-up dynamic: the refusal to demolish the church

was widely shared by the inhabitants of the district. Their first action was to

gather signatures against the demolition and to hold a jumble every Saturday to

raise money for the church. On the basis of this action-oriented potential, the

newly arrived vicar mobilized volunteers to elaborate a project of renewal. This

elaboration was made by the consultation of the inhabitants’ advice during the

jumble sales. It created a strong feeling of ownership of the project among the

residents.


Implication of the local civil-society: The realisation of the project was made

through the consultation of a wide range of statutory and voluntary

organizations. The fund raised came from over a dozen funders of very different

origin: from the National Lottery to the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and

charitable trusts.43

4.3.3- Critical assessment and lesson learnt.

An evaluation of this project has not yet been carried out. Nevertheless, the project can

already be considered as a relative success, in the sense that the community centre has been

built and seems to attract a lot of diversified activities in touch with the residents’ everyday-

life: karate courses, a quit smoking programme, an art gallery, a café… It also created two

jobs. Overall, the project seems to arouse enthusiasm.

Therefore, if it seems to be too early to draw conclusions based on tangible results, a set

of questions can be asked:

To what extent will the project help to build a new community feeling in Brow?

Will the minority groups such as young people, women, or ethnic groups, be touched by

this collective enthusiasm as well?

Will this initiative’s benefits be durable (both economically and socially)?

Could there be some negative effects?

To what extent is this experiment transferable to other areas?

43 Information on the St. Paul’s church are available on the ReUrba² website and on the St. Paul’s church website: www.stpauls-bow.co.uk


4.4- Critical assessment and examples of good practices:

Due to the recent character of these innovative experiments, we should prevent

ourselves to draw definitive conclusions. Nevertheless, some examples of good practices can

be highlighted. Regarding critical factors, the synthesis is more delicate: both because of the

unavailability of evaluation documents and simply because some non-identified problems are

not yet visible. Therefore, this paragraph will mostly summarize example of good practices,

addressing interrogations with regard to obstacles.

The good practices can be subsumed by three main categories:

The integrated approach, including the emphasis on territorial cohesion appears

relevant to mobilize the different stakeholders and to reach a satisfactory

consensus. Urban development is not only physical, but neither is it an

exclusively economic or social issue.

.

Problems:

Such an approach requires a strong capability of management, in order to make

the diversity of approaches become a productive input and not a factor of

disorder. How can all and every interests be included on an equalitarian basis? In

other words: is there a need for a leadership? And if there is such a need, what

kind of leadership would guaranty the process of carrying out such an

ambitious approach?

The empowerment of the inhabitants appears as an innovative factor of success.

It allows the appropriation of the projects by those who live it everyday. In this

respect, the bottom-up approach seems to facilitate this process, keeping the

project in touch with the residents’ daily life.


Problems:

The main difficulty encountered by the projects with regard to the so-called

‘bottom-up’ approach comes from its very nature: given that it cannot be created

from above; one can then wonder the extent to which it will be supported,

without giving the impression to the inhabitants that they are not listened to.

In this respect, the micro-project level seems to be an effective framework to

conduct empowering and integrated projects. In addition to its very concrete

character, this level of action seems to allow more flexibility between the

stakeholders, thus facilitating the transparency and the visibility of both the

objectives and realisations of the project.

Problems:

The micro-project level of action also presents major disadvantages: it remains

very local and in that way can be seen as contradicting the conurbation dynamic.

At the time of the increasing importance of inter-municipal networks, both

nationally and internationally, how can the micro-local scale remain relevant

from a generable point of view? In other words, how can the good practices

experimented at the micro-local scale be capitalized and transferred at other

levels?


Throughout this report, the review of existing experiments of urban projects went

progressively from the general level of interaction with inhabitants to the co-production of

public policies and to more specific and innovative practices as regards local governance. The

following part summarizes the “practical outcomes” of this panorama, pointing out tools and

challenges for the KN projects.


Practical Outcome ________________________________________________________

This report, focusing on local governance, presented an overview of the exiting

practices in the field of urban policies. It revealed the diversity of the experimentations

conducted at the local level. The adoption of the “governance approach”, defined as the

“ability to regulate internally the interplay of interests and to reconcile them in view of their

representation externally”44, led us to insist on the importance of the relationships between

the different stakeholders. The common denominator of the different reported experiences

consists in the efforts made to integrate different and sometimes contradicting positions as

regards the future of the European cities. From the diffusion of information on urban policies

implemented by the municipalities to the engagement into concrete participation of

inhabitants at the micro-local level, a diversified range of practices aim at achieving this

“environment of good governance”45.

Considering the multiplicity of actors intervening in the processes of elaboration and

implementation of urban policies, and the diversity of overlapping scales in which urban

projects are developed, what is at stake is the quest for a negotiated political equilibrium46.

The purpose is to answer the tension caused by the ambivalent urban context: holding more

and more responsibilities delegated by the nation-states and the European Union under the

principle of Subsidiarity, European cities are becoming increasingly active in the economic

competition and development. But at the same time, cities are also the first to be confronted to

the problems of exclusion and dereliction of territories, endangering their own development47.

44 P. Le Galès ,“Urban Governance and policy networks: on the urban political boundedness of policy networks. A French case study”, Public administration, 2001, 20(2-3). 45 S. Leach & L. Pratchett, « Local Government: A new vision, Rhetoric or Reality? », in Parliamentary Affairs, 58 (2), April 2005: « UK 2004: Someone’s responsible; no one’s to blame. » 46C. Jacquier, « Inventer une démocratie urbaine de ‘coopération conflictuelle’ », in Pouvoirs Locaux, 62, III, 2004. 47 Ibid.


In an attempt to restore the consistency and the harmony of urban development is promoted

the collaboration of the administrations with the inhabitants, the business forces and other

actors of the civil society.

The experiments described above arouse several challenges to take up, in order to make urban policies successful:

The first challenge regards the mobilization of the stakeholders:

Experiments displayed the difficulty to engage every actor in the processes of

production of urban policies. Moreover, the mobilization of the stakeholders on the long-

term, at every stage of the project, mentioned as an important condition of success,

remains hardly achievable.

In this respect, the reported experiments emphasized the need for a strong and active

leadership. Indeed, the confrontation of an extremely diversified range of stakeholders

requires the action of a leader, allowing to “interplay” the diversity of interests and to

go beyond the simple expression of contradicting views.

This task implies the early establishment of clear ‘rules for the game’, distributing

the roles, accountabilities and responsibilities of every actor. The establishment of

rules to regulate the relationships between the different stakeholders is crucial to

avoid the frustration leading to a despondency effect in lots of cases.

To sum up, without the presence of a strong leadership, regulating the relationships

between the different stakeholders, their continuous mobilization is very difficult,

damaging the final outcomes of the projects.


But the kind of leadership is highly problematic:

As written by S. Leach & L. Pratchett48, the role of the leader is difficult to assess. Not

only because the quality of the leadership partly depends on the personal quality and

motivation of the leader, but especially because it is difficult to know what is a ‘good’,

‘strong’, or ‘effective’ leadership. The authors argue that in any case, speaking about

leadership is speaking about representation power. Indeed, to be useful, the leader needs

to be widely accepted by the partners; in other words, the question of its legitimacy is

determinant for the success of the project.

Regarding legitimacy, the experiments revealed that the inhabitants sometimes feeled

instrumentalized within a fake participative project, which will eventually only

validate a already decided policy.

To counter this feeling of certain stakeholder to be an ‘alibi’, the development co-

decional projects appears as a good practice, for example, by providing

inhabitants with the responsibility of a part of the budget.

But the legitimacy of the projects does not only comes from formal procedures. All

the presented projects experienced the difficulty to build a trustful relationship

between the different stakeholders, highly damaging the outcome of the projects.

Experiences evidenced the necessity to implement a continuous collaboration, and

to adopt a flexible attitude toward the participants. For instance, meetings are key

moments in the construction of the relationship between the different stakeholders,

and need to take place from the elaboration phase to the evaluation of the project.

48 S. Leach & L. Pratchett underlined the ambiguity of the notion of leadership in their analysis of the ‘10-year vision’ announced in July 2004 by the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK. See their article “Local Government: A new vision, Rhetoric or Reality?”, in Parliamentary Affairs, 58 (2), April 2005: « UK 2004: Someone’s responsible; no one’s to blame. »


Briefly, the construction of a good relationship between the different stakeholders

consitute a major challenge for the success of the project. The difficulty lies in the integration

of every stakeholder in the production of urban policies.

The ‘empowerment’ of the inhabitants:

In the construction of the relationship with the inhabitants, what is at stake for the

professionals is the acknowledgement of the competence of the inhabitants with

regard to urban policies.

In this respect, the ‘bottom-up’ approach is pointed out as a factor of success by

numerous projects. This approach stresses the fact that the inhabitants possess an

“experience of the place”, and in this respect, they constitute a precious source of

knowledge.

The experiments reported the benefits of the appropriation of the project by the

inhabitants: feeling owners of the project, they contribute largely to its success.

A good practice favouring this appropriation is the connection with the

inhabitants’ everyday life. To this extent, successful projects are often those who

are located at a limited scale.

Overall, the empowerment of inhabitants constitutes a key for the success of a urban

project. Indeed, the direct implication of the inhabitants in small scale projects allows the

contacts between the partners to be more frequent and more transparent. Increasing the

visibility of the accomplished progresses, it creates a feeling of ownership, which benefits to

the partnership by improving the trust in the relationship. Subsequently, the mobilization

becomes easier, because every stakeholder integrated in the project. Nevertheless, these types

of practices have only been observed at micro-level, and at this stage, the question of the

transferability of these good practices remains.


Governance in action and Theory of local citizenship ________________________________________________________

The KN consortium is deeply interested in “best practises” and tools in order to

improve local governance and implement the right ideas. The CIR hopes that this report might

be a first step to seize what might be undertaken or, rather at this stage, to know what the

others try to do. Besides, following the philosophy of the project, we would like to stress

some theoretical implications of KN.

I

As John Crowley (2001) has pointed out, the question of local citizenship is primarily

a matter of scale. However, it is important to keep in mind that the dimensions of scale, scope,

and mode, intersect and influence each other reciprocally. Much of the literature suggests that

“local” democracy might be closer to people not just in the trivial sense that it involves

geographically less extended territories, but more profoundly in being a different kind of

democracy – addressing different questions and doing so in different ways. The defence of the

innovative or even transformative character of local democracy often turns on positive claims

about civil society, voluntary organizations, and grassroots politics. Similarly, and for the

same reasons, it encapsulates a critique of ideas of sovereignty, the general will, and political

leadership. In such arguments, it is the quality of citizenship and not simply its geographical

extent that is at stake.

II

In order to make theoretical progress, it is necessary to go back to the discussion at a

very general and abstract level. The question is, therefore, whether it is possible to develop a

concept of “local citizenship” that might be coherent, usable, and useful. The condition of

coherence is that local citizenship should be identifiably a species of the genus civitas – one

that includes other manifestations that differ from it in scale (e.g. national citizenship) or in

structure (e.g. social citizenship), but have nonetheless a genuine family resemblance. For


such a concept to be usable, it must be possible, on the basis of it, to develop empirical

research protocols capable of ascertaining whether it is actually extant in any particular habi-

tat. And finally, as suggested by the theoretical framework sketched in the previous section,

the exercise might as well be useful, in the sense of telling us something about complex

societies that we might miss if the concept of local citizenship were not deployed.

That a coherent and usable concept of local citizenship would be useful if available

can reasonably be assumed. There are two major strands in traditional theories of citizenship.

One is centrally concerned with the idea of a political community. It asks how we can make

conceptual and institutional sense of the democratic principle that the subjects of law should

also be, jointly and severally, its authors. Its polar figure is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who,

while deeply divisive, is as important for the liberals who reject him as for the radical

democrats who embrace him. The second strand is centrally concerned with the idea of an

integrated society. It asks how we can make conceptual and institutional sense of the idea that

membership of society means the same thing for large numbers of otherwise unrelated people

who occupy very different positions in it, command unequal resources, and have often sharply

divergent views of what is going on. Durkheim is its often unacknowledged ancestor, but T.

H. Marshall may be conveniently taken as a fairly consensual father figure. These strands of

theory differ in many ways, but they share an important feature. They locate citizenship at the

level of social entities that are, at least empirically, large-scale – and, in theoretical terms,

geographically indeterminate – and, more importantly, conceptually homogeneous.

With respect to contemporary European societies, this feature looks like a defect. A

more sociological approach does not postulate a single nexus of law that uniquely defines

citizenship. To that extent, it seems promising to tie together the two strands of traditional

thinking and to take as units of analysis societies organized as political communities. How-

ever the Marshallian paradigm of citizenship, even as adapted by later writers, leaves us lum-

bered with an implicit presumption of homogeneity. Citizenship, says Marshall, “is a status

bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are e-

qual with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.” (Marshall, 1950,

p. 18). The core of his analysis is the extension of full membership, or citizenship, to an ever

wider group of people and its enrichment by attachment to it of an expanding bundle of rights


and duties. There is thus a structural presumption that full membership is uniform and homo-

geneous, however diverse may be forms of exclusion. It may be that this analysis is

empirically correct in the sense that modern societies do tend towards uniformity of

membership. But it would be deeply unsatisfactory to build it into the very concept of

citizenship. A differentiated concept would thus be useful in making it possible to take

account of a greater degree of heterogeneity than the Marshallian framework allows for.

It is therefore worth considering whether the idea of local citizenship – as an issue for

any differentiated perspective on citizenship – can be made coherent. Using as a working def-

inition of citizenship “the form of membership peculiar to societies organized as political

communities”, this implies assessing the idea of a “local society” and of a “local political

community” – leaving aside for the moment the question of their empirical existence. Prima

facie, the idea makes a lot of sense. Once we view it in differentiated terms, citizenship

combines, in complex ways, a set of legal statuses and relationships, including rights; a set of

institutions and practices; and a set of ideas that give meaning to all of this. Because of this

complex structure, there is nothing absurd in the idea that citizenship might differ from time

to time and from place to place. It may evolve, as in Marshall’s analysis of Britain. It may

also be expressed differently at different institutional levels – for instance in the context of

European integration. It is possible in principle, therefore, that at a local level – for example at

the level of the city or city neighbourhood – a specific form of membership may be

identifiable that can be called “citizenship” without doing violence to the concept.

There are, furthermore, empirical reasons to make such an assumption. One aspect of

citizenship is the relationship between a political authority with territorial or functional juris-

diction and the group of people subject to it. Some such authorities are specifically local in

both senses of the word: they are defined territorially, and they are of comparatively small

scale within a larger territorial system. Indeed, there is a tendency in countries such as the UK

and France, which are perceived to be over-centralized, for the importance of local juris-

diction to increase in response to concerns about both administrative efficiency and demo-

cratic accountability. The relevance of the local idea is also apparent if we consider patterns

of mobilization, which are a constitutive dimension of citizenship as defined here. Their very

existence expresses the dual relationship between the people subject to political authority (or


a sub-group of them) and between such people collectively and the institutions that embody

authority. Furthermore, to the extent that mobilization involves challenges to existing arrange-

ments or proposals for new arrangements, it is necessarily framed in a political language (in

the broadest sense, including not just verbal deliberation but also a whole range of modes of

communication of which violence is equally part) that reflects the prevailing meaning of

citizenship – or, more likely, the set of possible meanings within which a particular political

community argues about citizenship. Now, by its very nature, mobilization has a geography.

This may be tightly defined – when it is framed by a territorial issue, or involves specific uses

of physical space, such as demonstrations, occupations, etc. Or geography may be of minor

significance in understanding a process of mobilization, when it merely brings together some

of the people who happen to occupy a particular territory. From either perspective, however,

local territories that are endowed with structures of political authority, and within which spe-

cific issues and mobilizations emerge, may be thought of, prima facie, as possible spaces of

citizenship.

These points are sketchy, and each of them would require both conceptual expansion and

empirical substantiation. They do however suffice to show that to talk of “local citizenship” is

not simply to make a sloppy category mistake. On the contrary, the need for critical appraisal

of our habitual, and sometimes taken-for-granted, “scaling” of democracy emerges from the

very conceptual structure of citizenship. In addition, formulating citizenship in terms of the

articulation between society and political community points us towards the kinds of empirical

work that might make the concept usable. In particular, this formulation shows the fruitful-

ness of a focus on contestation, on the mobilization of claims about political exclusion – inter-

preted here as the denial of full membership –, not as the only mode of citizenship, or even

necessarily the most important, but simply as a crucial indicator of tensions of scope and scale

within formally democratic systems. The nexus of multiculturalism and citizenship – the

position of ethnic and cultural minorities within societies organized as political communities

of which they are at best ambiguously members –, is of course exemplary in this respect.

To refer to such “tensions” underlines the extent to which the scale and scope of democracy

are normative issues of considerable contemporary significance. As we have already noted,

interest in local spaces of citizenship, even in its most ethnographic forms, is invariably


normatively charged. In the background of most recent social-science literature on citizenship

lurks the “crisis of the nation-state” – serving as both a diagnosis and a prescription. Sim-

plifying for my purposes here, the supposed crisis is the inability of actual states to guarantee,

within a singled privileged level of political organization, the citizenship they claim to

embody. One set of arguments is that globalization is depriving the state of so much of its

capacity for action that legal sovereignty has ceased to constitute self-government. The

second, often related, set of arguments – for which “multiculturalism” is a convenient generic

label – stresses the absence, or the purely rhetorical nature, of the convergence between the

ethnic and civic dimensions of nationhood that the nation-state model postulates and on the

basis of which it defines legitimacy (Crowley, 2000). The normative critique, correlatively, is

that this inability is not simply an accidental or transitory defect of currently existing nation-

states but a necessary feature of the nation-state model itself, which, as a consequence, is con-

ceptually irrelevant. Furthermore, the tension between the ethnic and civic dimensions of

nationhood gives rise to real and damaging processes of exclusion, of which the difficulties

experienced by most European countries in responding to the presence of substantial immi-

grant communities in ways compatible with basic liberal democratic principles is exemplary.

Subscription to such arguments leads logically to a normative defence of non-national forms

of citizenship – what we might call generically “postnationalism”. The “local” is one of these

forms (alongside the European and the cosmopolitan), and is perhaps peculiarly significant

because its smaller scale and very concrete issues make it easier for people to identify with it.

Such arguments are offered, in particular, in defence of the view that resident foreigners

should be granted local, but not national, voting rights. A number of countries have granted

such rights to foreigners generally, and the principle has been enshrined in European law – for

citizens of the European Union only, on the basis of reciprocity – since the Treaty of

Maastricht.

III

As a consequence, it seems that there are no insuperable obstacles to the development of a

concept of “local citizenship” that might be coherent, usable, and useful – and perhaps,

indeed, of considerable conceptual importance. If we take seriously the idea of citizenship as


membership of a society organized as a political community, nothing in the concept, however,

presupposes that local citizenship actually exists. We need therefore to consider empirically

how politics is actually structured at the local level.

In any system as complex as a contemporary European state, there will be different levels of

political authority and administrative competence, issues that are inherently territorial because

they involve among other things contested appropriations of physical space, forms of mobiliz-

ation that depend on pre-existing structures within civil society, types of identification defined

mainly or partly in terms of pride of place. If we take seriously the concept sketched in previ-

ous paragraphs, our working hypothesis must therefore be that citizenship will manifest itself

in a distinctively local key or mode to the extent that these four dimensions tend to overlap.

Conversely, the mere fact of localization, of being somewhere, cannot be considered decisive.

Mobilization directed at the holders of political authority and framed in terms of legitimacy is,

prima facie, an expression of citizenship. This does not mean, however, that citizen mobiliza-

tion about local issues directed at local authorities is necessarily an expression of local citi-

zenship. That will depend on how closed the local political system is and how distinctive is its

repertoire of political language. Local manifestations of citizenship are thus questions of de-

gree, and crucially of scale. The very existence of a territorially circumscribed focus of ad-

ministrative authority, especially if it is at least partly accountable to some elected body, will

tend to stimulate a specific mode of citizen activity. However, depending on the kinds of

issues, the forms of mobilization and the types of identification involved, points other than

official territorial subdivisions may be more relevant, or the “local” itself may prove illusory.

It is possible, in particular, that what takes place at the local level can be adequately under-

stood only at the national level.

In fact, this theoretical possibility does seem to be substantiated empirically. A range of evi-

dence clearly indicates the importance of local political activity and its particular significance

for groups whose membership of the society and the political community is institutionally in-

complete or normatively contested. Thus, many things that ethnic political activists care about

– certain aspects of education, access to facilities for religious and cultural activities, relations

with law-enforcement agencies, housing issues – are, in practice, most effectively addressed

at municipal or neighbourhood level. Furthermore, exclusion itself creates political resources


that can be mobilized, often as explicit or implicit threats, in certain local contexts.

Nonetheless, despite the internal connection – illustrated in this volume – between local

modes of citizenship and the politics of multiculturalism, it would be premature to conclude

that properly local citizenship is thereby shown to exist – and even more premature to

consider that local citizenship is thereby proved to be the answer to the problems raised by

multiculturalism. There is, of course, no strictly uniform political space corresponding to the

legal limits of the state. However it is misleading to view the local as simply the opposite of

the national. A more adequate interpretation is rather that multiple dynamics of

territorialization or localization are at work without converging on any uniform space.

Because representative and administrative structures, substantive issues, forms of mobili-

zation, and identities relate to different subdivisions and bring into play different dynamics,

there is no uniform, homogeneous level or scale that is truly “the local”.

Undoubtedly, mobilization around some territorially inscribed issue – housing

regeneration, say – will generally be local in at least three senses: it involves people that can

be attached to a fairly small-scale social space, it is expressed by forms of action

(demonstrations, petitions, squatting, etc.) that occupy an identifiable and limited space, and it

is addressed at institutions and policy processes that are reasonably “close”. Furthermore,

there is often a fair degree of overlap between these three forms of “locality”.

There are, however, two reasons to be wary of talking here of specifically local

citizenship. First, such overlap is an empirical fact rather than a necessary feature of any

particular political configuration. It is sometimes more effective to mobilize for local

purposes at national level because doing so facilitates the forging of coalitions and enhances

media impact. Conversely, of course, issues for which the state is solely responsible – the

legal status of aliens, say – may, for tactical reasons, be the objects of local mobilizations.

And, finally, transnational mobilization does occur, although it remains unusual. The local is

part of a repertoire of political activity that is never strictly determined by the nature of the

actors or of the issues involved. An important implication is that there are no strong reasons to

believe that local citizenship stands in a specifically coherent relation to multicultural con-

cerns. Empirical analysis shows the inadequacy of policies premised on the claim that multi-

culturalism is about “community” issues that are best solved locally of the basis of specific

forms of political participation. Such policies tend to be undermined or overtaken by main-


stream participation, and have often been abandoned or downgraded in countries such as the

UK, the Netherlands and Sweden where – in different ways – they had in the 1970s and 80s

been at the heart of official multiculturalism (Crowley, 2001a). This is hardly surprising:

multiculturalism is essentially a critique of the nation-state, and many of the issues it raises –

involving the symbols and institutions of nationhood – can, by their very nature, only be ad-

dressed at the level of the state. There are many good reasons for the multicultural agenda to

be strongly expressed at municipal level, but all of them depend on detailed empirical consid-

erations of political sociology rather than any necessary conceptual connection. The second

reason to be wary of exaggerated claims for local citizenship is that the observable “leakage”

of local political systems has a conceptual and not simply an empirical basis.

What is important sociologically is that the politicization of claims, and the

corresponding shift from bargaining to deliberation, depend on the dynamics of mobilization

rather than on the good intentions of the actors involved. Otherwise, the idea of a public

sphere would be purely wishful thinking. Whether the dynamics of mobilization suffice to

impose deliberation on actors who do not have an interest in generalizing and politicizing

their claims is, however, doubtful. The process sketched with reference to the nationalization

of local claims depends crucially on the comparative weakness of the initial mobilization and

the structural necessity to change scale, because of the lack of legislative capacity at the local

level. Pure bargaining may be a perfectly stable format for other kinds of claims. Habermas

himself would of course argue that the dynamics of argument – even within a bargaining

format – force the participants towards deliberation. But this is inadequate, since it leaves

willingness to participate in good-faith argument ungrounded within the dynamics of

mobilization.

The problem for a sociological analysis of the public sphere is therefore to specify the

structural conditions that make participation in deliberation a rational political strategy even

for actors who are unreasonable in the Rawlsian sense that they are not motivated by a desire

for just cooperation. Such conditions cannot, of course, provide guarantees, or even impose

enforceable constraints on political participation. Arguably, indeed, democracy depends on

the absence of guarantees or constraints of this kind. The conditions are simply those that

make it more probable that membership of a society organized as a political community


should take the form of participation based on public-spiritedness – in other words what one

would usually call, for normative purposes, citizenship.

At first sight, no two things could be more different than a public sphere and a

political field. Without being able to go into much detail here, it might be suggested that they

are in fact, pace both Bourdieu and Habermas, mutually reinforcing. What prevents

citizenship being simply a sham in the political field is the competitive pressure to which

those who attempt to monopolize it – the “political class” – are subjected. And what prevents

Öffentlichkeit being merely wishful thinking in the public sphere is precisely the same

competitive pressure. What develops, in other words, is an uneasy balance between the

tendency of public-spiritedness to emerge from cynical politics and the tendency of even the

most idealistic politics to close in on itself. This balance, like citizenship itself, is a question

of empirical degree: there are no knock-down arguments, sociological or quasi-

transcendental. Effectively, a public sphere is an open political field:49 one from which

nothing – no person, no issue, no mode of discourse – is excluded a priori and in which

practical limits to inclusion can be overcome if people care about them enough. Meaningful

citizenship is the correlate of such openness.

While the general theoretical implications of this hypothesis cannot be explored here,

it has direct and important consequences for the notion of local citizenship. John Crowley has

underlined that the latter depends on the existence of a local public sphere in which the

language of political justification is not entirely reducible to a usable higher-level resource. It

now appears that such a local public sphere would necessarily be related to a local political

field. This relation does not threaten the theoretical coherence of the idea of local citizenship:

everything said earlier remains valid. But empirical evidence that local politics might

constitute a local political field is woefully lacking. Political career structures, modes of

political organization, relations between politics and the media – all these features continue to

shape a predominantly national and state-centred political field. The “local field” is one of its

modes of expression, not an autonomous alternative to it. (The same is true, for much the

same reasons, of politics at the European level.) Nor is there any strong evidence that

multicultural issues offer an exception to this pattern. Available research on Western Europe

hardly contradicts Kymlicka’s claim, made in a North American context, that “most 49 The idea that a political field might be “open” is, on the face of it, inconsistent with Bourdieu’s whole field theory. The essence of a field is, in principle, precisely to be closed. My argument here assumes, without being able to establish it fully, that Bourdieu’s field theory is itself inadequate as it applies to politics.


polyethnic demands are evidence that members of minority groups want to participate within

the mainstream of society” (1995, p. 177). And for political purposes, the mainstream is the

national and state-centred field sketched earlier. The “local” offers a mode of citizenship that

is valuable, perhaps deserves enhancement, and possibly has a specific affinity with the

interests of certain groups within contemporary European societies. But, conversely,

confinement to the local arena, to the extent it exists, is the expression not of citizenship but

precisely of exclusion from it.

What light does this very rough outline of a theory of local democracy throw on

broader questions of contemporary democracy and citizenship? The answer is that we should

beware of a crudely empiricist relation between levels of technical-administrative political

organization – of policy, in a word – and levels of political authority and accountability – of

democracy, in this context. A range of arguments in public debate make claims about the

reshaping of policy – e.g. that that the state no longer has control over the economy – and

derive conclusions about the appropriate level of democracy. What is inadequate about this is

not necessarily the empirical point itself, though it may be arguable in any particular case, but

the argumentative structure. If we agree, in line with my analysis here, that democracy cannot

be divided up without losing its substance, then the very idea of “levels” is misleading. In the

context of recent debate, this has at least one specific and important implication. Any erosion

of democracy within the nation-state – the level most often regarded as challenged or even

obsolete – is unlikely to be compensated for by changes at other levels. The enhancement of

local and supranational democracy is, precisely, an enhancement of democracy, not the

emergence of some radically new form of it (Crowley, 2002).

It can be stressed that KN partners contribute to these debates at the same time the consortium

is thinking and trying to implement local governance.


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