Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City

Non-Governmental Public Action

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

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

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

Titles include:

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

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

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

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Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City

Edited by

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

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

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v

Contents

List of Tables, Boxes and Photographs vii

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations viii

Preface ix

Notes on Contributors xiii

1. Introduction 1 Jenny Pearce

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

Jenny Pearce

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

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

Zander Navarro

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

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

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

John Diamond and Jenny Pearce

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

Heather Blakey

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

Davina Miller

vi Contents

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

Jenny Pearce

Index 255

vii

Tables, Boxes and Photographs

Tables

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

per 100,000 inhabitants 129

Boxes

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

Photographs

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

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

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

viii

Acronyms and Abbreviations

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

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

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

ix

Preface

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

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

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

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

x Preface

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

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

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

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

Preface xi

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

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

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

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

xii Preface

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

Note

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

xiii

Contributors

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

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

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

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

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

xiv Contributors

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

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

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

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

Porto Alegre

Photo 1 Rubbish recycling unit

Photo 2 Chácara do Primeiro, community association meeting

Photo 3 Feeding back research findings to AEPPA

Photo 4 Researchers meet members of the PB council

Caracas

Photo 5 Members of the MTA

Photo 6 Members of the OCA and researchers

Photo 7 MTA, ‘A Tool of the Revolution’

Photo 8 Landslide in La Pedrera

Medellín

Photo 9 Downtown Medellín

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

Photo 11 Comuna 1, Medellín

Manchester

Photo 12 Team social event with HRACA

Photo 13 Street poster, Manchester

Bradford

Photo 14 Participatory budgeting, Keighley

Photo 15 Latin American researchers meet with Bradford Resource Centre

Salford

Photo 17 Salford’s working class terraces

Photo 16 Media City: Salford’s future vision