When Participation Fails: The Implications of Struggling Organizations for Participatory Democracy

• In Event: 187 - Regular Session. Political Culture

Abstract

The positive outcomes and impacts of successful participatory governance experiments have been well detailed by researchers. By analyzing these successful cases, researchers have suggested that experiments grounded in participatory democratic theory can both empower citizens and reconfigure state institutions, making the latter more accountable to the former. However, the focus on exemplary cases alone ignores the ways in which lack of success shapes participants’ and non-participants’ understandings of alternative political practices. Relying on ethnographic and interview data collected in three communities in popular sectors of Caracas, Venezuela this article looks at the implementation of participatory experiments in instances where they fail to motivate participation and/or make successful claims on the state. In these cases, rather than increasing citizens’ ability to make claims on the state, groups turned their attention away from the state, shifting blame onto citizens and communities instead. Furthermore instead of unifying people around local concerns and fostering linkages across common interests, attempts to promote local participation increased neighborhood conflict and distrust.

Author

• Rebecca Annice Hanson, University of Georgia-Athens