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Can agonism be institutionalised? Can institutions be agonised? Prospects for democratic design
Abstract
One of the main criticisms of agonistic democracy (and of post-structuralism more generally) is that it fails to get beyond a purely negative assessment of alternative theories. The article takes up this challenge. First, it seeks to specify the core commitments of agonistic democracy, focusing on the concepts of contestation, contingency and interdependence. Second, it analyses how these commitments might be institutionalised through models of perfectionism, adversarialism and inclusivism. Third, it considers how agonistic principles can suffuse broader processes of democratic design, drawing on insights from critical institutionalism. The article argues that agonism can become more than a thought experiment or critique. An agonistic design process is possible. Such a process has five key characteristics: it is processual, collective, contextual, contestable and always provisional.
... Westminster, qui souligne la place centrale de l'antagonisme et du conflit dans la vie politique et démocratique. Cette approche est par ailleurs diversifiée : elle se développe autour de plusieurs auteurs et courants (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018 ;Paxton, 2020) qui mettent en avant l'importance de la diversité, du pluralisme et du dissensus. À l'instar du commun, l'agonisme est récemment mobilisé en sciences de gestion dans une optique démocratique (entre autres (Barthold & Bloom, 2020 ;Burchell & Cook, 2013 ;Couch & Bernacchio, 2020 ;Dawkins, 2015 ;S. ...
... Dans le même temps, il faut éviter le blocage de l'action représenté souvent par l'image d'une agora permanente. (Gand & Segrestin, 2009, p. 136) (3) Le(s) dispositif(s) pour concrétiser cette autorité de gestion Paxton, 2018). (2) Ce retrait empirique explique en partie le caractère davantage analytique de notre recherche. ...
... Cet élément répond tant à une exigence pragmatique -ce sont les membres qui ont les connaissances et les compétences sur le sujet traité -qu'à une attention agonistique. En effet, l'agonisme insiste sur la nécessité d'impliquer les personnes parties du dissensus (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018 ;Mouffe, 2014 ;Westphal 2019). ...
Cette recherche porte sur l’association de deux objets de gestion : l’entreprise de l’ESS, à la gouvernance démocratique, et l’entreprise libérée, prônant une organisation managériale libératrice et émancipatrice. Alors que le fonctionnement démocratique de la première semble condamner à la dégénérescence par la littérature, nous montrons que ce déterminisme s’appuie sur un impensé : une organisation démocratique du travail. Parallèlement, l’entreprise libérée, dernière mode managériale contemporaine, est amplement critiquée par la littérature scientifique. En particulier, nous montrons que ses partisans se sont contentés d’une « libération » de l’organisation du travail. Il existe de fait un plafond de verre de la gouvernance d’entreprise. Ces deux catégories organisationnelles semblent donc complémentaires et leur association constitue une réunion originale pour repenser l’organisation et la gestion de l’entreprise. Pour étudier le potentiel démocratique de cet objet de gestion unique, cette recherche mobilise une double approche théorique démocratique : les communs et l’agonisme. D’un point de vue empirique, nous nous appuyons sur une étude de deux cas d’entreprise : un supermarché coopératif, mettant en place une organisation sociocratique et holacratique, et une entreprise sociale du secteur de l’aide à domicile, entreprise commerciale de l’ESS organisée par équipe autonome. Cette thèse propose une triple contribution. Tout d’abord, nous analysons le potentiel démocratique d’une ouverture de la gouvernance au sein de l’entreprise libérée. Ensuite, nous contribuons à approfondir le fonctionnement démocratique des entreprises de l’ESS. Plus précisément, cette thèse permet de réexaminer la théorie de la dégénérescence. Enfin, nous dévoilons des conditions, des effets et des enjeux d’une démocratisation organisationnelle de l’entreprise.
... Hâlihazırda mevcut bulunan müzakereci ve işbirlikçi teorinin uzlaşmaya dayalı yaklaşımını reddeden agonizm; çekişmelere, demokratik tartışmalara ve karşıt görüşlere odaklanır (Lowndes ve Paxton, 2018;Mouffe, 1999). Agonistik yaklaşımın yükselişinin ardında yatan asıl neden daha demokratik bir duruma ulaşma amacıyla siyasal tartışma ortamını ve içinde yer alan karşıt fikirlere yaklaşımı düzenlemektir. ...
... Bu anlamda agonizm uzlaşı yoluyla çatışmayı ortadan kaldırmaya da çalışmaz. Aksine çoğulculuğa açık, çeşitliliği kabul eden, demokratik topluluğu teşvik eden ve karşıt görüşler arasındaki boşluğu dolduracak üretken ve yenilikçi bir gerilim yaratmayı amaçlamaktadır (Lowndes ve Paxton, 2018;McAuliffe ve Rogers, 2019). ...
... Benzer şekilde agonistler, toplumsal değerleri tartışmaya ve çekişmeye açık olarak gördükleri için evrensel doğru, tarafsızlık ve rasyonalite iddialarını reddederler (Lowndes ve Paxton, 2018). Agonist bakış açısı çoğulcu bir toplumda, bir grubun doğru ve tartışılamaz söyleme ve değerlere sahip olduğu iddiasını, yeni kavramlar ve anlatıların çoğulluğunu önlenecek bir durum olarak yorumlamaktadır. ...
Türkiye’de bölge planlama pratiği sürecinde içerikler, amaçlar ve kurumsal yapılar sürekli olarak değişime uğramıştır. Oluşan karmaşık sistem, bölgesel planların amaçlarını, karar alma mekanizmalarını, sürecin meşruiyetini ve bu planların genel olarak uygulamadaki başarısını da etkilemiştir. Türkiye’de bölgesel planlamada etkili olan karmaşık ve değişken kurumsal yapıları değerlendirmek ve kurumsallaşma dinamiklerini daha iyi anlamak için kurumlar ile birlikte, kurumların organizasyon mekanizmaları, kurumlar arası çatışmalar veya farklı otoriteler arasındaki iş birliklerinin evrimi tartışmanın merkezine alınarak incelenmelidir. Değişen dinamikler, birden çok kurumu ve kurumların ilişkilerini içeren süreçlerin içkin bir parçasıdır. Bu dinamikleri daha iyi anlamak için temel alınacak kuramsal bir çerçeveye ihtiyaç vardır. Bu bağlamda, Türkiye’de bölgesel planlamadaki kurumsallaşmadaki üç ayrı evreyi oluşturan kırılma noktalarını detaylı bir şekilde incelemek, süreci anlamak ve birimler arasındaki ilişkileri güncel kuram ve kavramlarla tartışmak amacıyla; çok bileşenli yapıların incelenmesine olanak sağlayan asamblaj (assemblage) ve aktör ağ kuramları (actor network) ile kurumsallaşma üzerinde demokratik bir çatkı oluşturan agonizm kuramı çalışmanın temel eksenini oluşturmaktadır.
... Incompleteness may serve dominant institutional actors in urban governance or more marginal ones. For example, incompleteness may be either a de facto policy choice that serves dominant interests, or serve to open up 'pre-figurative spaces' (Cooper, 2017), characterised by the inclusion of non-state actors, democratic contestations (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018) and acknowledgement of local or experiential expertise (Durose and Richardson, 2016) For these reasons, rather than 'wishing away' incompleteness, we need to engage in further conceptual work to understand why incompleteness is pervasive in institutional design, how it operates in urban governance and what its effects might be. ...
... Acknowledging and celebrating incompleteness as a normative design value in and of itself resonates with concepts of postmodernity (contrasting with modernist assumptions of progress toward completeness). Here, we are invited to embrace the uncertainty of incompleteness for both its practical benefits and its democratic values of inclusion, participation and contestability (Lowndes and Paxton 2018;Griggs et al., 2014;Moon, 2013). ...
... Incompleteness in institutional design may here be allied with an agonistic perspective that values democratic contestation and seeks to realise it through an institutional design process imbued with the principles of contestation, contingency and interdependence (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018). This view prioritises diverse and inclusive participation in the process of institutional design, thus enabling space for generating alternatives (Cooper, 2017) and harnessing perspectives on problem-solving that are closer to those affected (Ostrom, 2005). ...
This article asks why institutional designs for urban governance are so often incomplete and what a critical perspective on incompleteness may offer. We develop a novel conceptual framework distinguishing between incompleteness as description (a deficit to be ‘designed-out’), action (‘good enough’ design to be worked with and around), and prescription (an asset to be ‘designed-in’). An extended worked example of city regional devolution in England illuminates the three types of incompleteness in practice, whilst also identifying hybrid forms and cross-cutting considerations of power, time and space. Perceiving institutional incompleteness as a design logic in its own right, held in tension with completeness, could help augment institutional design repertoires and even enhance democratic values.
... When asked what democracy means, many people think of elections (Achen and Bartels, 2017). Deliberation provides the fundamental practice around which deliberative democracy revolves (Fishkin, 2018), as does contestation for agonistic democracy (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018). However, this approach only makes sense if the practices are normatively charged. ...
... The original agonistic focus on the claimed spaces of social movements (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) recently shifted to institutional design (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018;Westphal, 2018;Wingenbach, 2011) exploring agonism in the closed spaces of parliaments and party competition (Mouffe, 2018) and governmental invited spaces (Dean, 2018;Paxton, 2020). Such agonistic spaces need to fulfil two crucial functions, to facilitate the expression of disagreement while containing conflict: 'If we are to overcome the polarisation and division which permeates Western democracies, we must recreate spaces . . . ...
Deliberative democratic theory and the practice of deliberative minipublics currently hold a dominant position within the study of democratic innovations. This one-dimensional view inhibits learning from other perspectives in democratic theory. Responding to the post-model debate in democratic theory, the article argues for a multiperspectival approach that combines the normative grounding provided by models with diversity and innovation. Through the multiperspectival approach, the article presents five lessons for democratic innovations. By engaging with conceptions of democratic space in participatory, deliberative, agonistic, feminist, and transformative democratic theory, it argues that democratic innovations need to be (1) grounded, (2) connected, (3) agonised, (4) embodied, and (5) politicised. Drawing on empirical studies, it translates these five lessons into concrete recommendations for designers of democratic innovations.
... Interdependence promotes the non-definitive characteristic of social actors, a non-fixed ontology of beings, that can always be updated. For those reasons, agonism is a continuous experiment, a constant settling of preferences rather than a settled and finished process (Hirsch, 2013;Lowndes and Paxton, 2018). ...
... This leads us to question whether traditional justice can be agonized. Even more, it makes us question whether agonism can be designed in institutions and fostered at different times to resist a contingent experiment within a community (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018). ...
It is difficult to promote the encounter between clashing members of a community, or between offenders and victims, after serious offenses and deep division, like after school shootings victims, sexual abuse, citizen insecurity, and even racial violence. What are the conditions that enable distant positions can interact rather than promote a new battle that would turn the colliding groups even more entrenched in their beliefs and more distant in their actions?
Why do we need to create peace or repair the damage caused between people? In other words, what is the ultimate sense in developing and repai¬ring a divided community? The plain answer can be ‘to allow human rights and dignity.’ Yet, how antagonist members can settle a dialogue and restart living in divided societies? Many answers to those questions have been for¬mulated from democratic development theory and by practitioners of me¬diation and reparation.
Drawing from agonism theory, the adversarial division is understood as a productive conflict that entails many possibilities to reconstitute an ever-divided community full of controversies (imperfections). Rather than a polished consensus that subsumes clashing preferences for the sake of unity and cooperation, in divided societies, the perspective is ‘I will never understand where you come from’ instead of ‘I agree and understand your point’.
After serious offense and crime, the opposition between members or groups of people is far from suiting the model of rational deliberation and universal agreement. Instead of seeking a political center to reach an agreement, it is the margins that deliver the perspectives of politics in a community.
... The political is implicit to institutional bricolage, as leakage of meaning directs attention to the reproduction or reinforcing of pre-existing power relationships and inequalities that are entrenched in social life. Lowndes and Paxton (2018) draw parallels between critical institutional analysis of change processes and agonistic accounts of the political. Agonism focuses politics on social plurality, recognising conflict and contestation as inherent to human societies. ...
... For critical institutionalism and agonism, institutions are "discursively constructed power settlements that are animated through the creative action of reflective agents" (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018, page 703). While agonism centres analytical attention on the political as distinct from the social and cultural, both schools of thought recognise the influence of institutions and actors on each other; the potential for agential creativity to enable institutional change; and the deep entanglement of institutions with the power relations embedded in broader social structures (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018). Institutional order is, therefore, an expression of a particular configuration of power relations at a given point in time and, as the agonistic view of the political emphasises, "could always have been otherwise […] every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities" (Mouffe, 2016, page 1). ...
In many parts of the world, traditional institutions are the backbone of village governance and service delivery. While the effects of introducing new institutional arrangements from outside have been widely studied, autonomous changes – that is, those that originate from within communities – are not well understood. Recognising that traditional institutions continuously evolve to remain relevant, we build on critical institutionalism and the concept of institutional bricolage to explain autonomous change processes in traditional institutions. Relying on unstructured storian conversations with community members (20 female, 18 male) from two villages in Vanuatu, our fieldwork explored the emergence of village committees as a governance mechanism to sustain access to vital services. Storian data revealed that a small number of bricoleurs – local agents of change – were driving these autonomous institutional change processes, their agency enabled and constrained by structures within and beyond the community. Bricoleurs created new institutional arrangements to address new governance challenges by borrowing traditional and non-traditional elements and associated meaning, authority and legitimacy. Our analysis reveals the interplay of two established institutional bricolage processes – elite capture and leakage of meaning – each of which operated to open up and close down spaces for change. We draw on agonistic accounts of the political to deepen our understanding of this interaction. By adopting this approach, we reveal the significance of the political at the local level, through which the social plurality of village life is negotiated, resulting in profound shifts in some norms and the maintenance of others. We conclude with reflections on the prospects of unsettling the deep-rooted exclusion from decision making of groups such as women and young people through future autonomous changes in village governance.
... Emotional statements are acceptable. The opponents (both the competing groups and individuals) should be treated with respect, as esteemed adversaries, not the enemies [37]. Through collective contestation, participants develop autonomy and group identity relationally. ...
... This kind of assessment means using composite indexes and scales typical to the social sciences -the models, mainly quantitative and presented in numerical format [51]. Here it should be taken into account in the following aspects of the deliberative debate: The substantive value of the arguments [31,52]; respect for the opponents' arguments [26]; sensitivity of community members [31]; inclusiveness and diversity; shared responsibility [27]; sense of common interest; focus on consensus [23,32]; and decentralisation [23], as well as the following aspects of agonistic debate: competitiveness; group identity; strong rivalry among participants; respect for outstanding adversaries; focus on recognition, precedence and acclaim; and the existence of highly influential participants [28,30,37]. In addition, we should state how different types of attitude translate into: Effectiveness in problem solving, self-organisation, and quality outputs (ideas, activity, and structured opinions). ...
In this study, we focus on models of civic debate suitable for use in Polish-Ukrainian internet projects, as well as methods of researching collective intelligence that can help to monitor particular aspects of such debates and consequently create social bridging capital between these groups. The dynamic socio-political situation of recent years, both in Ukraine and in Poland, has created new conditions. Anti-government protests and social turmoil related to the war in Crimea and Donbas, as well as a high level of migration in the region in a short period led to the creation of a multi-ethnic society. This brings opportunities for the development of a new type of social capital: A new participative model of social life based on internet projects, with a relatively low entry barrier, space for creativity, and the widespread use of ICT technologies, can provide the new ways of debating, civic engagement, and collective action. Our research, based on a multidisciplinary literature review, as well as a series of qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs), proved that the selected collective intelligence (CI) research methods and debate models can help to develop internet communities that will contribute to building bridging capital between Poles and Ukrainians.
... Agonists have recognised the importance of creating these institutional avenues, "to make room for dissent and to foster the institutions in which it can be manifested is vital for a pluralist democracy" (Mouffe, 2000a, p. 17). Nevertheless, agonism has been described as having an institutional deficit (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018). Unlike deliberative democrats, who have invented a range of procedures intended to manifest deliberative democratic principles, agonists have been much more circumspect in proposing agonistic institutional arrangements. ...
... Rather than a paradox, we find a productive tension. (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018) The next section of this article employs the theoretical resources of agonism to go beyond the dominance of the collaborative governance approach to theorising participation in urban governance. Using Rosanvallon's (2008) three democratic counter-powers as a framework it explores new ways for citizens to adopt an agonistic relation to institutional actors and engage in counter-governance. ...
The theory and practice of urban governance in recent years has undergone both a collaborative and participatory turn. The strong connection between collaboration and participation has meant that citizen participation in urban governance has been conceived in a very particular way: as varying levels of partnership between state actors and citizens. This over-focus on collaboration has led to: 1) a dearth of proposals in theory and practice for citizens to engage oppositionally with institutions; 2) the miscasting of agonistic opportunities for participation as forms of collaboration; 3) an inability to recognise the irruption of agonistic practices into participatory procedures. This article attempts to expand the conception of participatory urban governance by adapting Rosanvallon’s (2008) three democratic counter-powers—prevention, oversight and judgement—to consider options for institutionalising agonistic participatory practices. It argues that these counter-governance processes would more fully realise the inclusion agenda that underpins the participatory governance project.
... Similarly, Matulis and Moyer (2017) defend agonistic participation in environmental governance, which need not prevent or stop actions. Lowndes and Paxton (2018) suggest several institutional architectures of agonistic participation in public governance: citizens' assembly, referendum, preference ranking, and truth and reconciliation commissions. ...
After the discovery of the Mobuoy illegal dump in Derry, known to the public as one of the largest illegal dumpsites in Europe, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency adopted a so-called 'co-design' approach to the remediation of the contaminated site. As part of it, the Mobuoy Stakeholder Group was established so that local communities could represent their concerns and give feedback to the government's remediation project. Based on semi-structured interviews and policy analysis, this article examined the level of inclusiveness and representativeness of the Mobuoy Stakeholder Group by looking into the decision-making processes over two divisive agendas on the remediation project. This article concluded that a so-called 'co-design' approach to remediating the Mobuoy site was significantly misleading. The Mobuoy illegal dumpsite is an alarming case of environmental unsustainability in Northern Ireland, not only because of its massive scale, but also because of the government's closed and siloed approach to environmental governance. Through a lens of agonistic participation, this article argued that for co-design approaches to environmental governance to function as intended, power inequalities among participants, particularly the government and ordinary citizens, in environmental governance should be taken into consideration seriously.
... The first one is that intelligence should also be connected with agonism in politics. An agonistic democracy implies that an expected level of conflict and tensions is healthy for political life (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018). Rather than being a coherent and harmonic process, intelligence should address different voices, including those who dissent and contest. ...
This article analyses the accountability of intelligence agencies in Spain and Brazil. Drawing from critical intelligence studies, this article will argue that the goal of accountability is to expand legitimacy by incorporating the civil society. This requires redeveloping the scope of intelligence and its audience beyond legal norms and traditional decision-makers. To do so, the article will consider the following actors: 1) the media; 2) whistleblowers and leaks; 3) scholars; and 4) fiction writers. These actors may complement intelligence by gathering information or acting as knowledge advisory groups. Moreover, they can also challenge intelligence by promoting deeper scrutiny and transparency, while constructing archetypes that represent secret agencies. The conclusion will summarize the strengths and limitations deriving from these actors to promote accountability. It will also claim that, through a critical approach, exploring new accountability forms are necessary to expand the social legitimacy of intelligence policies.
Received: 2022-10-07
Revised: 2022-01-05
... Mouffe's powerful arguments highlight the normative and empirical significance of conflicts in democracies. Nonetheless, many scholars have pointed out that Mouffe is notoriously weak in actually proposing agonistic institutions (Lowndes and Paxton, 2018;Rzepka and Straßenberger, 2014: 230-232;Volk, 2021;Wallaschek, 2017: 9-13;Westphal, 2019). Indeed, the keyword-in-context analysis supports this critique. ...
Western democracies experience profound conflicts that induce concerns about polarization and social cohesion. Yet although conflicts are a core feature of democracies, the forms, functions, and dynamics of democratic conflicts have rarely been subject of political theory. This paper aims at furthering our understanding of democratic conflicts. It analyzes the theory of conflict in Mouffe's agonistic pluralism, confronts it with sociological conflict theory, and presents concrete points of departure for a more comprehensive theory of democratic conflicts. The paper, thus, contributes to two lines of research: (1) Regarding agonistic theories, the paper shows that agonistic pluralism fails to provide a convincing theory of conflict since it underestimates the mechanisms and effects of conflict dynamics (e.g. intergroup cohesion, intragroup conflict, domination, and escalation) and fails to account for the variety of conflict interactions. Proponents of agonistic pluralism should therefore invest more into clarifying their core concept. (2) For a general account of democratic conflicts, the paper proposes to pursue interdisciplinary research on the cognitive concepts shaping conflict interactions, the linked practices of conflict regulation, and the processual dynamics of conflicts.
... Lamont (2019) suggests that "ordinary universalism" allows working class ("non college educated") people to find common human values across ethnic, racial and other boundaries. This form of boundary making recognizes the continuing salience of existing boundaries, for example, in religion and family, but makes the boundaries more permeable in common everyday fields like locality and work, and potentially in politics, by highlighting values of respect and equality for all Agonism involves a retention of existing ideals, identities and boundaries in all fields within an overarching commitment to discussion and mutual coexistence, and involving typically a reevaluation of group hierarchy (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018). It has been argued to be central to peace-making and to reconciliation (Rumelili & Celik, 2017;Schaap, 2006;Strömbom, 2020) where radically oppositional perspectives have to be recognized as TODD eT al. 888 F I G U R E 1 Modes of boundary making? ...
This article explores how boundary making proceeds after protracted conflict has ended. Drawing on an interview and focus group study in two local areas in Northern Ireland, we identify the diverse forms of everyday boundary work amongst moderates who distance from the ethno‐political blocs: everyday universalism, agonism, transformation and cosmopolitanism. Each overcomes closed exclusivist boundaries and identity oppositions, thus providing a clear contrast with the overt political contention and polarization that has followed Brexit in Northern Ireland. Our research shows the internal shape and diversity of the moderate constituency who support peace‐building and a less‐polarized politics. It also offers an answer to the question how such everyday openness coexists with continued political polarization. We trace the different political perspectives associated with each form of boundary making and argue that this hinders political cohesion amongst moderates.
... Lamont (2019) suggests that 'ordinary universalism' allows working class ('non college educated') people to find common human values across ethnic, racial and other boundaries. This form of boundary making recognises the continuing salience of existing boundaries, for example in religion and family, but makes the boundaries more permeable in common everyday fields like locality and work, and Agonism involves a retention of existing ideals, identities and boundaries in all fields within an overarching commitment to discussion and mutual coexistence, and involving typically a reevaluation of group hierarchy (Lowndes and Paxton 2018). It has been argued to be central to peace-making and to reconciliation (Rumelili and Celik, 2017;Strombom 2020;Schaap 2006) where radically oppositional perspectives have to be recognised as legitimate and political contest and decision-making between one-time enemies accepted. ...
... This observation is in line with the view that contestation is one of the most important incentives motivating the participants of online debates [59]. Through collective contestation, participants develop autonomy and group identity, relatively speaking [60]. The observed relative balance between the two groups in tweets and replies was not the case with retweets, where a significant advantage of the opponents of the vaccination mandate was noticed, especially after 6 December 2021. ...
Poland’s efforts to combat COVID-19 were hindered by endemic vaccination hesitancy and the prevalence of opponents to pandemic restrictions. In this environment, the policy of a COVID-19 vaccination mandate faces strong resistance in the public debate. Exploring the discourse around this resistance could help uncover the motives and develop an understanding of vaccination hesitancy in Poland. This paper aims to conduct a social network analysis and content analysis of Twitter discussions around the intention of the Polish Ministry of Health to introduce mandatory vaccinations for COVID-19. Twitter was chosen as a platform to study because of the critical role it played during the global health crisis. Twitter data were retrieved from 26 July to 9 December 2021 through the API v2 for Academic Research, and analysed using NodeXL and Gephi. When conducting social network analysis, nodes were ranked by their betweenness centrality. Clustering analysis with the Clauset–Newman–Moore algorithm revealed two important groups of users: advocates and opponents of mandatory vaccination. The temporal trends of tweets, the most used hashtags, the sentiment expressed in the most popular tweets, and correlations with epidemiological data were also studied. The results reveal a substantial degree of polarisation, a high intensity of the discussion, and a high degree of involvement of Twitter users. Vaccination mandate advocates were consistently more numerous, but less engaged and less mobilised to “preach” their own stances. Vaccination mandate opponents were vocal and more mobilised to participate: either as original authors or as information diffusers. Our research leads to the conclusion that systematic monitoring of the public debate on vaccines is essential not only in counteracting misinformation, but also in crafting evidence-based as well as emotionally motivating narratives.
... But instead of asking how to build agonistic institutions, a goal better suited to the overall agonistic project would be to investigate [ 91 ] how well current institutions and procedures are aligned with an agonistic perspective and develop ways to further agonize any such institutions (cf. Lowndes and Paxton 2018;Paxton 2019;Westphal 2019). In the following, I will attempt to derive such impulses from the agonistic perspective for the problem of values in science and the case of establishing IPBES. ...
How to deal with non-epistemic values in science presents a pressing problem for science and society as well as for philosophers of science. In recent years, accounts of democratizing science have been proposed as a possible solution to this. By providing a case study on the establishment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy comment: Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services comment: (IPBES), I argue that such accounts run into a problem when values are embedded in the general scientific and societal setup to such an extent that they shape the terrain upon which such a democratization needs to take place. I introduce the notion of particularities as manifestations of values in science and state a problem of particularity, posed by the ways in which the interactive dimension of particularities interferes with democratic procedures for resolving value judgements in science. As a possible remedy, I propose enriching accounts of democratizing science by agonistic theories of democracy.
... The agonists had advocated that certain groups be accorded recognition in the policy environment and that they should be awarded recognition. The recognition requires that participatory strategies be institutionalised in the policy design to promote collective solidarities to reduce conflict and to integrate residents into the implementation process (Dean, 2018;Lowndes and Paxton, 2018). For instance, Dean (2018) concluded in a study that institutionalising specific actions and roles for dissenting groups in a pluralist policy environment, will broaden inclusion, promote policy robustness, and reduce resistance. ...
One of the aims of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is infrastructural development. In pursuance of this goal, partnerships and collaborations remain key responses. Thus, Goal 17, which is the climax of the SDGs, revolves around partnering with private investors to generate the required capital for the attainment of said developmental goals. Using some public-private partnership (PPP) projects as case study, this paper aims to analyse how early involvement or non-involvement influences the project communities to trust the project handlers and give support towards sustainable infrastructural development. The researcher applied qualitative method data gathering techniques and analysis. Findings show that communities that seemed to have been well engaged at the initial stages only experienced ‘therapeutic’ and ‘manipulative’ involvement because firstly there was a flagrant disregard for initial agreed-upon principles and tenets of inclusive governance and secondly the promoters of the collaborations did not do enough to have an all-inclusive advocacy with community groups. The study recommends that the law governing the implementation of PPP in Lagos State be modified to allow community representatives feature prominently on the committee for infrastructural projects right from the initial stage through the entire process.
... To make this argument, I will review major works by a new generation of democratic innovations scholarship, which embraces the diversity of democratic theory. This new generation includes participatory (Pateman, 2012), agonistic (Dean, 2018;Lowndes and Paxton, 2018;Westphal, 2018) and pragmatist (Fung, 2012;Hendriks, 2019) conceptualizations of democratic innovations. In this review, I will focus on the work of Albert Dzur (2019), Marie Paxton (2020) and Alexandros Kioupkiolis (2019). ...
The study of democratic innovations has long been situated in the deliberative paradigm. Today, however, a new scholarly generation conceptualizes democratic innovations from various theoretical angles. This article reviews participatory, agonistic and transformative accounts of democratic innovations. This multiperspectival analysis presents democratic innovations in a new light. The term changes its meaning, going beyond institutions designed by experts to include the remaking of the structures that govern our everyday lives. Democratic innovations interrupt established modes of governance and create spaces for systemic transformations.
... This article contributes to the evaluative discussion of participatory practices by developing politicization toward a more empirically applicable concept of evaluation. It departs from the proposition that if depoliticization is the major antidemocratic concern to be tackled within expert-focused participatory projects, we need to develop our empirical understanding of what politicization looks like (Dean 2018;Lowndes and Paxton 2018), before we are able to evaluate whether and how well the projects investigated "succeed" as democratic spaces. Subsequently, the article sets out to unpack how politicization and depoliticization take shape within participatory innovations. ...
There is growing concern among democracy scholars that participatory innovations pose a depoliticizing threat to democracy. This article tackles this concern by providing a more nuanced understanding of how politicization and depoliticization take shape in participatory initiatives. Based on ethnographic research on participatory projects with marginalized people who are invited to act as experiential experts, the article examines how actors limit and open up possibilities to participate. By focusing on struggles concerning the definition of expertise, the article identifies a threefold character of politicization as a practice within participatory innovations. It involves (1) illuminating the boundaries that define the actors’ possibilities; (2) making a connection between these boundaries and specific value bases; and (3) imagining an alternative normative basis for participation.
... However, as Lowndes and Paxton (2018) note, the trick lies in 'flip[ping] the question by asking not how to institutionalize agonism but how institutions themselves can be agonised' viz. disturbed (p. ...
Festering ocean conflict thwarts efforts to realize the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This paper explores transformations of ocean conflict into situated sustainability pathways that privilege human needs, justice and equity. We first outline the promise and limits of prevailing ocean/coastal governance practices, with a focus on marine spatial planning (MSP), which by framing conflict in shallow terms as use incompatibility, supports resolution strategies that privilege neoliberal technocratic-managerial and post-political models of consensual negotiation, thereby obscuring the structural inequalities, maldistributions and misrecognitions that drive deep-seated conflicts. Next, the distinctive features of the marine realm and ocean conflict are explained. Third, we outline the root causes, drivers and scale of conflict, with reference to history, climate, culture, governance, institutions and prevailing international socio-political conditions. Fourth, we reflect on the nature of conflict, exploring implications for shallow and deeper approaches of handling conflicts. Fifth, we highlight the implications of knowledge co-production for understanding and transforming conflict in pursuit of justice. Then, in response to the orthodoxies of MSP and prevailing conflict resolution strategies, we elaborate an alternative approach-Pragmatic Agonistic co-produced Conflict Transformation (PACT) for sustainability-sketching out key elements of a praxis that seeks to transform destructive interaction patterns of conflict into co-produced, constructive, scalable and 'institutionaliz-able' yet contestable and provisional sustainability knowledge-action. KEYWORDS Just, equitable and sustainable transformations; ocean conflict; marine spatial planning; pragmatic-agonistic institutional design; knowledge co-production
... Importantly, leaving the trap moves beyond embedded dialogues of liberalism to engage with challenges from post-liberal and postrepresentative politics, which themselves have difficulty moving from critique to governance and decision-making, leaving an institutional gap (Howarth 2008;Lowndes and Paxton 2018) and a potential 'tyranny of structurelessness'. They risk falling themselves into the 'purity politics' trap of assuming that 'autonomous' local groups will necessarily pursue progressive ends (Bruzzone 2019) and can direct too little attention to the embedded geographies where politics most obviously takes place (Barnett and Low 2004), for example, in local elected councils. ...
Local government in England faces unprecedented challenges, with ten years of austerity adding to longer-term concerns over its waning influence. Responses so far have involved dismissing local government for more radical alternatives or re-iterating increasingly shaky defences. I argue that resetting the debate around local government requires firstly addressing the meanings we have assigned to the local, which are at presentconstrained by the ‘Local Trap’, and that looking at the English case gives a particularly insightful view of its consequences. I set out the ‘Local Trap’ and identify three ways in which local government discourse is trapped; by assumptions about the ‘naturalness’ of the local; assumptions about its democratic qualities; and an adherence to scaler representations. I then argue that as a consequenceattention is diverted to either local government past or an elusive one to come, before setting out potential pathways out of the trap via engaging more robustly with practice.
... Dean calls this 'counter-governance', and it reso- nates with a proposition some of my interviewees were also making locally. The idea of counter-governance institutionalises participatory roles that are tasked to critique, question and destabilise -a position that many of my interviewees ex- pected to be able to assume when they were invited as experts-by-experience (see also Lowndes & Paxton 2018). This thesis has attempted to make headway for the interpretive study of lay expertise in order to imagine new ways in which participatory governance ar- rangements could be configured to be in service of democracy. ...
This dissertation analyses expertise-by-experience in Finnish social welfare organisations as part of the participatory practices presented as new democracy. It employs a governmental ethnographic method to investigate how a person with difficult experiences is made into ‘an expert of one’s own life’ and how the subjectivity thus created is connected to different possibilities and rationales of participation. It asks: 1. What characterises the subjectivities created in the initiatives? 2. How (through which practices) are the participants constructed as experts? In this summary article the democratic quality of expert-making practices is interpreted through a critical democratic lens by inquiring: 3. How do the practices identified sustain or, conversely, undermine democracy? Conceptually, the research builds on a Foucauldian vocabulary by connecting processes of subjectivation with knowledge-claims as undergirding practices of governing. The data consist of ethnographic material produced in a civil society organisation, of themed interviews with experts-by-experience and practitioners from seven projects in Finnish social welfare organisations and of policy-documents delineating the concept and its related practices. The research argues that the initiatives studied primarily seek to construct collaborative and consensus-seeking participants. This is achieved by defining ‘expertise’ as the ability to present neutral and objective knowledge over specific issues despite one’s personal experiences. Participation is constructed as a distinctly a-political activity based on objectified knowledge. Collective advocacy, emotions and opinionated inputs are deemed unfitting. This configuration of expertise as a pre-requirement for the right to participate establishes epistemic thresholds for participation, making it possible to choose participants according to the projects’ predefined objectives. This is a cause for concern for democracy. Nonetheless, the research also suggests that the emphasis on expertise also renders the concept available for contestations and critique. The participants’ and practitioners’ attempts to destabilise the technocratic expert-construction illuminate the existing boundaries of expertise and serve to politicise the boundaries of inclusion in participatory governance. Still, the acts of resistance do not contest participatory governance’s underlying premise of joint knowledge production, which reaffirms that the value of participation lies in its epistemic contributions to decision-making.
Scholars and practitioners discuss how to increase the policy impact of climate assemblies (CAs) noting that their proposals tend to be more ambitious than government policy. CAs comprise groups of randomly selected citizens (minipublics) who deliberate on climate policy issues. We argue for greater focus on how political actors strategically use CAs and suggest welcoming some of this strategic use. We propose that CAs, and minipublics more generally, need political embedding. That means, minipublic designers should first consider how political actors will likely interact with a process given their interests and political context, and subsequently make deliberate use of strategies to foster objectives like policy impact. Using a thought experiment, we then demonstrate that the effectiveness of such political embedding strategies to promote CAs’ policy impact depends on political context. Our analysis shows that the impacts of mass publicity, commissioning actors, inclusion of perspectives, and strategic framings vary with the constellation of interests of climate political actors. This exercise challenges sweeping statements about optimal CA and minipublic design, contributing to more realistic theorizing. Considering political embeddedness will help democratic reformers assess potential models for minipublic institutionalization more accurately.
How can political theory respond to the challenges of mass action in the Anthropocene? In this article, I review criticisms of the recent work of William Connolly and respond by way of a particular mode of theory revision that can be found in Connolly’s work of the last 15 years. I argue that Connolly’s recent work marks a strategic turn in his thought, emphasizing the relationship between revisions to theory and practical experimentation in politics. In the second section, I illustrate this relationship by revising Connolly’s notion of the ‘climate general strike’ in light of failures of climate strikes in recent years. Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of mass strikes guides the revisions advanced in this section. In the third section, I move up a level of abstraction to think through how this suggested revision to climate strike strategy can feed into alterations and clarifications of key concepts in Connolly’s political theory.
This chapter contends with the imperative of enhancing the intellectual caliber of online public debates, a task that falls to both policymakers and CI researchers. It scrutinizes the digital transformation of public discourse in the digital age, examining the erosion of the traditional public sphere and the rise of online platforms as new arenas for civic engagement and policymaking discussions. The chapter also discusses the use of social network analysis as a method of calculating the features of online debate. It addresses the challenges and opportunities of the online public sphere, such as information dissemination dynamics and opinion polarization, and concerns like social media's role in behavioral targeting, information noise, and the spread of misinformation. Furthermore, it presents findings from empirical studies, including a laboratory experiment comparing policy and business debates, Twitter discussions on mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations, and stock price predictions during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The chapter concludes with proposed models for intelligent public debate, highlighting the importance of independent and engaged citizens and differentiating between deliberative and agonistic responses to online antagonism. Finally, it delineates key perspectives on enhancing collective intelligence for more effective and substantively valuable policymaking.
Digital technology is reshaping participatory planning, including conflict and antagonism in the planning process. Yet planning theory has largely failed to engage with emerging digital mechanisms that could stimulate antagonism in online environments. This paper seeks to explore different ways of framing conflict and antagonism in planning and the degree to which they reflect an increasingly digital approach to public participation. We introduce an Online Conversion Framework to delineate the process of conversion for antagonistic to agonistic action on social media, using X (formerly Twitter) as an example.
In this article we introduce a pragmatist interpretation of agonistic pluralism and develop this into an analytical framework that is applied to the analysis of urban conflicts. In the article, we take stock of contemporary critical and radical urban scholarship, our aim being twofold. First, we substantiate Chantal Mouffe's notion of agonistic pluralism with tools from French pragmatic sociology. We suggest that, in a democracy, plurality emerges both as a plurality of conflict manifested in the variety of possible ways to identify injustices, and formulate and justify claims in public struggles, and a plurality of commonality , manifested in different logics by which a ‘we’ can be formed and action coordinated so as to solve issues without resorting to physical violence. Secondly, by applying the developed conceptualization of plurality to an ongoing urban conflict concerning an airport, we showcase the value of the approach for identifying and analyzing different forms and phases of actually existing political conflicts, and for recognizing their meaning for democracy.
The current debate on agonism has become fixed in an institutional approach: How can an agonistic design institutionally become a tool against forms of domination? An agonistic space needs decisions that do not silence dissensual voices with a finite decision. This paper suggests that this agonistic approach needs de-cisions or simply put, temporary decisions drawn from seeing a decision as a solution for now. A de-cision is not a no-decision, but a decision recognised as temporary. The paper proposes ‘the sketch’ as an appropriate mode for working de-cisionally and unfinished. By having a sketch and working de-cisionally, planners are able to invite agonistic positions to ongoing talks and to act progressively, adaptably, or rationally in the face of emerging circumstances and uncertainty. To work unfinished from a sketch transforms the planning process from being a matter of reaching a finite decision to a strife about how to understand the present and which temporary contours and directions to move on from. The paper as such thus deals with difficult praxis questions, for instance: How is it possible to allow dissent to inform planning praxis in praxis? How can quarrelling and working unfinished empower planning democracy?
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced challenges to societal and local planning, especially regarding unpredictable mutations and the management of the emergence through control and surveillance. During the pandemic, the evolving relationship between society and politics cannot be called the ‘new normal’. This paper argues that the fight against the pandemic showed instead a ‘normal’ politics of discipline and control of people and peoples’ acceptance of a temporary displacement of civil rights and a suspension of participatory democracy. Limited attention has been paid to how societal dynamics and urban planning are related to common mechanisms concerning the procedural administration of a population. The ‘new normal’ emerges when we reflect on the planning skills essential to any society in a crisis and emergency. The COVID-19 contagious virus situation has led to reflections on how to meet a ‘new normal’ of ever-new types of emergencies. The pandemic showed that improvisation became a needed task in politics. But an emergency also depends on national systems and existing institutional and social regulations that constrain the ability to work unfinished and fail to reveal a new perspective to the new normal.KeywordsAgonismPublic participationDe-cisionDiscourse hegemoniesPlanningAnd democracy
Der Artikel rekonstruiert Merkmale einer realistischen politischen Theorie im Anschluss an Bernard Williams und Raymond Geuss und diskutiert auf dieser Grundlage, inwiefern Chantal Mouffes agonale Demokratietheorie eine realistische Demokratietheorie verkörpert. Mouffes agonaler Pluralismus weist zentrale Merkmale einer realistischen politischen Theorie auf, wozu die Anerkennung des von Macht und Konflikt geprägten Charakters von Politik und ein Anti-Moralismus in der Bewertung von politischen Konflikten gehören. Es mangelt dem agonalen Pluralismus jedoch an einer Auseinandersetzung mit den realen Kontexten demokratischer Politik. For a Left Populism lässt sich als eine Vertiefung des realistischen Charakters der Mouffe’schen Demokratietheorie lesen. Die im agonalen Pluralismus zunächst abstrakt beschriebenen Ideen einer in der Demokratie stets erforderlichen Kritik am Status quo und einer Verbindung unterschiedlicher demokratischer Kämpfe zum Zweck einer Politisierung des Status quo werden hier vor dem Hintergrund realweltlicher Diagnosen konkretisiert. Abschließend konturiert der Artikel in einem Ausblick, wie sich der realistische Charakter agonaler Demokratietheorie vertiefen ließe.
Teknolojik gelişmeler ve küresel anlamda gerçekleşen değişimler insan doğasını değiştirmektedir. Bu değişim insan hayatının tüm aşamalarına doğrudan etki etmektedir. Bu noktada insana ve insan yaşantısına yönelik olarak araştırmalar gerçekleştirmek kaçınılmaz bir hal almaktadır. Sosyal Bilimler alanında gerçekleştirilen tüm çalışmalar insanı, insan yaşantısını ve insan doğasını anlamayı amaçlamaktadır. İnsanı anlamak adına ortaya koyulan bu eserde farklı disiplinlerden farklı çalışmalar ele alınmış ve bir nebze de olsa bu amaca ulaşmak için bir basamak inşa edilmeye çalışılmıştır.
En este artículo, analizo una muestra de las prácticas educativas actuales en los movimientos populistas educativos de Brasil, Estados Unidos e Israel. Tras un breve examen de estas formas de populismo, que revela tendencias políticas de nacionalismo étnico, ortodoxia religiosa, antisecularismo y autoritarismo, reviso la teoría democrática para interpretar el populismo desde una posición teórica democrática dual: pragmatismo, y teoría democrática crítica o radical. Utilizo reflexiones pragmáticas en la esfera pública (Dewey, 1927; Frega, 2010, 2019), para explicar cómo y por qué emergen colectivos en la dinámica de las instituciones estatales democráticas de educación. Y posteriormente, paso a la teoría democrática radical para analizar la idea de la expresión populista y su función en la política democrática (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018). En términos pragmáticos, los movimientos populistas son colectivos en potencia, basados en una idea experimentalista de la vida política que incluye asociaciones de grupos en la sociedad civil que generan opinión, acción y desacuerdo en intentos de conformar decisiones en las instituciones estatales. Pero muchos movimientos populistas no llegan a ser colectivos democráticos en la medida en que se caracterizan por reducidos intereses privados, hábitos irreflexivos y prácticas que son antagónicas a la interpelación, la capacidad de respuesta y la deliberación. Como tales, los movimientos populistas amenazan la legitimidad normativa y la estabilidad de las instituciones estatales democráticas liberales de enseñanza. Aunque las versiones minimalistas o menos militantes de populismo son compatibles con, y vehículos importantes para la política educativa, las versiones maximalistas actualmente dominantes perfiladas en este artículo amenazan el proyecto de estado liberal-democrático (Sant, 2020). Las teorías pragmáticas de política democrática y acciones colectivas (Frega, 2019) ofrecen vías para conocer el momento populista, pero contienen significativas implicaciones de rediseño y reforma institucional para su materialización.
Seeking Justice: Access to Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuse explores victims' varying experiences in seeking remedy mechanisms for corporate human rights abuse. It puts forward a novel theory about the possibility of productive contestation and explores governance outcomes for victims of corporate human rights abuse across Latin America. This foundation informs three pathways that victims can use to press for their rights: working within the institutional environment, capitalizing on corporate characteristics, and elevating voices. Seeking Justice challenges the common assumptions in the governance gap literature and argues, instead, that greater democratic practices can emerge from productive contestation. This book brings to bear tough questions about the trade-offs associated with economic growth and conflicting values around human dignity-questions that are very salient today, as citizens around the globe contemplate the type of democratic and economic systems that might better prepare us for tomorrow.
Governments introducing smart city technologies increasingly encounter political contestation. The deliberative perspective aims to overcome contestation by seeking consensus through deliberation. The agonistic perspective critiques this deliberative perspective, arguing that emphasizing consensus-building in response to contestation can lead to a ‘post-political’ debate excluding certain citizens and opinions. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this critique by analyzing governments responses to contestation about the smart city and its potentially depoliticizing implications. Therefore, seventeen vignette interviews were conducted with civil servants working at major local governments in the Netherlands. The results reveal three depoliticizing responses in the smart city debate: (1) local governments aim to include everyone, but only if citizens act and behave in a way that they perceive as rational and reasonable; (2) local governments welcome a variety of viewpoints, but only if these views do not contradict what they see as the natural order and common sense; and (3) local governments allow for contestation, but only if it is perceived as being provided at the right time and in the right context. Two tentative explanations for depoliticizing responses are presented: a silent ideology within the government, and a lack of practical methods to organize agonistic channels for engagement.
Based on award-winning research, Love and Revolution brings classical and contemporary anarchist thought into a mutually beneficial dialogue with a global cross-section of ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist activists – discussing real-life examples of the loving-caring relations that underpin many contemporary struggles.
Such a (r)evolutionary love is revealed to be a common embodied experience among the activists contributing to this collective vision, manifested as a radical solidarity, as political direct action, as long-term processes of struggle, and as a deeply relational more-than-human ethics. The theory developed in this book is brought to life through the voices of Tom at the G20 protests in Toronto, Maria and her permaculture community in Mexico, Hassan on the streets in Syria, Angelo and his comrades occupying squares in Brazil, Dembe and his affinity group in Kampala, and many more.
Love and Revolution provides an essential resource for all those interested in building a free society grounded in solidarity and care, and offers a timely contribution to contemporary movement discourse. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Feminist democratic representation is a new design for women’s group representation in electoral politics. We build on the design principles and practices of the 1990s’ presence theorists, who conceived of political inclusion as the presence of descriptive representatives and advocated for gender quota. Our second-generation design foregrounds women’s ideological and intersectional heterogeneity, and details a representative process that enacts three feminist principles: inclusiveness, responsiveness and egalitarianism. A new set of actors – the affected representatives of women – play formal, institutionalised roles in two new democratic practices: group advocacy and account giving . Together, these augmentations incentivise new attitudes and behaviours among elected representatives, and bring about multiple representational effects that redress the poverty of women’s political representation: elected representatives now know more, care more and are more connected to diverse women, including the most marginalised; and the represented are now more closely connected with, more interested in and better represented through democratic politics.
This article explores the theoretical challenges for normatively progressive foreign policy following the rise of populist nationalism during the 2010s, using analytical concepts from the English School. It argues that populist nationalism exposes a problem of internal dissensus on the future trajectories of solidarist international society, within the Western states that have traditionally been its principal supporters. The ‘populist moment’ reveals problems of disconnection between domestic publics, the practices, and institutions of contemporary international society, and state actions that are premised in part on ethical regard for non-citizens. The article contends that, as an interface point between rooted communities and global ethical concerns, progressive foreign policy approaches have an important role to play in ameliorating these disconnections. However, these approaches must look beyond a simple ‘re-booting’ of liberal internationalism, focussing instead on building a path towards solidarist international society that is rooted in everyday-lived experiences, communities, and identities within the state. Building upon theorizations of good international citizenship, the article advances an alternative framework of good global statehood, which draws upon a coproduction methodology as a means of creating progressive foreign policies that are better attuned to pluralism and diversity across, but also within state borders.
This conceptual paper contributes to the critique of a body of literature that will be named ‘deliberative corporate governance’ by defending non‐deliberative acts performed by stakeholders. It first argues that this literature introduces to the corporation a decision‐making process where it does not belong, given the corporation's economic role. This leads to an ‘efficiency constraint’ on any attempt to justify deliberation – deliberative governance theorists must show that it is the most efficient and cost‐effective way to address the issues that concern them. A real case example where deliberation would have been counter‐productive in that regard will show that this is not the case. Building on this example, the paper uses the theory of democratic agonism to argue that non‐deliberative acts should be part of governance. A sketch of managerial duties vis‐à‐vis such acts is attempted as well. The paper does not seek to reject deliberative corporate governance entirely, but rather to defend the importance of non‐deliberative practices in addressing its theoretical concern. It makes a conceptual contribution to corporate governance theory, from which it draws practical implications for stakeholders‐oriented management.
Planning is politics. It is a procedural public participation and ladder of decision. Planning praxis is governmentalized through planning law and its procedures for communication and dialogue on decision-making and how to solve planning conflicts. It is a sedimented system (sectors) and vertical structured decisional system (top-down). Public planning is procedural (limited time for public dialogue and critique) and sedimented (organized forces first, next community). Planning is politicized in different ways: through discourse, plans, planner’s attention to political voices and space of dialogue ruled by politics and demands. This article discusses how to move from procedures to agonism or strife. Outlining some important contemporary studies on participation, including the debate on ‘good enough’ solutions, discussing the ideas of ‘temporary resting places’ and ‘strategic navigation’, this article introduces ‘the unfinished’ as a way of thinking and doing, and how a ‘de’-cisional mode of acting is responding to a praxis always ‘on the move’. The aim is, on one hand, to explore governmental modes of decision from a public participation perspective, and on the other hand, to point to the transformative potentials of working as temporary, navigating, from ‘solutions for now’, or better, unfinished.
A worrying trend of autocratization that has been spreading globally in
recent years, has thrust forward a new wave of appeals for deliberative and
participatory democracy as a remedy for the crisis. With a few exceptions,
the majority of participatory and deliberative institutions were implemented
in stable democracies. The efforts to institutionalize participatory and
deliberative models are almost completely absent in Serbia and other Western
Balkan countries. Yet, there has been a trend of citizen mobilization in the
form of social movements and local civic initiatives, which are both a
symptom of unresponsive and quite openly authoritarian institutions, as well
as a potential pathway to democratization. The pace and scope of these
developments in the undemocratic societies of the Western Balkan region, in
terms of both bottom up and top-down democratic experimentation, call for a
better understanding of their internal dynamics, and their social and
political impact. Responding to this need, the articles in the special issue
focus on social movement mobilizations and deliberative experimentation. To
begin with, our introductory article focuses particularly on understanding
the possible role deliberative institutions could have in hybrid regimes. It
looks at the first two cases of deliberative mini publics (DMPs) ever
organized in Serbia, analyzing their rationale, specific design,
implementation, as well as considering the possible role deliberative
institutions could play in the hybrid regime of Serbia.
Existing public relations measurement and evaluation frameworks may struggle to adequately capture (1) organizational engagement regarding contentious or intractable issues, and (2) external or publics-centered outcomes beyond the realm of organizational objectives and interests. In this research, qualitative, semi-structured interviews (41) with experienced U.S. public relations practitioners examined measurement and evaluation in the context of managing perceived intractable issues. In order to capture public relations engagement and potential impact on such issues, the paper presents a new measurement framework to encourage metrics for issues, communities, and societies—not just organizational priorities. This approach ensures a wider scope of levels of analysis (from message-level metrics to societal and global levels) as well as recognition of the potential value of dissensus, agonism, and agonistic metrics (Davidson & Motion, 2018) for more nuanced understandings of the work of public relations practitioners in contentious contexts.
In its “deliberative turn,” the field of science and technology studies (STS) has strongly advocated opening up decision-making processes around science and technology to more perspectives and knowledges. While the theory of democracy underpinning this is rarely explicitly addressed, the language and ideas used are often drawn from deliberative democracy. Using the case of synthetic biology and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), this paper looks at challenges of public engagement and finds parallels in long-standing critiques of deliberative democracy. The paper suggests that STS scholars explore other theories of decision-making and explores what an RRI grounded in agonistic pluralism might entail. An agonistic RRI could develop empirical research around questions of power relations in contemporary science and technology, seek to facilitate the formation of political publics around relevant issues, and frame different actors’ stances as adversarial positions on a political field rather than “equally valid” perspectives.
In response to the political protest of National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick and subsequent controversial comments from President Donald Trump, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft declared, “There is no greater unifier in this country than sports and, unfortunately, nothing more divisive than politics.” Such a sentiment is commonplace in sport, whether it is about race, political affiliations, or responses to tragic events, and it quickly became an organizing theme for NFL owners as they sought to defuse the issue. Meanwhile, sports media and others echoed the call for unity and largely dropped discussion of the commitment to social justice that had originally animated Kaepernick’s protest. This essay argues that claims to unity are rooted in the logic of consensus, a value in democratic theory that offers an illusion of peaceful cooperation while denying important conflicts and differences. As understood through the rhetorical tradition and theories of agonistic democracy, athletic activism in the NFL has been important precisely because it disrupts the illusion of unity on which the national anthem ritual rests. In short, contesting unity and consensus seeks to identify communicative resources that facilitate social justice in and through sport.
This article seeks to explore democratic theory by focusing on the example of agonistic democracy, in which contest between citizens is valued for its potential to render politics more inclusive, more engaging, and more virtuous. Using Connolly and Tully’s inclusivism, Chantal Mouffe’s adversarialism, and David Owen’s perfectionism, the article discusses democratic theory as a critique, a series of normative proposals, and a potential bridge between political theory and public policy. It is this bridge that enables democratic theory to pull together critical and normative discussions with those surrounding public policy and institutional design.
What is democratic theory? The question is surprisingly infrequently
posed. Indeed, the last time this precise question appears in the academic archive was exactly forty years ago,1 in James Alfred
Pennock’s (1979) book Democratic Political Theory. This is an odd discursive silence not observable in other closely aligned fields of thought such as political theory, political science, social theory, philosophy, economic theory, and public policy/administration – each of which have asked the “what is” question of themselves on regular occasion. The premise of this special issue is, therefore, to pose the question anew and break this forty-year silence.
What Works Scotland aims to improve the way local areas in Scotland use evidence to make decisions about public service development and reform. We are working with Community Planning Partnerships involved in the design and delivery of public services (Aberdeenshire, Fife, Glasgow and West Dunbartonshire) to: learn what is and what isn't working in their local area encourage collaborative learning with a range of local authority, business, public sector and community partners better understand what effective policy interventions and effective services look like promote the use of evidence in planning and service delivery help organisations get the skills and knowledge they need to use and interpret evidence create case studies for wider sharing and sustainability A further nine areas are working with us to enhance learning, comparison and sharing. We will also link with international partners to effectively compare how public services are delivered here in Scotland and elsewhere. During the programme, we will scale up and share more widely with all local authority areas across Scotland. What Works Scotland brings together the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, other academics across Scotland, with partners from a range of local authorities and: Glasgow Centre for Population Health Improvement Service Inspiring Scotland IRISS (Institution for Research and Innovation in Social Services) NHS Education for Scotland NHS Health Scotland NHS Health Improvement for Scotland Scottish Community Development Centre SCVO (Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations) This is one of a series of papers published by What Works Scotland to share evidence, learning and ideas about public service reform. This paper relates to the What Works Scotland collaborative action research workstream.
The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in Southampton and Sheffield towards the end of 2015.
This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management
from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a
contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically
mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses
on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical
formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern
arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives
a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional
processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially
much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power
of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Critical
institutional approaches, gathering momentum over the past 15 years or so, have
excited considerable interest but the insights generated from different disciplinary
perspectives remain insufficiently synthesised. Analyses emphasising complexity
can be relatively illegible to policy-makers, a fact which lessens their reach. This
special issue therefore aims to synthesise critical institutional ideas and so to lay the
foundation for moving beyond the emergent stage to make meaningful academic
and policy impact. In bringing together papers here we define and synthesise key
themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage
and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.
The ‘new institutionalist’ approaches have recently been beneficially expanded by the introduction of a body of work which falls under the collective label of discursive-constructivist institutionalism. This article argues that the discursive analytical focus of these approaches would be complemented and extended by the application of the post-structuralist conceptual tool bag offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In so doing it advocates developing a post-structuralist institutionalism (PSI), detailing the approach's key theoretical underpinnings and differences from constructivist-discursive approaches. These are subsequently illustrated via an analysis of the arguments within Rhodri Morgan's Welsh Labour party over the use of private finance in health provision.
Local governance is conceptualised as an ‘institutional matrix', comprising distinct (but interacting) rule-sets, in which forces for change and continuity coexist. Different rule-sets change at different rates and in different directions, reflecting power relationships and the ‘embeddedness' of local governance in specific historical and spatial contexts. In England, inertia and innovation have characterised, respectively, the political and managerial domains of local governance. But it is clear that creative spaces also exist between the extremes of institutional stability and volatility. Institutional entrepreneurs exploit ambiguities in the ‘rules of the game' in order to respond to changing environments, and to protect (or further) their own interests. Local government actors expand and recombine their institutional repertoires through strategies of ‘remembering', ‘borrowing' and ‘sharing'. In so doing they create a contingent and context-dependent process of institutional emergence.
: This paper describes participatory budgeting in Brazil, where citizen assemblies in each district of a city determine priorities for the use of a part of the city's revenues. This is one of the most significant innovations in Latin America for increasing citizen participation and local government accountability. After describ-ing its antecedents, as various local governments sought to increase citizen involve-ment during the 1970s and 1980s, the paper reviews the experience with participatory budgeting in the cities of Porto Alegre and Belo Horizonte. It describes who took part in different (district and sectoral) citizen assemblies, the resources they could call on and the priorities established. It also discusses its effectiveness regard-ing increased participation, more pro-poor expenditures and greater local govern-ment accountability. While noting the limitations (for instance, some of the poorest groups were not involved, and in other cities it was not so successful) the paper also highlights how participatory budgeting allows formerly excluded groups to decide on investment priorities in their communities and to monitor government response. It has helped reduce clientelist practices and, perhaps more importantly for a society as unequal as Brazil, helped to build democratic institutions.
The newest new institutionalism, discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels - policies, programs, and philosophies - and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose "background ideational abilities" within a given "meaning context" explain how institutions are created and exist and whose foreground discursive abilities, following a logic of communication, explain how institutions change or persist. Interests are subjective ideas, which, though real, are neither objective nor material. Norms are dynamic, intersubjective constructs rather than static structures.
Once created, institutions often change in subtle and gradual ways over time. Although less dramatic than abrupt and wholesale transformations, these slow and piecemeal changes can be equally consequential for patterning human behavior and for shaping substantive political outcomes. Consider, for example, the British House of Lords. This is an institution that began to take shape in the thirteenth century out of informal consultations between the Crown and powerful landowners. By the early nineteenth century, membership was hereditary and the chamber was fully institutionalized at the center of British politics. Who would have thought that this deeply undemocratic assembly of aristocrats would survive the transition to democracy? Not the early Labour Party, which was founded in 1900 and understandably committed to the elimination of a chamber from which its constituents were, more or less by definition, excluded Yet Labour did not dismantle the House of Lords – despite recurring opportunities to do so during the twentieth century. Instead, the institution was reformed over time in a series of more measured moves that, successively: circumscribed its powers (especially in 1911 by a Liberal Party government), altered its composition (especially in 1958 under a Conservative government, with the addition of life peerages), and rendered it less unwieldy and – in the eyes of some – more legitimate (in 2000 under a Labour government, by reducing dramatically the number of hereditary peers).
The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in Southampton and Sheffield towards the end of 2015.
These two ambitious volumes from one of the world's most celebrated political philosophers present a new kind of political and legal theory that James Tully calls a public philosophy, and a complementary new way of thinking about active citizenship, called civic freedom. Professor Tully takes the reader step-by-step through the principal debates in political theory and the major types of political struggle today. These volumes represent a genuine landmark in political theory. In this second volume, Professor Tully studies networks and civic struggles over global or imperial relations of inequality, dependency, exploitation and environmental degradation beyond the state. The final chapter brings all of the author's resonant themes together in a new way of thinking about global and local citizenship, and of political theory in relation to it. This forms a powerful conclusion to a major intervention from a vital and distinctive voice in contemporary thought.
Problems of institutional design and redesign, structuring and restructuring, acquired particular poignancy through recent developments from eastern Europe to southern Africa. At the same time, scholars in each of several disciplines - political science, economics, sociology, history and philosophy - have increasingly come to appreciate the important independent role that is, and should be, played by institutional factors in social life. In this volume, disparate theories of institutional design given by each of those several disciplines are synthesized and their peculiar power illustrated. Through analysis of examples ranging from changes in the British welfare state through the transition of eastern European societies to the reward structure of the modern university, the contributors emphasize the important interpenetration of normative and empirical issues in theories of institutional design.
In this book, Bonnie Honig rethinks that established relation between politics and political theory. From liberal to communitarian to republican, political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices of its displacement. Honig characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, and law to protect their political theories from the conflict and uncertainty of political reality. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt, as well as Machiavelli and Derrida, Honig explores an alternative politics of virtù, which treats the disruptions of political order as valued sites of democratic freedom and individuality.
Research on gender equality policy has generally focused on actors and institutions at the national and international levels. This article considers the role of local-level actors and institutions in explaining different policy responses to violence against women and girls (VAWG). The literature on gender policy trajectories identifies the particular importance of executive actors in influencing “status policies” like VAWG. Quantitative data are analyzed to show how local Police and Crime Commissioners in England and Wales have responded to demands for policy action. The focus is on the interaction between the 41 elected commissioners and the new institutional arrangements for police governance introduced in 2012. The article shows that variation in policy outcomes is related (a) to the gender of executive actors and (b) to the way in which actors interpret elements of the institutional framework, regardless of their own gender.
Is globalization being eclipsed by a resurgent geopolitics? Does the war on terror denote the end of globalization or a new phase of militarized globalization? Empire or globalization, which better describes the current global condition? In the aftermath of September 11th, and the war in Iraq, there has been much talk of the end of globalization. These post-mortems for globalization, as this book argues, are entirely premature. In this completely revised and expanded monograph Held and McGrew test the claims of those who dismiss the continuing significance of globalization through a comprehensive assessment of contemporary global trends. This thematic exploration focuses upon the primary structures of world order namely: patterns of governance, organized violence, and cultural, ecological and economic exchange with particular emphasis given to global patterns of inequality, exclusion and domination. Each chapter discusses and evaluates the contending claims and counterclaims of the principal antagonists in the globalization debate: the globalists and anti-globalists.Building upon this analysis the author’s present the case for continuing to take globalization seriously as both a description and explanation of our current global predicament. Indeed globalization remains, they argue, a fundamental source of both intense controversy and conflict within and more significantly beyond the academy. For it resurrects, albeit in a new context, one of the foundational questions of political life namely: who rules, in whose interests, to what ends, and by what means? In this respect it engages one of the most important ethical and political debates of our times: can globalization be tamed? Whether a more just and stable world order is either desirable or feasible is explored in the concluding chapters which present an alternative ethical and political agenda for the twenty-first century – a global covenant of cosmopolitan social democracy. This book provides an assiduous study for all those who remain intrigued, confused or simply baffled by the controversy about globalization and its consequences for the twenty first century world order.
Can we design institutions that increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision making process? At a time when there is growing disillusionment with the institutions of advanced industrial democracies, there is also increasing interest in new ways of involving citizens in the political decisions that affect their lives. This book draws together evidence from a variety of democratic innovations from around the world, including participatory budgeting in Brazil, Citizens’ Assemblies on Electoral Reform in Canada, direct legislation in California and Switzerland and emerging experiments in e-democracy. The book offers a rare systematic analysis of this diverse range of democratic innovations, drawing lessons for the future development of both democratic theory and practice.
Research into the deliberative dimensions of democracy has been remarkably productive over the last decade or so, spawning new insights into how deliberation functions within the many political venues that constitute contemporary democracies. Normative theories of deliberative democracy have justified and sometimes inspired a wide range of new institutional developments, from citizen juries, stakeholder meetings, deliberative polling, and deliberative forums to the Freedom of Information legislation that enhances public deliberation (Chambers, 2003; Gastil and Levine, 2005; Parkinson, 2006). The key claim of deliberative theories of democracy is simple and compelling: deliberative approaches to collective decisions under conditions of conflict produce better decisions than those resulting from alternative means of conducting politics: coercion, traditional deference, or markets. The decisions resulting from deliberation are likely to be more legitimate, more reasonable, more informed, more effective, and more politically viable (Cohen, 1996; Habermas, 1996; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996; Bohman, 1998).
Governance networks contribute to the production of public policy and governance. Political visions, policy ideas, comprehensive plans, informal norms and detailed regulations are often crafted, or at least influenced, through policy processes involving relevant and affected actors from state, market and civil society. The networked policy output is a contingent result of negotiated interaction between a plurality of interdependent, and yet operationally autonomous, actors. The form and character of the policy output depends on the form and character of the horizontal interplay between the network actors. The negotiated exchange between the various actors changes over time and varies from governance network to governance network. Basically, network-based governance is a complex and potentially chaotic process in which numerous interests, identities and rationalities fuse and collide.
The shift from government to governance has become a starting point for many studies of contemporary policy-making and democracy. Practices of Freedom takes a different approach, calling into question this dominant narrative and taking the variety, hybridity and dispersion of social and political practices as its focus of analysis. Bringing together leading scholars in democratic theory and critical policy studies, it draws upon new understandings of radical democracy, practice and interpretative analysis to emphasise the productive role of actors and political conflict in the formation and reproduction of contemporary forms of democratic governance. Integrating theoretical dialogues with detailed empirical studies, this book examines spaces for democratisation, institutional design, democratic criteria and learning, whilst mobilising the frameworks of agonistic and aversive democracy, informality and decentred legitimacy in cases from youth engagement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The shift from government to governance has become a starting point for many studies of contemporary policy-making and democracy. Practices of Freedom takes a different approach, calling into question this dominant narrative and taking the variety, hybridity and dispersion of social and political practices as its focus of analysis. Bringing together leading scholars in democratic theory and critical policy studies, it draws upon new understandings of radical democracy, practice and interpretative analysis to emphasise the productive role of actors and political conflict in the formation and reproduction of contemporary forms of democratic governance. Integrating theoretical dialogues with detailed empirical studies, this book examines spaces for democratisation, institutional design, democratic criteria and learning, whilst mobilising the frameworks of agonistic and aversive democracy, informality and decentred legitimacy in cases from youth engagement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The shift from government to governance has become a starting point for many studies of contemporary policy-making and democracy. Practices of Freedom takes a different approach, calling into question this dominant narrative and taking the variety, hybridity and dispersion of social and political practices as its focus of analysis. Bringing together leading scholars in democratic theory and critical policy studies, it draws upon new understandings of radical democracy, practice and interpretative analysis to emphasise the productive role of actors and political conflict in the formation and reproduction of contemporary forms of democratic governance. Integrating theoretical dialogues with detailed empirical studies, this book examines spaces for democratisation, institutional design, democratic criteria and learning, whilst mobilising the frameworks of agonistic and aversive democracy, informality and decentred legitimacy in cases from youth engagement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis. This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the deliberative turn in legal and political theory and its tendency to depoliticize social conflict, the various contributors to this volume diverge in arguing variously for pragmatic, expressivist or strategic conceptions of agonism. In doing so they question the glib assumptions that often underlie a sometimes too easy celebration of conflict as an antidote to de-politicizing consensus. This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in legal and political theory and philosophy.
This now-classic examination of the development of viable political institutions in emerging nations is a major and enduring contribution to modern political analysis. In a new Foreword, Francis Fukuyama assesses Huntington's achievement, examining the context of the book's original publication as well as its lasting importance. "This pioneering volume, examining as it does the relation between development and stability, is an interesting and exciting addition to the literature."-American Political Science Review. "'Must' reading for all those interested in comparative politics or in the study of development."-Dankwart A. Rustow, Journal of International Affairs.
Contemporary politics are characterised by the impossibility of agreement on fundamental values. This book examines the institutional alternatives available to democratic politics to determine which institutional structures are most likely to produce a democratic social order in which agonistic citizenship might flourish.
From the theory of "deliberative democracy" to the politics of the "third way," the present Zeitgeist is characterised by an attempt to negate the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics. Political thought and practice are stifled by a misconceived search fro consensus and the promotion of a bland social unanimity which, as Chantal Mouffe shows, far from being the sign of progress, constitute a serious threat for democratic institutions. Indeed, in many countries this 'consensus of the centre' is providing a platform for the growth of populist right-wing parties which, by presenting themselves as the only 'anti-establishment' forces, are trying to occupy the terrain of contestation deserted by the left. Taking issue with the work of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas on one side, and with the tenets of the third way as practised by Tony Blair and theorised by Anthony Giddens on the other, Mouffe brings to the fore the paradoxical nature of modern liberal democracy. Against those who affirm that, with the demise of the left/right divide, antagonism has been eliminated from contemporary post-industrial societies and that an all-inclusive politics has become possible, she argues that the category of the 'adversary' plays a central role in the very dynamics of modern democracy. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein and Derrida, and engaging with the provocative theses of Carl Schmitt, she proposes a new understanding of democracy in terms of 'agonistic pluralism' which acknowledges the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of a final resolution of conflicts.
English local authorities face a combination of deep budget cuts and sharp increases in citizen demand, linked to the costs of recession and demographic changes. Evidence from case study research shows the dominance of cost-cutting and efficiency measures, as in previous periods of austerity. But creative approaches to service redesign are also emerging as the crisis deepens, based upon pragmatic politics and institutional bricolage. While the absence of radical new ideas and overt political conflict is surprising, local government reveals a remarkable capacity to reinvent its institutional forms to weather what amounts to a 'perfect storm'.
The article aims to provide a synthesis of key discussions within scholarship that is critical of Mainstream Institutionalism. It adopts a thematic approach to chart debate and areas of convergence about key issues. The first section of the article briefly charts the rise to prominence of the mainstream ‘collective action’ school. Each of the themes identified as central to the alternative critical approach is then examined in turn. These are the ‘homogenous community’ critique, the avoidance of politics critique (further divided into ideational politics and politics of local empowerment) and the sociological critique. The article concludes by reflecting on the challenge of ‘making complexity legible’ that faces the nascent critical tradition in institutional analysis.Cet article fournit une synthèse des principales analyses scientifiques critiques à l’égard de l’institutionnalisme traditionnel. Il s’appuie sur une approche thématique pour retracer le débat et les points de convergence sur des questions-clés. La première partie de l’article récapitule brièvement la montée en puissance de la théorie traditionnelle de « l’action collective ». Ensuite, les thèmes identifiés comme étant au cœur de l’approche alternative sont examinés tour à tour. Il s’agit, tout d’abord, de la critique du postulat d’« homogénéité de la communauté », puis de la critique de l’évitement du politique (lui-même divisé en politique idéationnelle et en politique d’autonomisation locale) et, enfin, de la critique sociologique. Nous concluons par une réflexion sur le défi de « rendre lisible la complexité », auquel est confrontée la nouvelle tradition critique de l’analyse institutionnelle.
The UK could be on the cusp of an energy revolution. Is fracking the solution to the UK's energy crisis or are the environmental and human costs too high? Yasminah Beebeejaun examines this contentious debate and the lessons from the US experience.
Drawing upon collaborative planning theory and on the work of Lefebvre and de Certeau, this paper explores the multistage governance arrangements leading to the employment of temporary uses as an instrument for regeneration in a context of economic crisis. It contributes to a thorough understanding of the relations between the power hierarchy and the strategy/tactics developed through a more or less inclusive collaborative process from place-shaping (weak planning) to place-making (masterplanning). By decrypting the different paths that can be taken by the collaborative process, the paper demonstrates how temporary uses on differential spaces shape space from a use value point of view, influence and challenge the distribution of power and enable (temporary) occupants to acquire and sometimes sustain a position in the place-making process.
In the inaugural set of Seeley Lectures, the distinguished political philosopher James Tully addresses the demands for cultural recognition that constitute the major conflicts of today: supranational associations, nationalism and federalism, linguistic and ethnic minorities, feminism, multiculturalism and aboriginal self government. Neither modern nor post-modern constitutionalism can adjudicate such claims justly. However, by surveying 400 years of constitutional practice, with special attention to the American aboriginal peoples, Tully develops a new philosophy of constitutionalism based on dialogues of conciliation which, he argues, have the capacity to mediate contemporary conflicts and bring peace to the twenty-first century. Strange Multiplicity brings profound historical, critical and philosophical perspectives to our most pressing contemporary conflicts, and provides an authoritative guide to constitutional possibilities in a multicultural age.
In this new and brilliantly organized book of essays, Anthony Giddens discusses three main theoretical traditions in social science that cut across the division between Marxist and non-Marxist sociology: interpretive sociology, functionalism, and structuralism.
Beginning with a critical examination of the importance of structuralism for contemporary sociology, the author develops a comprehensive account of what he calls "the theory of structuration." One of the main themes is that social theory must recognize, as it has not done hitherto, that all social actors are knowledgeable about the social systems they produce and reproduce in their conduct. In order to grasp the significance of this, he argues, we have to reconsider some of the most basic concepts in sociology.
In particular, Giddens argues, it is essential to recognize the significance of time-space relations in social theory. He rejects the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, or statics and dynamics, involved in both structuralism and functionalism, and offers extensive critical commentary on the latter as an approach to sociology.
The book, which can be described as a "non-functionalist manifesto," breaks with the three main theoretical traditions in the social sciences today while retaining the significant contributions each contains. In so doing Giddens discusses a range of fundamental problem areas in the social sciences: power and domination, conflict and contradiction, and social transformation. He concludes with an overall appraisal of the key problems in social theory today.
To be ashamed of one's immorality—that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Can we design institutions that increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision making process? At a time when there is growing disillusionment with the institutions of advanced industrial democracies, there is also increasing interest in new ways of involving citizens in the political decisions that affect their lives. This book draws together evidence from a variety of democratic innovations from around the world, including participatory budgeting in Brazil, Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform in Canada, direct legislation in California and Switzerland and emerging experiments in e-democracy. The book offers a rare systematic analysis of this diverse range of democratic innovations, drawing lessons for the future development of both democratic theory and practice.
Deliberative democratic theorists (in this essay, Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas) seek to resolve, manage, or transcend paradoxes of democratic legitimation or constitutional democracy. Other democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, embrace such paradoxes and affirm their irreducibility. Deliberativists call that position “decisionism.” This essay examines the promise and limits of these various efforts by way of a third paradox: Rousseau's paradox of politics, whose many workings are traced through Book II, Chapter 7 of the Social
Contract. This last paradox cannot be resolved, transcended, managed, or even affirmed as an irreducible binary conflict. The paradox of politics names not a clash between two logics or norms but a vicious circle of chicken-and-egg (which comes first—good people or good law?). It has the happy effect of reorienting democratic theory: toward the material conditions of political practice, the unavoidable will of the people who are also always a multitude, and the not only regulative but also productive powers of law.
The political-economic institutions that have traditionally reconciled economic efficiency with social solidarity in the advanced industrial countries, and specifically in the so-called ‘coordinated market economies’, are indisputably under pressure today. However, scholars disagree on the trajectory and significance of the institutional changes we can observe in many of these countries, and they generally lack the conceptual tools that would be necessary to resolve these disagreements. This article attempts to break through this theoretical impasse by providing a framework for determining the direction, identifying the mode, and assessing the meaning of the changes we can observe in levels of both economic coordination and social solidarity.
This essay introduces the reader both to the varieties of representations of queers currently available on US Web servers and to the kinds of critical questions that scholars and activists can ask about such representations. As such, the author surveys, summarizes, and analyzes both pertinent Websites and scholarly writing about queer representation, identity, community, and social agency. Ultimately, the author concludes that analyzing queer self-representation on the Web is a significant scholarly undertaking in that it can help us understand better (1) how queers use, represent themselves, and are represented on the Web, and (2) what such representations might mean for our understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our future both locally and globally.