Private Issues in Public Spaces: Regimes of Engagement at a Citizen Conference
- PDF / 526,438 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 153 Views
Private Issues in Public Spaces: Regimes of Engagement at a Citizen Conference Juan C. Aceros1 · Miquel Domènech2
Accepted: 28 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The ‘participatory turn’ in science and technology governance has resulted in the growth of initiatives designed to engage lay people in consultation and decision-making on controversial matters. Almost from the start there has been both enthusiasm and serious critique of these exercises, from scholars and activists. The gaps and challenges are well known. In this paper we indicate the limitations of deliberative mechanisms as regards how they cope with familiar forms of people’s engagement with a given matter. We examine how this phenomenon unfolded at the Barcelona Citizen Conference on the Digitalization of Society; a participatory exercise inspired by the model of consensus conferences that took place in 2014 in Barcelona. Our perspective on the topic is inspired by Sociology of Engagements. Focusing on how participants and organizers deal with individual anecdotes, worries and testimonies reported during the conference, the analysis shows how these formats are ignored, externalized, banned and re-formed during deliberations. This phenomenon is seen as supporting a civic-liberal regime of engagement. Keywords Public participation · Deliberation · Consensus conferences · Regimes of engagement
* Juan C. Aceros [email protected] Miquel Domènech [email protected] 1
Escuela de Trabajo Social, Universidad Industrial de Santander, Carrera 27, calle 9, Bucaramanga, Colombia
2
Department of Social Psychology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
J. C. Aceros, M. Domènech
Introduction The ‘participatory turn’ in science and technology governance (Jasanoff 2003) has resulted in the growth of initiatives engaging lay people in consultation and decision-making on controversial matters. Almost from the start there has been both enthusiasm and serious critique of these exercises, from scholars and activists. The gaps and challenges are well known (Bogner 2012; Felt and Fochler 2010; Hagendijk and Irwin 2006). For example, Wynne (2007) has noted that participatory exercises implicitly impose restrictive frameworks through a pre-ordained agenda. Other authors have seen public participation in science and technology as a neoliberal tool for the avoidance of conflict (Levidow 2007), and have pointed out its lack of political and social impact (Hagendijk and Irwin 2006; Grundmann 2017), as well as its limits in terms of transportability (Laurent 2009; Ureta 2016) and inclusiveness (Kurath and Gisler 2009). In this paper we indicate the limitations of deliberative mechanisms in this latter sense, although our interest is not in examining how well the exercises can include a plurality of voices, but in how they cope with heterogeneous modalities of engagement with a given matter. Deliberative exercises are frequently publicized as democratic endeavors in which ‘all have the same chance to initia
Data Loading...
