Koen P.R. Bartels

Facilitative Leadership and the Challenge of Renewing Local Democracy in Italy

Participatory arrangements have become a popular way of addressing modern challenges of urban governance but in practice face several constraints and can trigger deep tensions. Facilitative leadership can play a crucial role in enabling collaboration among local stakeholders despite plural and often conflictual interests. Surprisingly, this style of leadership has received limited attention within debates linking urban governance and participatory democracy. We summarize the main insights of the literature on facilitative leadership and empirically develop them in the context of participatory urban governance by comparing recent participatory processes in two Italian cities. Whereas in one city facilitative leadership gradually emerged and successfully transformed a deep conflict into consensual proposals, in the other city, participatory planning further exacerbated pre-existing antagonism, and local democratic culture was only later slowly reinvigorated through bottom-up initiative. These diverging pathways explain how facilitative leadership is: (1) important for making things happen; (2) best understood as situated practices; (3) an emergent property of the practices and interactions of a number of local actors and (4) a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges. Key to this style of leadership is understanding participatory urban governance as an ongoing democratic process.

Communicative Capacity The Added Value of Public Encounters for Participatory Democracy

Questions have arisen about the added value of public encounters for participatory democracy: Do problems with living up to its promises occur because of or despite public professionals and citizens coming together? This article presents the findings of a study that examined their public encounters, or communicative “in-between,” in participatory projects in three European cities. A narrative analysis revealed how the communicative capacity of public professionals and citizens is imperative and yet largely overlooked, that is, their ability to recognize and break through dominant communicative patterns by constantly adapting the nature, tone, and conditions of conversations to the situation at hand. Less time, energy, and resources will be lost if they pay more attention to how they communicate (process) rather than what they talk about (substance). As this proves to be inherently difficult in everyday practice, researchers could play an important role in cultivating communicative capacity.

Symposium introduction: usable knowledge in practice. What action research has to offer to critical policy studies

Critical policy analysts aim to serve policy actors in dealing with the intricate problems they face by facilitating productive communication, critical learning and sustainable change. Action research is a valuable approach for living up to this ambition. As it is rarely used in the field of critical policy analysis, this symposium further explores what action research has to offer. In this introduction, we draw out the main principles, practices and dilemmas of action research, provide an overview of the four contributions to the symposium and set out an agenda for future action research. We argue that action research is a useful approach for generating reflexivity, learning and change among the actors implicated in the problem at hand and its wider context, as well as for grasping the meaning of ‘knowledge’ and ‘research’ within current science-practice relations. At the same time, it is challenging because, in practice, it means facing the diverse, contested meanings of usable knowledge in both of these settings. Hence, we encourage future action research to further come to terms with the actual possibilities and constraints of the transformative ambitions of CPS.

Communicative Capacity: Public Encounters in Participatory Theory and Practice

Participatory democracy has become an unshakable norm and widespread practice. Nowadays, public professionals and citizens regularly encounter each other in participatory practice to address shared problems. But while the frequency, pace, and diversity of their public encounters has increased, communicating in participatory practice remains a challenging, fragile, and demanding undertaking that often runs astray. This unique book explores how citizens and public professionals communicate, why this is so difficult, and what could lead to more productive conversations. Using timely, original empirical research to make a thorough comparative analysis of cases in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy, it shows policy makers, practitioners, students, and academics the value of communicative capacity.

The double bind of social innovation: Relational dynamics of change and resistance in neighbourhood governance

While current discourse promotes social innovation as a normative good, in practice it is highly contested by institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising. Concurrently stimulating and resisting innovation creates a ‘double bind’ of conflicting communicative signals that weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change. I develop a meta-theoretical framework that explains what is involved in these relational dynamics of change and resistance, how these can be assessed and improved, and why the double bind both necessitates and inhibits substantive change. Analysing relational dynamics in a case of neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam, I argue that social innovators should be prepared to constructively confront rationalistic evaluation, defensiveness, and experiential detachment while institutional actors should welcome fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics institutionalised in urban governance.

Doubt and excitement: an experiential learning approach to teaching the practice of qualitative research

This article diagnoses that qualitative research (QR) methods courses and literature often remain silent on how to actually do QR and explores how practice theory can improve learning and teaching the practice of QR. It develops an experiential learning approach of turning experiences and emotions of doubt and excitement into a dialogical process of asking creative questions, imagining new ideas, and animating a practical relationship to the world. Based on data and observations of a summer school course in QR methods to PhD students, we present three pedagogical practices for recognizing and tolerating affective resistances to experiential learning and finding creative solutions to emergent research problems.

Collaborative dynamics in street level work: Working in and with communities to improve relationships and reduce deprivation:

Joint service delivery is a well-established aspect of urban governance but does not necessarily improve interagency collaboration or reduce socio-spatial deprivation. What happens in interactions between street level workers has a large influence on collaborative processes and outcomes but is remarkably underexplored. This article develops an understanding of the nature and impact of the relational practices enacted in street level collaboration. I argue that community-centred working can foster effective and authentic collaborative processes and, as a result, generate better societal outcomes. Based on a participatory evaluation conducted in Amsterdam, I critically appraise how working in and with communities moved collaborative dynamics in street level work away from habitual routines and power relations that sustained exclusion and inequality of local disadvantaged youngsters towards better internal relationships and less socio-spatial deprivation.

Integrating process. Follettian thinking from ontology to administration, by Margaret Stout and Jeannine M. Love

Integrative Process by Margaret Stout and Jeannine M. Love highlights the momentous significance of Mary (Parker) Follett for our field. While Follett (1868–1933) was at the forefront of American p...