"Riding Paradox". Lessons learned from Italian participatory policy-making experiences (original) (raw)
Related papers
Perspectives on Federalism, 2012
Participatory democracy is a theme of growing interest in Italy, in both cultural debate and administrative practice. Some Regions have felt a need to provide a legislative framework in order to facilitate and finance these experiments. The first to do so was the Region of Tuscany which, in December 2007, approved a law that lays down “rules concerning the promotion of participation in the elaboration of regional and local policies.” The law regulates two principal typologies of participatory processes, namely: 1) public debate; 2) the Region’s support for such processes. In order to guide and manage these processes, the institution and regulation of a Regional Authority designed to guarantee and promote such participation has been provided for, in the form of a monocratic organ to be held by a person competent in the field of public law or political science or of proven experience in participatory methodologies and practices. Public debate assumes the form of an articulated discuss...
Social Media + Society, 2016
Since the 1990s, the theme of participation has come to the fore in international debates regarding at least three critical issues: the relationship between representative democracy and deliberative democracy and the possibility of citizens' empowerment through their involvement in policy making; the role of communication and of digital media in promoting new forms of participation; the feeling of disaffection toward politics and of democratic deficit. What we observe is a proliferation of experiences of both bottom-up and top-down enhanced forms of civic engagement. Our article focuses on "public engagement." We analyze the civic collaboration policy promoted by the Municipality of Bologna (Italy) in the frame of "collaborative governance" of the commons, based on civic involvement and governance transparency. Civic collaboration is characterized by a mixed communication ecology. We focus on the inclusiveness of this form of public engagement with local policies and on the role of digital media in supporting citizen's engagement. Civic collaboration emerges as a new, interesting frontier in top-down enhanced participation in local policies. We are currently witnessing some promising changes in the boundaries of participation, in civic practices and competencies. In conclusion, we argue that the concreteness of the projects of civic collaboration can enhance citizens' trust in the municipal administration, but we wonder whether it is likely to become a substitute for fuller citizen participation in local governance and whether it could also foster a removal of the controversial dimension of the political.
Participation is central to the strategies of many institution concerned with development, modernization and the reform of policy-making. In the EU framework and rethoric participation is viewed as capable to improving the governmental legitimacy, innovating the forms of regulations and enhancing the quality of public services (Com 2001, Oecd 2001). However the development of the potential of such an impulse seems hard to achieve and it clashes with different levels of difficulties. Increasing of the operational procedures, unsettled relationship between representative democracy and deliberative forms of public participation and consumerism, exclusion and "conditioning" of the most disadvantaged, are only some of the possible drifts highlighted by a body of empirical works. As Newman and Clarke observed (2009 : 134) “there is no simple explanation of why public participation has become so significant in governmental discourse and practices” and, on the other side, “partici...
Legal Issues of Public Participation. The Italian Experience
This paper aims at illustrating and discussing the Italian legal framework concerned with the exercise of participatory rights within the decision-making procedures held at the national and the local (both regional and municipal) level. This paper is also engaged in describing and analyzing the legal nature, the functions, and the scopes of the administrative entities demanded to take into account and guarantee the stakeholders' procedural rights. In order to fully illustrate such complex topics, and to understand whether and to what extent its peculiarities are helpful in distinguishing it from other European and non-European administrative systems, this paper will be ideally structured in three sections. SECTION I of the paper will provide a general overview of procedural guarantees at the national level. Account will be given on data from both the procedural and the structural side. SECTION II of the paper is topical in that it involves an in-depth analysis of regional and municipal areas of regulation concerned with the exercise of participatory rights and its main characteristics. With regard to the regional level, the cases of Tuscany and Emilia Romagna regions will be briefly depicted. The investigation of the municipal level will revolve around three key-areas. The first area includes the administrative procedures and structures for urban governance. The second case study focuses on budget making. The third case relates to the regulation and protection of the environment. Building on the analysis set forth in SECTIONS I and II, SECTION III develops a theoretical framework for reflection on the peculiarities of the Italian model for participation. Also, a few concluding remarks will be dedicated to the progressive globalization of principles and standards of administrative fashion, and the consequent fading of domestic systems' divergences.
Participatory Processes and Local Communities
In the last years in Italy, specific local laws, national strategies and European Community Programs have spurred many participatory processes in different social policy areas. The results of these interventions were significantly heterogeneous with respect to the effects on the participants and the local communities. In this context this paper provides a comparative analysis of what was experienced by a third sector organisation in welfare policies addressed to families. Within diverse relational environments, this subject has conducted participatory processes according to largely homogeneous approaches, which are identifiable in the community work paradigm and in the methodology of Action-Research, aiming to empower individuals, groups, and communities. In relation to the experimentation of local policies that try participatory processes this paper aims at analysing these different participatory projects investigating if and how they were able to build innovative relations between citizens and institutions within the communities and at trying to review the logic behind the models of intervention and the patterns of managing the social policies.
In the past decades, private, civil society and third sector organizations, or even the citizens, have been more and more involved within the decision-making processes. In the case of welfare policies, participation has gradually been considered a positive strategy at contrasting the crisis of legitimacy of the welfare states, to ameliorating the policy implementation in dealing with the new societal challenges, and to exploiting the informal resources of the grass-roots organizations. Nevertheless, some controversial issues must be taken into consideration, because to date it is still hard to understand why participation has become so significant in public discourses, in which ways it affects the policy processes, what will be the effects of the economic downturn, which role will participation have to deal with its challenges. The paper investigates these kind of issues in the case of the Tuscany (Italy) welfare reforms, strongly oriented to the participatory turn, and its developm...