This presentation will be dealing with the empowerment of local institutions
within a complex context of multilevel governance. The strengthening of cities
will lead us to consider a new transformative municipalism. The transition from
classic government to relational forms of governance paves the way to consider
both emerging multilevel networks and models of citizen involvement at local
level. The case of Barcelona today will be
shown as an example of boths trends: initiatives of community engagement in
urban policymaking, and local-global action at European and international
level.
1.
Strategic local
policy regimes
Within the golden age of the keynesian welfare state (KWS) (1945-1975), two
main models of local government were shaped in western Europe. In the Atlantic fringe (from Sweden to Ireland) cities became
the executive arms of the major KWS policies, but without any relevant
political autonomy. In the central and southern countries, local authorities
were provided with community-building and decisionmaking powers, but they
remained –with very limited budgets- at the margin of the main urban and social
policy areas.
Over the recent years, these traditional patterns have shifted along two
lines. As a common trend, local governments strengthened in both political
autonomy and public expenditure levels. All of them have played expanded and more strategic roles in the various paths of urban and KWS restructuring.
But this trend has taken place within a simultaneous process of
diversification: different local policy
regimes can be identified today. Using the worlds of welfare
typology (Pierson, Castles, 2007), table 1 shows
their principal features on underlying values, policy agendas and management
models.
Table 1. Local regimes in Europe: values, agendas and governance
|
Values
|
Urban agenda
|
Urban governance
|
Scandinavian
|
Sustainability
|
Ecological transition
|
Networks
|
Continental
|
Protection
|
Urban regeneration
|
Partnerships
|
Anglo-saxon
|
Growth
|
Creative /smart city
|
Contracts
|
Mediterranian
|
Citizenship
|
Open democracy
|
Community
|
2.
EU multilevel
governance networks
Multilevel tension within the process of building policy powers has
been a constituent element of European
politics. On the one hand the logic of
diversity, embedded in different institutional levels and agendas, made the
creation of a single EU policymaking state very difficult. On the other hand
the logic of European integration, developed
on the basis of the traditional model of multi-sectoral policy harmonization, made
difficult as well the emergence of new, local policy powers.
However, over the last decades, an innovative view of the subsidiarity principle
has opened the way to a scenario of local
empowerment within a multilevel governance
model, where strategic europeanization of policies not only exclude but
even foster the role of cities and municipal networks at every policy field,
from urban to social inclusion strategies, from environmental to local economic
development.
Table 2. Policymaking systems: level and model of EU
Integration
|
Model
of Integration
|
Level of
Integration
|
|
Comprehensive
|
Strategic
|
High
Europeanization
|
Single
policymaking state
|
Multilevel
governance
|
Low
Europeanization
|
Transfer
of policy paradigms
|
Convergence
of policy aims
|
In other words, the traditional models of funcional or dual federalism,
where local government was pushed to implementation roles or to a marginal agenda
are now being replaced by a relational
policymaking federalism. A multilevel governance based on policy networks
with interdependencies and shared powers, and with expanded and strategic urban
agendas. A model which, crucially, does not accept stable and rigid legal
frames of powers allocation, but needs to be managed on the grounds of deliberation, learning and open political
negotiation.
Table 3. Emerging multilevel governance
networks
|
Intergovernmental
Relations
(Classic
patterns)
|
Multilevel
networks
|
|
Functional
model
|
Dual
state model
|
Relational
policymaking
|
Power relations
|
Hierarchies
|
Legal Autonomy
|
Interdepencies
|
Allocation
|
Specialization
|
Segmentation
|
Shared
|
Local Agendas
|
Cross-sectoral
|
Marginal
|
Expanded
|
Local Roles
|
Implementation
|
Decision-making
|
Strategic
|
3. Better and fairer cities
through people policymaking networks
It is assumed so far that different local regimes have emerged recently
in Europe, with expanded agendas and playing strategic roles.
Moreover, cities are today working within a relational and open policymaking
federalism which brings multilevel networks at the heart of a changing European
governance. In this context, the city of Barcelona shows some
features that can be useful to illustrate these assumptions.
Barcelona may be consider
a case of latin-mediterranian city and its local policy regime. It is, on the
one side, a densely populated place, where the urban functional, cultural and
social class mix is quite well preserved across the neighbourhoods. Beyond
this, there is a high density of social ties and networks which give
communities a sense of identity, and
strong patterns of urban space commoning. It is not, of course, the entire
reality. Barcelona is as well a
city which receives every year 20 million tourists, and is perceive by global
finantial agents as a platform of high profit for property investment. Both
things have great impacts: they tend to erode the urban mix, make housing very
expensive, and generate gentrification processes. On that basis, how does local
government manage to reinforce an urban
regime based on citizenship-building values, and to face the risks which
may undermine them ?
The new urban agenda establishes the right to the city at the heart of
the local regime, which is built through a set of common good policies on the
housing, environmental, social and economic dimensions. But is crucial that
those policies are to be deliver by a governance system of open policy networks which enable the involvement of residents, communities and their organizations.
The challenge is then making policies work not only for citizens but by
citizens. This option might be seen as a complex and even inefficient way to
reach policy outputs. But there are at least three type of arguments which
support the approach. Firstly, an argument of values: people participation in policy networks as a means to
deepen democracy; secondly an argument of power:
to make effective the right to the city a more democratic power structure is
needed, a new balance of power relations that transfers influence from
corporate actors to the people; and third, an argument of knowledge and complexity, as we are living in cities of increasing
social diversity and shared knowledge, and therefore nobody is able to grasp
enough experience or expertise to ensure good policy outputs. Good governance
becomes, instead, a set of social learning processes. In summary, citizen involvement in the urban
governance arena as a way to deliver more
sensible and fairer policies.
Table 4. Policymaking: levels of social and knowledge diversity
|
Social
diversity
|
Limited
|
Complex
|
Knowledge
Sharing
|
Low
|
Urban policymaking
As rational top-down
|
Urban policymaking as
collective negotiation
|
High
|
Urban policymaking as
operative experimentation
|
Urban policymaking as
Social learning processes
|
Which are the real ways to put in practice citizen involvement in urban
policymaking? Based on the Barcelona experience, 6
strategies can be listed as governance proposals to empower residents,
communities and social organizations.
Empowering by
networks of policy coproduction
- Coproduction of urban policies. Coproduction is policymaking in
common. It is a step beyond a traditional stakeholder approach to policy
networks, and beyond conventional citizen participation. The starting point is
that the public is wider than the institutional, it becomes a shared space
where partnerships between local state, citizens and community agents may
provide new grounds for policymaking. Coproduction may involve a process of
participatory budgeting, whereby people codecide priorities and investments;
common policy planning on key broad areas (education, social inclusion,
mobility or ecological transition); and action networks to implement policies
and programmes.
- Community Development Plans (CDP). It is the area-based
dimension of policy coproduction. Barcelona is divided into
73 neighbourhoods. The CDP is the development strategy of each, on the grounds
of a communitarian evaluation of needs and potentials, which gives way to a
popular planning process on a comprehensive policy approach. So the CDPs are
intended to improve the community life with better health, education, care,
housing, public space etc; but are intended to do so by enabling the
involvement of the people, and by interconnecting policies and actors. Local
public services work together with grassroots organizations; and professionals
of different policy areas start to bring together resources, actions and
aims.
Empowering by networks of citizen management
- Remunicipalization and democratic management. Over the past
decades a strong movement led to urban commodification, that is, the transfer
of basic goods to the market. This trend is now on the road to be reversed. But
not to go back to a system of bureaucratic provision. Instead, the
remunicipalization of services and common goods –from children and home care to
energy and water supply- open the way to new forms of cooperative and
decentralized public management, open to people engagement and under social and
democratic control.
- Citizen management of centers and urban spaces. Another
relevant feature in local policymaking was externalization, the private
management of public services, on a competitive contract basis. This trend even
reached the network of neighbourhood-based cultural and civic centers, owned by
the Council. Recently, the alternative explored to reverse this has consisted
of a model of citizen management. It implies the community managing the centers
by means of a network of social organizations. They propose a project which is
publicly evaluated and it becomes an agreement signed by both sides: local
authority and the community network. This model has also been extended to
public spaces with non-executed planning provisions (“urban empties”). The
overall result is now a pluralist network of public-community parterships
running urban, social and cultural projects both on centers and streets:
networks for the involvement of citizens in the building of common spaces.
Other forms of empowerment: direct democracy and social innovation
- Local direct democracy tools. Citizen involvement in local
decisionmaking is about networks and open deliberation, but is also about the
devolution of direct capacity to local residents to make a concrete decision on
a city issue through a consultation or a referendum. Direct democracy tools
should embrace processes of appropiate information and spaces of public debate.
They should guarantee as well that the result of the referendum will be
consider a binding decision, with the obligation to be implemented.
- Support to social innovation practices. The recent crisis and
its impacts on the most vulnerable groups and urban areas, as well as the
austerity policies with social cuts, have provoked the development of social
innovation practices. As defined by the EU, they are initiatives focused on
building new types of collective answers to emerging human needs, beyond the
institutional sphere, and oriented to empower people and neighbourhoods. They
may range from community food provision to children shared caring and networks of
knowledge or time exchange. The challenge for local authorities is to set up
resources and schemes of recognition and support without eroding the autonomy
of the social innovation practices.
Coproduction, CDPs, remunicipalization, citizen management, direct
democracy and social innovation can be considered as a set of keystones to
build the new urban regime in terms of common good and people involvement.
These strategies, which are now being implemented in Barcelona, are coherent
with the two initial assumptions: the
local level is playing a set of reinforced strategic roles, and it is doing
so reversing both bureaucratic and market models, by building urban governance networks as a pluralistic arena of citizen
involvement in the common good city.
4. Stronger and fairer cities through international
networks
In the previous paragraphs, the
ideas of a reinforced local government level shaping an urban policy regime
through networks of citizen involvement have been illustrated taking into
account the case of Barcelona. But that is not the whole story.
There is a another part: the building of international networks. This can be
analyzed briefly along two dimensions. On the one side, a dimension of scale:
European and global. On the other, a
political dimension: multilevel networks
to involve local authorities on governance with other institutions, and horizontal networks to stregthen the
transformative role of cities. In
the crossing of both settings, different experiences emerge.
Table 5. Different models and scales of International networks
of cities
|
Networks to reinforce cities
in
multilevel governance
|
Networks to reinforce cities
as a level for change
|
European
|
Eurocities
|
Issue network cities
|
Global
|
UCLG
|
Habitat
III Alternatives
|
- Networks of cities within
multilevel governance
UCLG (United Cities and Local Governments) , headquartered in Barcelona, is the global network
of cities aimed at “being the united voice and world advocate of
democratic local self-government, promoting its values, objectives and
interests within the wider international community”. UCLG’s work programme focuses on: a)
Increasing the role and influence of local government and its representative
organisations in global governance; and b)
Becoming the main source of support for democratic, effective, innovative local
government close to the citizen. EUROCITIES was founded in 1986 by the mayors
of six large cities: Barcelona, Birmingham, Frankfurt, Lyon, Rotterdam and Milan. Today,
Eurocities brings together the local governments of over 130 European
cities. Through six thematic forums and a wide range of working groups and
projects, the network attempts to influence the EU institutions to respond to
common issues that affect the day-to-day lives of urban Europe, as well as it offers members a platform for sharing knowledge
and exchanging ideas. As the Eurocities Manifesto declares, “our objective is to reinforce the important
role that local governments should play in a multilevel governance structure.
We aim to shape the opinions of Brussels stakeholders and ultimately shift the focus of EU
legislation in a way which allows city governments to tackle strategic
challenges at local level”.
- Networks of cities for change
Habitat is the UN summit on cities
and urban sustainable development which is held every 20 years. The Habitat
III meeting took place in Quito at October 2016. More than a half
of the world population is now living in urban areas, in this sense Habitat III
opened up the Urban Age, and a New Urban
Agenda was discussed and approved. However, the main institutional actors
were the nation-states with their presidents and ministers. Cities and mayors
played a quite marginal role. This contradiction was a key factor to fuel the
urban alternative forums, where cities and other urban and community agents met
to discuss and claim for the rigt to the
city and for a system of urban real democracy at a global scale. Habitat III Alternative and Resist Habitat III final statements may be thus considered as the seed of horizontal networks of
cities building a transformative municipalism.
However, is at European level, where
the network of cities for change has gained visibility and has impacted upon
key policy issues. Last year, the
political force now in power in Barcelona, Barcelona in Common, launched a framework
statement advocating for a strong relationship between new municipalism and the
reconstruction of Europe from below:
“We still believe that our response should be based on our local communities,
on proximity, on municipalism. The city is the agora in which democracy was
born, and it will be where we can win it back. But we must not think about the city
in isolation; we have to link up with other European cities that are in
a process of democratic transformation. That is why we have to be ready to
connect different situations, know-how and processes to create a network
of cities for real democracy, alternative economies, human rights and the
commons. If we are able to imagine a different Europe, we will
have the power to transform it”.
Different networks of cities around key policy issues has been
created in Europe. Being some of the most relevant the network of Refugees Welcome Cities, oriented to put
together local-level strategies to host refugees from countries with armed
conflicts, in the light of the failure of EU-level responses; or the Transition Towns network, where cities
share strategies to urban sustainable development ans socioecological change. Finally,
it is important to mention, at national level, the network of Cities of Change, created by most of the
largest cities in Spain where broad coalitions of progressive forces and
citizens movements won last year municipal election and are now governing those
cities. The network operates as an stable space for policy coordination on
several areas, ranging from housing and urban planning to social economy and
open democracy.
In summary, the European Union and the EU governance are facing major
challenges. Local governments are increasingly at the heart. Cities are
stronger; urban regimes are more likely to channel political innovation in decisionmaking;
and those stronger cities are generating international networks to reinforce
their presence in multilevel governance and their own policy responses to
global challenges.
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