Local Democracy and Neighborhood Participation. Evidence from a large city.

Iglesias, Ángel

Local Democracy and Neighborhood Participation. Evidence from a large city.

Archivos

Local Democracy-Final..pdf (1.05 MB)

Fecha

2023

Autores

Iglesias, Ángel

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10115/27471

Resumen

Mediante un estudio de caso, en este libro se describen y analizan las estrategias de profundización en la democracia local mediante instrumentos de participación ciudadana en una gran ciudad.

Descripción

Globalisation has generated a need for the renewal of local democracy and experiments in democratic innovation at the local level. While city governments may be constrained by the forces of globalism they are also active in developing strategies to improve democracy and, therefore, the local level has become a splendid laboratory of democratic innovations. In this context, civic engagement in local policies appears as a vital element of local governance aimed at both a relegitimation of the local democratic process and the improvement of efficiency. Citizens are not any more viewed as passive consumers of local public services but rather as participants in decision making processes and part of the whole governance system. As a matter of fact and in the light of the many potential benefits of increased civic participation a vast array of local governments in Western Europe as well as in many other countries that recently adhered to democracy have designed and implemented policies to put into motion several civic engagement strategies to foster citizen’s involvement in public affairs and, in the end improve the whole system of local governance. But whereas there is within the citizenry a great potential for developing the democracy, there is, on the contrary, an increasing lack of interest on the part of the citizens to participate in public affairs. To reverse this situation many local governments are putting into motion different initiatives to reinforce their citizen’s implication in local affairs. All of these initiatives are based on notions like “citizen empowerment”, “strengthening democracy”, reinforcement of citizen implication, direct democracy, consumer participation and so on. On the other hand, citizen participation has become an important issue within the context of social change developments not to mention the globalization, the European integration and some other political and socioeconomic processes. The more the societal and institutional differentiation the more responsiveness of the political and administrative systems is required. All these initiatives involve new forms of participation at the different stages of the administrative decisions. Furthermore, an important part of the literature on democracy deals with the question on how to improve citizen participation throughout the different participative models or about creating new ways of participation. These studies focus on public policy approaches from the point of view of the instruments, strategies, resources and contents. The need for the local governments to innovate is mainly due to two, not necessarily compatible, trends which are the yardsticks of our present time. On the one hand, the desire of improving and expanding the representative democracy. On the other, the existence of a growing process of globalization which changes the traditional arrangements of power division among the different levels of territorial governments. In this context, the local level is becoming a splendid laboratory for democratic innovations and this level seems to be the most adecuate to put into practice the array of new initiatives and, therefore, is also where most part of the discussion has been developed.