Barbeito, Roberto L.Iglesias, Ángel H.2025-04-072025-04-072022-11-09Barbeito, R.L., Iglesias Alonso, Á.H. (2022). Citizen Participation and Democratic Innovation in Spanish Local Governance. In: Alonso, Á.I. (eds) Local Governance in Spain. Local and Urban Governance. Springer, Cham.978-3-031-14804-0978-3-031-14803-3https://hdl.handle.net/10115/82557This chapter provides a broad and up-to-date overview of the structure and evolution of citizen participation in Spain, including the innovative practices and experiences that emerged as a result of the citizen protest movements in the second decade of this century. The chapter is included in the most complete and up-to-date book on local governance in Spain available at the time, making it an indispensable international reference for the study of the Spanish case in its area of research. In fact, it is included in the prestigious collection Local and Urban Governance, published by Springer Nature, one of the most prestigious academic publishers worldwide. The chapter, as well as the book, is the product of a long trajectory of research led by its authors on the general problems of current liberal democracies, as well as on the possibilities for innovation, with a special focus on local levels of governance. In fact, it draws on the research work carried out by the authors within the ISCH COST ACTION IS 1207 (http://www.cost.eu/cost_actions/isch/is1207), funded by the European Union within its Horizon Framework Programme, under the title Local Public Sector Reforms: an International Comparison, subproject WG4, on Democratic Renewal, of which Ángel H. Iglesias was principal investigator for Spain and Roberto L. Barbeito a member of the Spanish research team. It also shows the results of the authors' participation in the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory of Democracy and Public Space (URJC), as well as the participation of the latter, together with 80 other institutions of the highest international prestige, in the international network GRALE, led by the homonymous group on Local Administration in Europe, based at the University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.Through a documentary methodological strategy, which includes academic literature, official documents, and reports compiling experiences, this chapter examines the change in the structures of citizen participation that has taken place in Spanish local governments as a result of the transformative pressure exerted by new political actors and their experiences of democratic innovation over the past decade. The text presents the general features of the Spanish model before and after this change and also offers a panoramic view of the peculiarities exhibited by the participatory experiences of social and democratic innovation deployed by these new actors in local communities and governments. The chapter concludes that, in a uniquely favorable context, Spanish local governments were quite permeable to the transformation of the participation model, turning it into a transversal policy that fosters participatory democratic innovation. However, it is not clear whether this new policy (the so-called local participatory governance strategy) will withstand the change in the political cycle.enLocal governmentLocal communitiesNew political actorsParticipationParticipatory governanceSpainSocial movementsBook chapterhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14804-0_8info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess