Table Of ContentFraming Citizen Participation
Framing Citizen
Participation
Participatory Budgeting in France,
Germany and the United Kingdom
Anja Röcke
Assistant Professor, Institute for Social Sciences, Humboldt-University Berlin
palgrave
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© Anja Röcke 2014
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Part I Analytic Framework: Frames, Diffusion and
Democratic Innovations
1 Frames and Diffusion 19
2 Citizen Participation and Democratic Innovations 30
3 A Democratic Innovation: Participatory Budgeting in
Porto Alegre 45
Part II The Invention of National Models of
Participatory Budgeting?
4 France: Between ‘Proximity’ and Participatory Democracy 59
5 Germany: Consultation, Modernisation and
the ‘Citizens’ Town’ 73
6 United Kingdom: A National Strategy for Community
Empowerment 87
Conclusion of Part II 106
Part III From Frames to Democratic Innovations?
Three Local Case Studies of Participatory Budgeting
7 Participatory Democracy in Schools? The Case of
Poitou-Charentes, France 113
8 Participatory Budgeting as ‘Citizens’ Town’?
The Case of Berlin Lichtenberg, Germany 133
9 A Process of Top-Down Community Empowerment?
The Case of Salford, England (United Kingdom) 153
Conclusion of Part III 164
v
vi Contents
Conclusion 167
Notes 177
Bibliography 204
Index 221
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
I.1 PB across the world (2013) (Source: Sintomer et al., 2010) 3
2.1 Number of participatory budgets in Europe and
population involved (Source: Sintomer et al. (eds.), 2013) 35
7.1 Implementation of a frame through ‘bricolage’ in
Poitou-Charentes 120
Tables
I.1 Two levels of analysis 11
3.1 Participatory democracy frame in Porto Alegre 51
4.1 Proximity frame of Jean-Pierre Raffarin 66
5.1 Citizens’ town frame in Germany 81
6.1 Community empowerment frame (top-down) of
Hazel Blears 96
6.2 Community empowerment frame (bottom-up) of
Jez Hall 99
7.1 Participatory democracy frame of Sophie Bouchet-Petersen 119
7.2 Democratic innovation criteria and main outcomes in
Poitou-Charentes 129
8.1 Democratic innovation criteria and main outcomes in
Berlin Lichtenberg 152
9.1 Democratic innovation criteria and main outcomes
in Salford 162
vii
Acknowledgements
Figure 1.1 ‘Participatory budgeting across the world (2010)’ has already
been published in Sintomer, Y., Herzberg, C. and G. Allegretti (with the
collaboration of A. Röcke) (2010) Learning from the South: Participatory
Budgeting Worldwide – An Invitation to Global Cooperation (Bonn: InWent
gGmbH, Service Agency Communities in One World), p. 10. Figure 2.1
‘Number of participatory budgets in Europe and population involved’
has already been published in Sintomer, Y., Traub-Merz, R. and J. Zhang
(eds) (2013), Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe, Key Challenges of
Participation (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 10. I thank the pub-
lishers for their permission to reproduce these figures.
In addition, I would like to thank all the people ‘on the ground’
I have talked to over the last years, political activists, administrative
officers and politicians. They answered my questions about the why
and how of participatory budgeting and about their broader normative
perspectives on citizen participation, and they challenged the research
with their own questions. I am equally indebted to the academic teach-
ers who accompanied this project and who have been of invaluable
support. These are Donatella della Porta, Yves Sintomer and Hans-Peter
Müller. I would also like to thank a number of other researchers and
colleagues who, at various moments, have given precious advice on this
project, most notably Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Loïc Blondiaux, Carsten
Herzberg, Joan Font, David McCourt, Alice Mazeaud, Stefania Milan,
Lea Sgier, Graham Smith, Julien Talpin and Peter Wagner.
Finally, my gratitude goes to my family, particularly to my parents
Marja-Leena and Werner, as well as to my brother Timo and his fam-
ily. They have always supported me in all possible ways, and this work
would not have seen the day without them. A big hug is for Elena.
Fabian’s love and intellectual support have played a fundamental role
for carrying out this research until the very end.
viii
Introduction
‘For us, real participatory democracy is a democracy which reaches a
real division of power [...]; otherwise you deal with the consultation of
citizens, you listen to them, you are close to them ... all things which
are necessary. But for real participation there needs to be a moment of
decision taking, or at least of impacting decisions’.1 This quote comes
from the former advisor of Ségolène Royal, president of the Poitou-
Charentes region in France, who masterminded the implementation
of a participatory budgeting (PB) process in regional high schools. In
this case, participatory democracy constituted the leading frame of
reference for the implementation of a new participatory process that
involves ordinary, non-elected people into the allocation of public
money. PB was first invented in Porto Alegre, Brazil,2 at the end of the
1980s, and belongs today to the ‘canon’ of democratic innovations,
next to cases like the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly (Lang, 2007)
or community policing in Chicago (Fung and Wright, 2003c). It was in
correspondence with this new participatory institution that the ideal
of a ‘participatory democracy’ was formulated (Genro, 1998, 2001; de
Souza, 1998). The global diffusion of PB favoured the re-emergence of
this lead slogan from the 1960s in a powerful and new form during the
2000s (Wainwright, 2009: 22). It has become one of the main references
of leftist and alter-globalisation movements all over the world.
This book deals with the ideas linked to citizen participation and
their role in PB initiatives. It considers these ideas as ‘frames’, that is
relatively coherent but flexible ‘ideational packages’ (Polletta and Kai
Ho, 2006: 191) actors use consciously or unconsciously for ‘making
sense’ of the world and/or making their public claims more effectively.
The starting point of this research project was the observation, during
the mid-2000s, that people involved with PB in France, Germany and
1
2 Framing Citizen Participation
the United Kingdom often referred to different concepts when argu-
ing about the aims and meaning of this participatory project.3 People
involved in the dissemination of PB in Germany usually referred to the
citizens’ town (Bürgerkommune) that includes the focus on increased
civic engagement, but usually not the idea of power division as in the
notion of participatory democracy, which has become almost synony-
mous with citizen participation in the French public discourse. In the
United Kingdom, PB was regularly associated with the ideas of com-
munity empowerment and community development. In addition, the
procedural shape of PB in these countries seemed to witness certain
national characteristics. This observation triggered two main questions:
(1) What is the role of ideas, conceptualised as frames, in the diffusion,
implementation and results of PB initiatives in France, Germany and
the United Kingdom? (2) What are the concrete outcomes of PB in these
countries, in other words: Can they be considered as democratic inno-
vations, meaning new processes deliberately set up in order to improve
the functioning of democratic institutions and that indeed reach this
goal? In order to answer these questions, it was also necessary to get a
more precise understanding of the diffusion dynamics of PB and of the
role of the nation-state framework in its adaptation in three European
countries. This introductory chapter provides a general overview of the
topic, the involved literature and the methodological framework.
The diffusion of a democratic innovation
The original model of PB, the Porto Alegre process, constitutes a
major democratic innovation, in the sense of a process that represents
‘a departure from the traditional institutional architecture’ and that
goes beyond ‘familiar institutionalised forms of citizen participation’
(Smith, 2009: 1). The huge impact it had in creating a broad mobilisa-
tion of civil society, a more just redistribution of money and the fight
against corruption in Porto Alegre has been widely acknowledged in
the literature on democratic innovations and participatory democracy
(Abers, 2000; Avritzer, 2002; Baiocchi, 2005; Gret and Sintomer, 2005;
Smith, 2009; Sousa Santos, 2005). Following Fung (2011: 859), ‘the sig-
nificance of the Porto Alegre participatory budgeting experience for the
theory of participatory democracy cannot be overstated’. The far-reach-
ing results of the Porto Alegre model of PB have played a major role for
its global diffusion, and PB seems to be the first democratic innovation
to come from the Global South to the Global North. In the beginning,
political actors from the left were mainly interested in this process, but
