Participating also means opening new forms of participation

There are words that, from being repeated so much, run the risk of losing the capacity to challenge us. Participation is one of them.

The Council of Mallorca has just announced grants for citizen participation projects. It is interesting to pause and reflect on what the institution itself says it wants to promote.

The call speaks of active involvement of the population in collective life, of a more cohesive society committed to the common good. It defines participation as a set of collective processes through which people can debate, deliberate, and influence matters that affect life in common. It speaks of defining collective priorities, contributing diverse visions, contributing to decision-making, and guiding public policies. And it expressly points out that participating is much more than being a spectator.

It is hard not to agree. 

But precisely for this reason we believe it is worth opening a question: are we using a broad enough conception of participation to recognize how citizen participation is generated today?

Because not all participation begins where the institution has already prepared a space to participate.

Sometimes it starts much earlier.

Start by creating the conditions so that people who have never participated can do so. In neighborhoods where there are difficulties for collective organization. Among generations that barely relate to each other. In communities that do not have a regular relationship with institutions. Among people who do not feel addressed by conventional mechanisms of participation.

In these contexts, culture, mediation, and artistic practices can function as devices for citizen activation.

Not because a cultural activity is, in itself, participation. 

The question is different.

There are processes that are designed as an architecture of relationships: listening, detecting needs, generating bonds, sharing knowledge and experiences, opening spaces for dialogue, formulating questions, contrasting positions, building proposals, making decisions, and evaluating what has happened.

Within this architecture, many different actions can exist. What is seen may be a concrete activity. But what is happening is a much broader process. The activity is one of the gears.

And the gear matters, because it sets others in motion: people meeting each other, voices appearing, conflicts becoming visible, knowledge circulating, relationships being created, proposals being formulated, and communities acquiring the capacity to intervene in what affects them.

This is especially relevant when we talk about participation in territories or communities where participating is not an acquired habit.

Because a public participation policy should not be aimed solely at those who already know how to participate. It should also ask how we can get those who have never done so to participate.

And here appears one of the challenges for institutions: recognizing participatory processes that do not necessarily resemble traditional formats, but that manage to generate participation.

The same call by the Council of Mallorca incorporates among its criteria deliberation and debate, the adoption of decisions resulting from this deliberation, citizen participation in the planning and development of public policies, and networking.

Therefore, the question should not be whether a given action has a cultural, artistic, educational, or community appearance. The fundamental question should be what process it generates, what relationships it activates, what voices it incorporates, what questions it opens up, what decisions it allows to be built, and what capacity for impact it produces.

If we want participation to reach more people, we will have to accept that it may not always appear in the form we expect.

And there is a second issue that is difficult to separate from the first. 

Forms of participation need conditions to be able to exist.

A public participation policy is not built solely through calls and declarations of intent. It is also built through material and administrative conditions that allow citizen initiatives to be developed.

When grant resolutions arrive too late for organizations to know in advance the resources they can count on, a contradiction that is hard to ignore is generated.

Entities must organize projects, commit resources, hire people, assume expenses, and meet execution and justification schedules without having fundamental information beforehand: what public support they will receive and in what amount.

The same call recognizes this need for liquidity and establishes a system of advances to facilitate the execution of the projects. But if the resolution arrives when a good part of the process is already underway, the issue of liquidity ceases to be an administrative detail. It becomes a barrier.

And administrative barriers also have consequences on participation. 

A small entity may have an idea, an involved community, a network of collaborators and an enormous capacity for work, but lack the necessary resources to function for months amidst uncertainty.

It is not just about how many resources an entity receives. It is about what conditions we are creating for citizen initiative to exist.

For this reason, an administration that wants to foster participation should also be concerned that procedures do not end up discouraging, even if involuntarily, those who participate in, organize, care for communities, and set in motion projects from the ground up.

Perhaps this is the moment to update your perspective. 

Not to replace some models with others. Not to question the value of institutional participation mechanisms.

But to expand the field.

To recognize that there are other ways to generate participation and that some achieve precisely what public policies claim to seek: incorporating new people into collective life, generating bonds, producing deliberation, bringing needs to the surface, and building civic capacity.

And, at the same time, to review some administrative procedures that should be at the service of these processes and not become, even if unintentionally, a hindrance.

Because fostering participation does not just consist of asking citizens to participate.

It also consists of asking ourselves if institutions are prepared to recognize the ways in which this participation is born.

And, above all, if they are prepared to let it grow.