Chapter 1Spaces for Change? The Pol

Chapter 1
Spaces for Change? The Politics of Participation in New
Democratic Arenas
Andrea Cornwall and Vera Schattan Coelho
The challenge of building democratic polities where all can realize their rights and claim
their citizenship is one of the greatest of our age. Reforms in governance have generated a profusion of new spaces for citizen engagement. In some settings, older institutions with legacies in colonial rule have been remodelled to suit contemporary governance agendas; in others, constitutional and governance reforms have given rise to entirely new structures. These hybrid ‘new democratic spaces’ (Cornwall and Coelho 2004) are intermediate, situated as they are at the interface between the state and society; they are also, in many respects, intermediary spaces, conduits for negotiation, information and exchange. They may be provided and provided-for by the state, backed in some settings by legal or constitutional guarantees and regarded by state actors as their space into which citizens and their representatives are invited. Yet they may also be seen as spaces conquered by civil society demands for inclusion.i Some are fleeting, one-off consultative events; others are regularised institutions with a more durable presence on the governance landscape.

In contrast to analyses that situate such institutions within the public sphere, such as
Avritzer’s (2002) powerful account of Brazil’s participatory governance institutions, or
within the ambit of the state, as in Fung and Wright’s (2003) ‘empowered participatory
governance’, we suggest that they constitute a distinct arena at the interface of the state
and the public sphere: what we term here the ‘participatory sphere’. The relationship of
the participatory sphere with both government and the public sphere is only ever
partial; its institutions have a semi-autonomous existence, outside and apart from the
institutions of formal politics and everyday associational life, although they are often
threaded through with preoccupations and positions formed in them.

As arenas in which the boundaries of the technical and the political come to be
negotiated, they serve as an entirely different kind of interface with policy processes
than other avenues through which citizens can articulate their demands – such as
protest, petitioning, lobbying and direct action – or indeed organize to satisfy their own
needs (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001, Goetz and Gaventa 2001). These are spaces of
contestation as well as collaboration, into which heterogeneous participants bring
diverse interpretations of participation and democracy and divergent agendas. As such,
they are crucibles for a new politics of public policy.

This book explores the contours of this new politics. It brings together case studies that
examine the democratic potential of a diversity of participatory sphere institutions:
hospital facility boards in South Africa, a national-level deliberative process in Canada,
participatory policy councils and community groups in Brazil, India, Mexico and Bangladesh, participatory budgeting in Argentina, NGO-created participatory fora in
Angola and Bangladesh, community fora in the UK, and new intermediary spaces
created by social movements in South Africa. Contributors take up the promises offered
by advocates of participation – whether enhanced efficiency and effectiveness of public
policy, ‘deeper’ democracy or a more engaged citizenry (Mansbridge 1999; Fung and
Wright 2003; Dryzek 2000; Gaventa 2004) – and explore them in a diversity of social,
cultural and political contexts.