Anthropology of political participation

This Directions piece presents the project ParticiPat: Patrimonio y participación social: propuesta metodológica y revisión crítica (ParticiPat: Heritage and Social Participation: Methodological Proposal and Critical Review). ParticiPat is a multidisciplinary and mul-tisituated research project involving fourteen researchers from different disciplines and institutions that aims to analyze critically the ubiquitous buzzwords and practices of participation—as well as its key institutions and actors—affecting heritage management in Spain, Portugal, or Mexico. This article advances preliminary results derived from the authors' case study of a natural park and biosphere reserve in Spain. In doing so, it contributes to the anthropological examination of what has recently been described by different authors as the emergence of a new form of governance based on discourses and practices of participation. [ethnography, anthropology of policy, natural and cultural heritage, participation] This Directions piece presents the project ParticiPat: Patrimonio y participación social: propuesta metodológica y revisión crítica (ParticiPat: Heritage and Social Participation: Methodological Proposal and Critical Review), 1 and advances preliminary results derived from our particular case study of a natural park and its biosphere reserve in Spain. ParticiPat is a multidisciplinary and multisituated research project involving fourteen researchers from different disciplines and institutions studying heritage management in Spain, Portugal, or Mexico. The project aims to analyze critically how ubiquitous buzzwords and practices of participation, as well as its key institutions and actors, affect heritage management. In doing so, it contributes to the anthropological examination of what Kelty (2017) has recently described as the " grammar of participation " that results in creating " too much democracy in all the wrong places " while constantly shifting " from a language of normative enthusiasm to one of critiques of co-optation and bureaucratization " (S77). Official discourses usually portray participation as a number of sociopolitical practices that allow citizens to influence, monitor, or engage in decision making on public affairs (Parés 2009). If understood as a cultural form, however, participation can also be seen as a state attempt to engender legal regulation, normalize citizenship, and diffuse power and governance throughout extended networks (Shore and Wright 1997). We aim to explore how this emerging governmentality technique affects the field of heritage and how, in turn, this shift reorganizes the bureaucratic and political spectrum as a whole. Following critical heritage scholarship, we understand heritage as a machine or regime of domination intrinsically linked to capitalist and state efforts to control the past and create prospects

This paper shows how regimes of spatial ordering in Brazil are produced by the entangling of neoliberalism, leftist populism and modernist visions. The paper focuses on Prometrópole, a slum upgrading project in Recife funded by the World Bank, which commenced in 2007. In this project, the neoliberal dimension manifests in the idea that the state, private companies and citizens together are responsible for (re)constructing urban space, and further, that beneficiaries should behave as autonomous citizens, taking responsibility for their new living environment. The leftist political dimension is seen in participatory procedures to involve the target population from project design through to implementation, in expectation of their cooperation with the government. The modernist aesthetics – of straight lines, open spaces and visible order – informs the project design with the requirement to use the new houses and public spaces according to the standards of ‘modern civilization’. As our research shows, such a regime of spatial ordering clashes with the livelihoods of the urban poor, whose quality of life might even deteriorate as a result of the intervention. Furthermore, so-called participatory procedures fail to grant the target population any real influence in creating their environment. Consequently, these residents of the new housing estate drastically reconstruct their private and public areas, reappropriating the urban space and contesting the regime of spatial ordering imposed upon them.

We therefore call for an analytical framework that takes account of its multiple instantiations: in Spain, at least, participation is a novel governance strategy that reproduces preexisting power relations while channeling new economic investment under a technocratic management. In spite of its decentralizing rhetoric, “actually existing” participatory processes actually tend to have recentralizing effects. Far from being paradoxical, this shows that neoliberal governance is not opposed to democratic
articipation and rhetoric (Rose 1996). Rather, participation is one more manifestation of a perverse confluence between the destructuration of the public sector and the requirement for citizens to become autonomous and self-responsible subjects. Certainly, as a concept or ideal type, participation may appear as a floating signifier susceptible of receiving any meaning. However, the discursive contradictions inherent in it fade when examining its material and power effects. Instead of creating “too much democracy in all the wrong places,” participation conceals and legitimizes the growing lack of democracy under neoliberalism.