Monat: Februar 2017

10^th Public Administration Discussion Meeting

Co-optation as Investment: theorizing the agency of social movements in participatory institutions

Victor A. Albert

National Research University Higher School of Economics: School of Public Administration

It is a pleasure for me to announce the upcoming 10th Public Administration Discussion Meeting, which will take place in room 242, 20 Myasnitskaya ul., on Monday, 13^th of February, 15:10

At our 10^th meeting we will welcome Victor A. Albert, who will present insights from his research on citizen participation. Albert is an Assistant Professor at the Public Policy Department at HSE. https://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/192085609

Citizen participation has become a governance commonplace as public authorities around the world have sought to the secure the benefits of increasing public involvement in government decision-making. The consequent proliferation of participatory institutions, however, can pose strategic dilemmas for social movements which must weigh up the pros and cons of involvement in state-organised institutions. In the academic literature, as in the vernacular, the term ‚co-optation‘ is used to describe the absorption of energy and political moderation that may occur as a result of citizen participation. In this paper I consider ‚investment‘ as an alternative to co-optation. I reflect on its metaphoric value – that is, its capacity to avoid some of the problems of theorising social movement change ‘from a position of exteriority’ (Boltanski 2011) – and also on its ability to enable a more detailed analysis of the multiple kinds of sacrifices that are made and the benefits that may be accrued by social movements in participatory fora. I differentiate between different kinds of investments, some of which are unavoidable, while others are highly variable and context dependent. I argue that the agency of individual actors needs to be taken seriously; but I also posit that political power materially and interpretatively shapes both academic and popular evaluations of participatory institutions. To advance this argument I draw on long term ethnographic research in Greater São Paulo, Brazil. More specifically, I compare the experiences of two social movements: one that participated extensively in participatory institutions and another that eschewed such participation altogether.

I saw the light – Have a look on the picture above.

What you can see on the picture is the latest round of innovation for Public transportation in the Russian capital. You can see a large capital letter M, which is for Metro, a underground railway system. This capital letter M can be found at Kitay Gorod, a metro station in the city center, a 5 minutes’ walk away from the red square.

The innovation is below the letter M: Two colored and lighted strips. The upper one has orange color; the lower one is a violet strip.

The orange strip is for the orange metro line; and guess what the violet strip is for the violet one. Moscow’s metro consists of 14 lines, each with a distinct name and particular color. The red line was the first one, opened in 1935, the green line the second (opened between 1935 and 1938). The yellow line is the youngest one. Metro lines cross at several stations, you can interchange there.

The lighted colored strips at a glance indicate which lines you can access at a particular station. That is an innovation, because it is a new practice which is very user friendly. As passenger you will save time to search for a metro map, look for the current station and the lines departing from there.

Nice.

Innovations are seemingly pilot-tested in the city center where a lot of tourists walk around. I have not recognized the colored strips at stations outside the city center. And also other significant stations still do not have it. Do you see the difference depicted below? Obviously we have a metro station here, but it is far from clear what line the stations is served by. (Send me a comment if you figured out which station is actually depicted in the figure below.)