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Call for Papers

8th International Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference (IPA) 2013 : Societies in Conflict: Experts, Publics and Democracy

Hosted by University of Vienna

3rd to 5th July 2013

Session title:  'Participation – from political demand to festivalised offer?'

Deadline for proposals: 28th FEBRUARY 2013

Session Chairs: Anna Richter and Susan Fitzpatrick

Taking our cue from the IPA’s useful conception of conflicts as ‘constellations of knowledge and power, in which diverse actors are gathered around values, meanings and practices’, we propose a session that considers the socio-spatial politics of festivalised, culture-led urban regeneration, both with respect to policy making and policy analysis. Policy based on 'broadly aesthetic and semiotic attributes' (Scott 2000), particularly when centralised around a single event, is ground for conflict, discord, claims of cultural marginalisation and an aggressive neoliberalising of space (Porter 2009, Save Carpenters 2012).
Alongside these considerations, discourses of participation have become crucial to urban policy making and analysis; this area has received growing attention from policy makers, analysts and publics alike. The claim that culture led events encourage participatory democracy has become a necessary ingredient for many urban projects which implicate  public life and public space. Yet, the notion of ‘participation’ is open to different interpretations and thus a contested discursive and communicative space. In their authoring of event-led regeneration policy, local governments and their partners utilise a number of off the shelf claims such as ‘the people are a city’s greatest asset’, and events are ‘owned’ by the people.  This frames event-led regeneration in the context of demands and bottom-up politics. There is an implicit irony in this type of framing: are they confessing their failure to involve people and are they doing so with a view to compensate for democratic underachievement? Irony aside, and following Mayer (2003: 110), 'what might appear as the fulfilment of earlier grassroots empowerment claims is actually part of a new mode of governance that has emerged in and for neglected and disadvantaged areas and communities’.
'The public' and invitations to 'participate' have become part of a trend Mayer describes as the ‘dissolving of social and political perspectives into economic ones’ (ibid). In other words, rather than opening up the discursive field of participation to considerations of communicative ethics, urban social movements and the nature of power and democracy, it has become a highly instrumental discursive tool wielded by urban developers, local government practitioners, and academic researchers attempting to close off critical discussion of the possibilities of public space.

Whilst events are often constructed as a jamboree for a rational, unified and uncritical polis to enjoy and consume, we invite scholars to theorise the phenomenon of event-led urban policy in terms of the conflicts it produces amongst the multiple publics. As events appear as if 'somehow separate from normal, everyday forms of urban politics' (Raco 2012: 452), they can serve to mobilise publics in a seemingly apolitical way. We aim to re-politicise such 'politics of participation' (Richter forthcoming, Fitzpatrick 2009) by means of critical analyses of participatory agendas.
Responding to the IPA conference aim of rethinking and debating the theory and practice of different methods of interpretation and critical explanation in policy analysis, this panel invites scholars to interrogate the ways in which meanings and practices of (particularly urban) policies are arrived at, interpreted and evaluated, particularly (but not exclusively) in the context of debates around the 'post-political city' (Paddison 2009).

The panel invites scholars to present papers on and around the following issues:
-       Discourses of participation and civic engagement in urban policy
-       Publics, counter-publics and modes of resistance vis-à-vis experts and policy actors
-       Production of consensus, moralisation and responsibilisation
-       The role of academia in constructing knowledge of the spectacle-driven urban development and policy making
-       Methodological challenges in critical policy analysis and 'translating' analytical findings back into policy
-       Efforts to re-politicise policy analysis
-       Debates around the 'post-political city'


If you would like to present a paper at this session, please email Susan Fitzpatrick [log in to unmask] with paper abstracts by February 28th.