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The Wicked, the Tame, and the Planetary: a Critical Review of Participatory Processes Led by Academia

Participation
Policy
VIRTUAL026
DILETTA DI MARCO
Oliver Escobar
University of Edinburgh
Azucena Moran
Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS) - Helmholtz Center Potsdam (GFZ)

The challenges, impact, legitimacy and temporalities of citizen-led spaces of participation and deliberation (Felicetti, 2016) divert greatly from those of government-led processes (Landemore, 2017; Dryzek et al., 2019). For instance, while governments are increasingly using spaces of participation (Smith, 2009; Curato, 2020) and deliberation to address some of the most wicked problems of our time (Fisher 1993; Balint et al., 2006; Smith, 2003; Rühli et al., 2017; Moon, 2020), bottom-up and citizen-led processes are focusing mostly on tame issues that affect communities on a daily basis (Mathie et al.,2017). According to the literature, even if these processes occur in parallel to each other, an ever-growing number of participatory processes of participation led by Academia (Zilahy and Huisingh, 2009; Zourou et al., 2020) have attempted to narrow down the gaps between citizen-led and government-led spaces of participation (Crumbley and Tickner, 2002) . Practical examples are represented by the Forum for the Future, the Global Citizens Assembly on Genome Editing, the Multi-City Challenge, and the Smarter Crowdsourcing initiative. This workshop will engage with the following questions: What is the role of academia in convening, designing, facilitating and assessing participatory processes? What are the challenges, the impact, the legitimacy and the temporalities of academia-led spaces of participation? How can transformative research support processes addressing wicked, tame and planetary issues? How can academically-led processes increase its impact by engaging governments concerns for the future while addressing the current needs of citizens? The aim of the workshop is to critically assess the role of governments, citizens and academia in convening, ideating, implementing and assessing processes of participation and deliberation. In order to do so during this workshop, we will produce a collaborative framework to identify and conceptualize the challenges, impact, legitimacy and temporalities of participatory processes led by Academia.

The aim of the workshop is to produce a collaborative framework to identify and conceptualize the challenges, impact, legitimacy and temporalities of participatory processes led by Academia. We will invite researchers who work in the bridge between science and policy, but the workshop will be also open to practitioners and citizens. We encourage three types of papers: i) normative proposals of new spaces, processes and methods to identify challenges within communities where a participatory space will occur; ii) theoretical conceptualizations of temporality and legitimacy within participatory processes; iii) multidisciplinary and empirical examinations and impact-assessment of deliberative and participatory processes. We will assess these experiences against the vast literature around diverse institutional designs for participation led by governments or citizens. The workshop will be divided in two parts: a learning phase and co-creation phase. During the first phase, we will share relevant antecedents and boundary conditions, processes and practices of collaboration among academics who have taken active part in convening, designing, implementing and/or assessing a participatory process. Additionally, we will share the expected outputs of processes led by academia in terms of both academic knowledge and societal or policy change. During the co-creation phase, we will elaborate a collaborative future research agenda leveraging on the insights among the participants. Our longer-term goal is to assemble and transform these discussions into an academic paper that in principle would engage all the participants as co-authors, launching a co-creation experiment of paper development (main reference: Beck, 2020). For this reason, this workshop will mainly engage with scholars who have ideated, designed, facilitated or evaluated deliberative or participatory processes as part of their academic work, to crystalize their knowledge in a collaborative document that represents a piece of knowledge which will be at disposal of the entire community.

Papers will be avaliable once proposal and review has been completed.