Co-Governance and Contestation: Conflict as a Driver of Participatory Reform in Large Infrastructure Projects

Governments in Western Europe increasingly involve citizens in their infrastructure and urban planning processes (Smith, 2005). The government discourse on co-governance typically blends arguments of improved policy making, higher legitimacy, and improved civic skills (Fung & Wright, 2002) The politico-administrative argument for doing co-governance in infrastructure projects furthermore stresses the value of higher public support for faster project completion. The official discourse generally does not touch upon the contestation prevalent in most contemporary large infrastructure projects. Yet, contestation can be argued to be one of the key factors for understanding the dynamics of co-governance (Baiocchi, 2005). This paper builds a theoretical argument around the notion of contestation and its relevance for understanding why and how co-governance works. We argue that contestation is a necessary condition for engagement in participatory processes. Conflict around interests is what makes people tick. However, since an important feature of many urban and infrastructure processes is the politico-administrative desire to avoid contestation (Flyvbjerg , Bruzelius, & Rothengatter, 2003; Keane, 2012), little space for critical dialogue is usually provided in both traditional and participatory decision making. Even so, in present-day democracies, it becomes increasingly difficult to restrain public dissent (Keane, 2009). Society offers ample opportunity for citizens to voice discontent, if not within governmental processes than outside of them. In order to understand co-governance, we argue, we need to follow the flows of contestation through both traditional and more innovative channels of decision-making and study how they interact. Based on desk research, we will confront this theoretical argument with the case of Stuttgart 21. The purpose of the case in this paper is mainly to develop the solidity of the theoretical argument rather than to test the theory empirically.