Relational Dynamics in Real World Participatory Practices: Exploring the 'Soft Side' Story

Participatory initiatives have become common practice in many policy areas, among which urban planning. Such practices essentially revolve around interactions among citizens and policymakers. These interactions do not only entail interchange on the issue. Through these interactions, actors also become related, and – inevitably –they evoke relational dynamics. The pivotal role of relational dynamics for participatory policy processes is widely acknowledged in public administration and political science literature. However, much theorizing and research in these fields approach relations as ‘structures’ and pay little attention to the ‘soft side’ of relationships, i.e. the interpersonal, socio-emotional and ‘lived’ relationships between actors. This side remains largely underexposed. Yet, understanding these ‘soft side’ relational dynamics in participatory practices and especially the factors that influence them can inform our actions in order to deal with the challenging venture of participatory governance. This paper aims to explore ‘real-life’ relational dynamics in participatory practices and the factors that shape it. We analyze two participatory practices in depth, both playing in urban areas in the city of Rotterdam and dealing with urban planning issues. We map the relational trajectory of both and explore how relationships between actors evolve and change over time. We do this by analyzing the interactions within the participatory process in retrospect and reconstructing the relational history of both cases. We pay particular attention to relational turning points: these are change moments in which actors redefine and re-craft their relationships. However, we also want to understand the sources of these changes and see what kind of mechanisms triggered change. We introduce the concept of relational events to trace these mechanisms. As such, next to describing the relational trajectory of these two cases, we also explain and compare their trajectories by exploring what types of relational events influence the transition and development of relationships.