Significant claims are made that the incorporation of participatory processes in local political decision-making signals the emergence of new modes of democratic governance that represent a shift in the division of power between citizens and public officials. One element of these claims is the argument that participation leads to the ‘democratization of expertise’ in the sense that citizens and civil society organizations are able to oversee the application of technical knowledge by policy officials in the policy process. There is, however, little systematic understanding of how different participatory processes deal with technical imperatives in practice. This paper analyses a number of participatory exercises developed in the Spanish regions of Andalusia, Catalonia and Madrid in 2007-2011 to answer two related questions: How does the design of participatory processes affect the potential for democratic oversight of technical knowledge? To what extent is this oversight realized in the everyday practices of participatory exercises?
