Managed Transition: Local Governance between (mis)Trust in Experts and Citizen Participation

Under conditions of multiple crises that mutually reinforce each other – economically, ecologically, socially, politically – it seems to be more urgent than ever to diverge from established social, economic and political orders and lifestyles. The question how to legitimize decisions has against this background grown more and more important: Democratic theory has discussed various approaches ranging from bottom-up and input-based understandings of democratic interest aggregation to expert-led top-down and output-oriented legitimation of democratic decision making. This paper addresses this question with regard to citizen participation in local governance. Democratic theory, eco-political theory and social movement research have recently put much emphasis on the re-localisation of movements and a return to the traditional environmentalist credo think globally and act locally. An essential part of this shift of focus is, in accordance with rising democratic needs, values and expectations which can only be met at the local level, the empowerment of citizens by means of democratic structures of self-governance. The participation and active involvement of citizens in planning processes and public policy has therefore been rising and stood at the centre of the idea that democracies and democratic values reproduce by means of practice. At the same time, there have always been doubts about the suitability of democracy as a political tool for the achievement of transformation goals for societies. Especially representative structures of democracy throughout western democracies suffer a loss of (political) trust and are regarded increasingly incapable of delivering much needed solutions and at the same time organize the necessary democratic legitimation for their acceptance. The belief in democratic governance comes under increasing pressure; ever more critics are calling for policy approaches that endow governments with special powers including the (at least temporal) suspension of certain democratic rights and procedures such as commissions of experts, think-tanks, and alike. Citizen participation in this perspective oscillates between being regarded as a valuable and necessary resource and a counter-productive problem to be managed. The concept of an expert-led and science-based managed participation to balance democratic needs and efficiency goals therefore stands at the core of projects that seek sustainability transformation. Taking Vienna’s smart-city Seestadt-Aspern as a case study, this paper a) takes a look at bottom-up participatory expectations and democratic values citizens express and b) the trust they have in top-down expert-based decision making when it comes to the development of the Seestadt as a social laboratory for future and more sustainable living environments and c) analyses who participates, when and why in the provided structures for citizen involvement – and who in turn might feel overloaded by innovative participatory designs of public policy. Thus, the paper addresses the difficult relationship between the confidence and trust citizens have (or lack) in expert-led planning and their demands for democratic participation in planning processes of future living conditions and sheds light on the conflicting expectations between direct, representative and expertocratic procedures of governance.