We Participate, Someone Decides and Nobody Explains. Accountability Practices in Local Participatory Processes

While, advocates and skeptics of participatory and deliberative democracy have analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of aspects of PPs, this paper turns its attention to an unexplored element of PPs: accountability practices. More specifically, under what conditions do public authorities offer an account of their actions in response to proposals from (participatory processes (PPs)? The paper focuses on four types of PPs operating at local level in Spanish municipalities. participatory budgeting, strategic planning, advisory councils and other temporary PPs. The study is embedded in the recent literature on systematic evaluations of democratic innovations which can be considered a sub-field of the emerging comparative analysis of PPs. The paper begins with a discussion of how accountability by public authorities is understood in relation to participatory settings from the perspective of participants, practitioners, policy makers and scholars. This aspect of the practice of PPs has been undertheorized. We draw on ideas related to liability, answerability, controllability, bookkeeping, scrutiny, monitoring, publicity and open government. Our analysis of accountability practices in PPs proceeds with empirical analysis of 39 PPs developed in 25 Spanish municipalities in order to identify the causal factors that explain effective and ineffective accountability. Through interviews and documentary analysis we test different explanations of accountability practices: 1) political/contextual-based explanations such as continuity at political level, proximity to elections and government stability; 2) process-design-based explanations, such as type of participatory mechanisms, and 3) proposal-based explanations, such as content of proposals (extent to which challenging), external support and the final destination of the proposal (ignored, abandoned, rejected or modified). This analysis is contrasted with discussion of results from a brief survey of attitudes and opinions towards accountability in PPs among civil servants and practitioners.