Re-politicizing Citizen Participation.

There is an increasing political demand to engage a variety of stakeholders in decision-making processes around urban development. In the Netherlands, for example, a new Environmental Law (Omgevingswet) requires local governments to include a participatory element in all environmental development processes. The literature and practice, however, reveal that these processes often end up as conflicts by default. Scholars of planning have convincingly characterized the politics behind urban development processes as post-political (Swyngedouw, 2005). The theory of post-politics can provide an important explanation why citizen participation processes end up as conflicts by default. It does, however, not explain how this works in practice. Post-political theory has been criticized as a one-size-fits-all label and conceptual short-hand to group current hegemonic political forms (Puymbroeck & Oosterlynck, 2019: 103). In this paper I seek to better understand the post-political practices that shape citizen participation processes. Via an ethnographic account, I seek to unpack the post-political practices of local decision-makers and politicians during a citizen participation process in Amsterdam, pinpointing exactly which practices of citizen participation processes can be understood as post-political, how they impact the process and what it would mean to re-politicize citizen participation.