Democratising policy-making from below: Civic managed facilities in Barcelona

Amid the growing rhetoric on citizen participation, the policy-making process remains a highly technocratic domain. Mechanisms inspired by participatory and deliberative democracy promise to address failures and democratic deficits of public administration (Dean, 2019; Warren 2014). The inclusion of citizens and grassroots in the process of policy-making can indeed generate local and practice-based knowledge that may contribute to legitimise the process and the outcomes of public policies (Goulart and Falanga, 2022). However, participatory processes continue to be fairly tokenistic. Even when they are championed by elected representatives or sponsored by administrators, because much of economic and political decisions are hardwired in laws, regulations, fiscal arrangements, customs and practices that are often invisible to outsiders, they continue to clash against institutions and practices within public administration. Furthermore, involving actors of different nature, power and interests in policy-making poses some challenges, such as the risk of grassroots’ co-optation (Dean, 2018; Richardson et al., 2018). In this paper we examine how grassroots and social movement-led experiences of co-production - as opposed to invited spaces opened on the initiative of public agencies - can contribute to democratisation processes within public administration, and how grassroots navigate and attempt to reshape administrative practices towards more open and participatory policymaking. Co-production is defined as the “provision of public services (broadly defined, to include regulation) through regular, long-term relationships between state agencies and organised groups of citizens, where both make substantial resource contributions” (Joshi and Moore, 2004, p.40). In public administration literature, co-production has a clear state-oriented approach and often responds to the decreasing functional capacity of PA to deliver public services in a context of lower resources, higher demand, increasing complexity and decreasing legitimacy (Bussu and Galanti 2018). Nonetheless, community-led co-production has been recently studied as a path for citizens and grassroots to influence public policies to meet community needs and agendas (Asara, 2019; Bianchi et al., 2022; Mitlin, 2018). We analyse the co-production of civic management policy in Barcelona as a case of community-led coproduction. Civic management policy defines the process of transferring municipal facilities and services to local grassroots that receive economic support from the City Council to develop their projects open to the community. Drawing on qualitative interviews and documentary analysis, we assess how grassroots navigate existing and inform new administrative practices, tracing power dynamics between different actors and organisational practices and reflecting on challenges and opportunities of these new forms of coproduction in public management. The coproduction process in Barcelona involved the creation of stable participatory boards and collaborative strategies aimed at implementing the policy according to shared criteria, helping to bridge between different cultures. Although not all the demands from grassroots in charge of civic management facilities were included in the coproduced policy, their experience grounded in years of activism since the late 1970s, their rootedness in the local communities and their mobilization capacity, all contributed to the recognition of civic management as a legitimate and effective policy implementation practice in Barcelona.