Let's make antagonistic and technocratic logics discuss! How citizen engagement in participatory and deliberative processes can affect the governance of highly controversial policies.

For several decades now, citizens' political engagement in democratic systems has been evolving towards scenarios that are less and less focused on electoral participation and militancy in political parties, which are declining in most established democracies, and increasingly oriented towards varied forms of civic activism, ranging from mobilization for major issues to individual testimony, from the involvement in participatory and deliberative arenas to direct work in the implementation of public policies. This paper focuses on the participatory and deliberative forms of citizen engagement that are promoted by public institutions in an attempt to manage highly contentious issues. For decades, the literature on conflict management in public policy has addressed the issue of how to deal with contentious issues in a constructive manner, so that conflict serves to generate creative solutions and avoid spirals of escalation that can lead to decision-making deadlocks, the authoritarian imposition of choices, or even violence. One of the most interesting fields of this strand of literature is conflict management in case of policies with highly concentrated costs and widespread benefits, such as the location of hazardous facilities (landfills, incinerators, polluting plants, etc.). In these cases, two diametrically opposed logics usually intertwine: the antagonistic logic of the communities that fear of incuring huge costs (in terms of pollution, environmental damages and health impact) and the technocratic logic of specialists and experts who plan the projects and are utterly convinced of their high quality. Which effects do participatory and deliberative processes produce when these two logics, which are usually accustomed to clashing, are forced to confront each other through structered public participation and deliberation processes? The debate is still open and full of grey areas. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the effects that participatory and deliberative processes have on the governance of controversial policies by presenting the preliminary results of an analysis of a crucial case: the public participation process that took place in Italy in 2021 to discuss about the national nuclear waste repository with the local communities of the sites potentially suitable to host it. The decision-making process is still ongoing, but the fieldwork conducted from 2021 to now already highlights some dynamics that offer food for thought on the consequences that participatory and deliberative processes can have on the governance of controversial policies.