Citizen participation in urban governance: the case of institutional participatory projects in Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Since the UN Habitat II conference in Istanbul in 1996, participation and collaboration have been proposed to define the relationship between authorities and social groups living and acting in cities. However, despite the consistent efforts poured by local authorities to implement forms of participatory and collaborative governance, they are often perceived as far from citizens’ needs and aspirations. Moreover, their attempts to institutionalise participatory processes are often criticised by active civil society as a “trick” to bend citizens’ energies and resources to their interests. Therefore, a few questions arise as: why have thousands of local administrations been supporting participation and collaborative governance for the last two decades? What are the meanings given by the different actors to the term ‘participation’? This single-case study analyses the participatory projects promoted by the municipality of Reggio Emilia in the last 15 years to verify the capability of a set of theories and tools to explain the reasons and objectives underpinning these projects, the type of participation at play, as well as the changes occurred in the relationships between institutions and participating citizens in Reggio Emilia. The main theoretical frameworks employed are Cabannes and Lipietz’s ‘Three competing logics’, Arena and Iaione’s co-governance theory and the ‘Gradient of subsidiarity’, Arnstein’s ‘Ladder of citizen participation’ and Wates’s ‘Participation matrix’. Different sources of information have been triangulated, namely official documents as municipal regulations and reports, semi-structured interviews with institutional and citizens’ representatives who participated in the analysed projects and the observation of some sessions of the ongoing participatory project. From these sources, in-depth answers to the research questions were elaborated and final observations on the effectiveness of the employed theories to provide these answers were made.