Keywords

1 Introduction

It has apparently never been as easy as it is today, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, to intervene in public action through participation and/or deliberation. The rise of participatory products seems to indicate an interest in having citizens add their proposals and ideas to the definition of public affairs. However, in this text, we consider the possibility that we are facing a merely apparent reality, and we are inclined to reply affirmatively, but with reservations, to Baiocchi and Ganuza’s question (2017: 7): “Participation is the buzzword of the neoliberal era?”

In this chapter, we maintain that Spain has witnessed a neoliberal participatory turn (NPT), since 2010. From that time onwards, the increase in the production of legislative texts on citizen participation is joined by the spread of the procedure of outsourcing participation in public authorities (Martínez-Palacios, 2019). Therefore, the NPT is a diagnosis that summarises a reality: that public efforts regarding participation, if they are mediated by the private codes of the New Public Management (NPM) kind, contrary to what they say, end up oriented towards the organisation of a lack of interest and awareness, politically speaking, among citizens. Put another way, participation is used to naturalise a policy of indifference towards public policy. The basis of this diagnosis (see Sect. 4) is the study of the institutionalisation of public action in participation in Spain between 1978 and 2017 from a genetic viewpoint.Footnote 1 In accordance with the sociology of public action, studying public action brings with it the obligation to analyse the “socio-politically constructed space, both through techniques and instruments, and through the goals, content and projects of different actors” (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2005: 12).

In the early years of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a reflection began on concepts such as “industry”, “engineering”, “market” and “company” in relation to participation (Nonjon, 2005; Lee, 2015; Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2017). These terms describe the unexpected effects of the spread of the dynamics of participation to all social fields,Footnote 2 derived from the incorporation of the discourse and dynamics of participation into the economic, media, administrative, bureaucratic and political fields, which broadens the area of study in the analysis of participatory democracy. If, up until now, studies have focussed on documenting devices and experiences or on studying the material conditions and politics of participation and its effects, with the spread of participative practices, new problems arise, such as the professionalisation of participation (Nonjon, 2005), the standardisation of democratisation (Lee, 2015) and the introduction of market criteria into the public management of participation (Hendriks & Carson, 2008; Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2017), among others. These issues bear witness to the emergence of a participation industry, with new practices and dynamics involving internationalisation; hence the terms “participatory turn” (Bherer et al., 2017), “tournat participatif” (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018) and “partizipative wende” (Hüller, 2010) cover problems linked to the engineering of participation on a global scale.

The global participatory turn (understood as the spread of participatory practices and the consequent verification of the existence of a participatory industry, engineering or even market) is a multiscale phenomenon that is being increasingly documented in the academic field (Ganuza & Fernández, 2012; Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018; Bherer et al., 2017; Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2017) and that is structured based on the historical, material and symbolic logics and conditions of possibility of each moment and context. Specifically, the turn does not take the same form in France, whose republican participative tradition pervades participatory products (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018), and in Spain, where “council democracy” (Ganuza, 2010) connects with the deliberative preference based on the patronage practices of Spanish political culture (Ramió, 2016). Therefore, it is necessary to document both the particular and general dynamics of this turn in order to understand the internal (local, national, state, etc.) and external (international) dynamics and, above all, the overlaps between them, which are what explain their movements.

The work we present seeks to document, analyse and study the consequences of the turn. To do so, the institutionalisation of participation being one of the elements common to the participatory turn everywhere from 2016 to 2019, the study looked at the institutionalisation of the public action of participation in Spain between 1978 and 2017. The material analysed (see Table 1) makes it possible to state that the turn in Spain has been of a neoliberal kind.

Table 1 Summary of the empirical material analysed
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We are aware that we are using the term neoliberal when its power to explain seems to be more politicised and questioned than ever (Slobodian, 2018). Neoliberalism covers a range of projects and schools (Ahedo & Telleria, 2020), which makes this concept a category that is sometimes too abstract, one that is recurrently used to describe the way in which public action works in capitalist systems during a specific stage.

For our consideration of this operational logic of financialised capitalism, this text is based on the studies of critical theory. From this perspective, talking about neoliberalism necessarily involves a view of capitalism that avoids a teleological understanding of it. For this, based on Marxian theses and supported by essential reading on the subject by Harvey (2014), Hibou (2012), Nancy Fraser and Rachel Jaeggi (2019: 32) and Wendy Brown (2015), we would like to characterise capitalism as “a path-dependent sequence of accumulation regimes that unfolds diachronically in history” (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2019: 71). The characteristic thing about financialised capitalism is that its logic is a neoliberal one that “authorises finance capital to discipline states and publics in the immediate interests of private investors” (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2019: 84) and that, furthermore, it does so by exercising the “use of the force of law” to maintain the status quo (Slobodian, 2018). In this regard, following Brown (2015), the neoliberal project aims to dismantle democratisation processes and to commercialise public action by installing markets and ethical principles in their place (2015: 108), diluting, through the law and the monetarisation of daily life, the weight of habitus in favour of ethos. At the level of the particular, following Hibou (2012), neoliberalism is characterised by the expansion of legal systems, multiplying the number of regulatory texts, assuming the ordoliberal perspective that works to put up an impenetrable mesh to defend the market from any interference (Ahedo & Telleria, 2020) in order to, at the same time, open up the decision-making process regarding the norms of public action to business agents. All this ends up in a normative articulation of a moral kind that sketches out the dispositions of a subject in a way that fits into the “fantasy of individuality” (2012); in a new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2002), market-based logic lands in the everyday, assimilating into itself, as natural, inequalities, competition and aggression to the same degree that the market defines itself as a processing mechanism for guaranteeing the efficiency of government (Mirowski, 2009). Ultimately, the key to neoliberalism is in the way that it situates the political, orienting it, on the one hand, towards the establishment of hard and fast legal and governmental guarantees for unfettered competition and private property, and, on the other hand, to incorporate the market’s competitive and individualistic logics into life (Ahedo & Telleria, 2020). Therefore, it is more appropriate to interpret neoliberalism as an “art of government” (Colmenero, 2019) than as an individualistic ideology or a programme for reducing the state. Ultimately, Hayek’s utopia (Vergara, 2015) can be encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s statement that her goal was to “win souls”.

Based on the empirical analysis carried out, this chapter maintains that there are three movements which characterise the neoliberal participatory turn in Spain that allows the entrance of private companies with private interests into the State’s decision-making through participative devices, with a resulting impoverishment of democracy. The three movements are: (1) the naturalisation of a topos of the crisis of democracy, which is taken on by private companies and used to sell participatory products via formulas such as outsourcing; (2) the neoliberal bureaucratisation of participation, which channels the New Public Management values, which in general orient private companies; and (3) the privatisation and commercialisation of participation, which means that this is converted into a saleable product oriented towards the accumulation of capital in any of its forms (economic, social, cultural, symbolic).

The main goal of this chapter is not to offer the complete thesis regarding the NPT in a detailed way, but rather to examine one of its movements, the third one, which gives the chapter its title. However, we consider it important to present a basic outline linking the three movements.

So this chapter is divided into five sections. After this introductory framework, in the second methodological section, we explain what is meant by the analysis’ genetic approach, and we set out the empirical material that forms the basis for a definition of the three movements. The third section offers a general description of the diagnosis of the NPT. We briefly introduce the first and second movements in order to then cover the interrelationship in which they appear with the practice of the commercialisation of citizen participation. In the fourth section, due to the relevance of the debate about the commercialisation of public and political life (Brown, 2015), the increase in studies of the relationship between market and participation (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018), and the context of the institutionalisation of public policies through regulation that is occurring in the Spanish Autonomous Regions, we look at the possibilities and dangers that commercialisation has for participatory public action. In the last section, we take up once again the study’s principal ideas, and we offer a series of thoughts that can be looked at in greater depth.

2 Studying the Institutionalisation of Citizen Participation in Spain (1978–2017): Methodology and Empirical Material

With the aim of understanding the meaning of the participative turn in Spain, we study the institutionalisation of participation between 1978 and 2017. To do this, we analyse public action as it relates to participation using a genetic structuralist approach, inspired by the work of Bourdieu (1993; 2014, among others), looking in depth at the production of power relations among agents through the study of field logics. This leads to an analysis, with a socio-historical approach, of the social position of the agents who produce participation services and the emergence of the contents and nature of the citizen participation products offered in the political field.

Thus, we study the genesis of what has been naturalised (participatory products on Table 1), studying their production process and identifying the position of the agents who produce discourses, legal documents and participatory devices and the relationship among those agents in the overall field of power (political, economic, etc.) as well as the power relations and interactions among these agents during the production process.

This genetic approach assumes that, in order to know what is happening, it is necessary not only to look at the composition of a (participative) field but also to attend to the movement from its origin.

It has already been pointed out that the participatory turn is characterised by the inflation of participatory products. Given that it is not possible to study them all, for the purposes of this text, we chose to select the principal political instruments used in order to create and maintain institutions according to the criteria indicated by Lawrence and Suddaby (2006) in their studies of the work of government and its institutions: laws, discourses of state, advisory documents, theorisation, routinisation, promotion and definition of categories and products that make it possible for these institutions to be reproduced in different places. This is a sample that includes discursive, legal and practical milestones in the implementation of participation obtained from consultation with experts (academic agents, participation technicians and participation consultants), regulatory documentation that constitutes the legal framework for participation in Spain, as well as the services offered by the main agents that offer participation products in Spain.

To summarise, with the genetic approach, we make these products “talk”, in a systematised way (Martínez-Palacios, 2019: methodological annexes), about the principles of vision and division that organise them.

The diagnosis of the NPT that we introduce in the following section comes from the study of the set of public products in Table 1. The identification of the first movement focusses on the discourse on participation; the identification of the second movement on legal texts, guides and manuals on participation; and the commercialisation of participation focuses on the products effectively implemented in participative procedures (see Sect. 4).

3 The Neoliberal Participatory Turn

The first movement of the neoliberal participatory turn in Spain is related to the production and naturalisation of the topos of the crisis in democracy, which introduces a systemic view of the world in which participation is presented and understood as a medical-style solution (participation as therapy). This first movement consists of the use of the discourse of the democratic crisis as a “common place, that can be argued with, but cannot be argued about”, as topos (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1998: 109).

So, on the one hand, the topos of the crisis that is present in the political and economic fields makes it possible for economic and business agents to sell products that until now have not been of interest in participatory democracy (e.g. private companies dedicated to telephone services, or consultancies without a particular specialisation in participatory material) in such a way that, given the neoliberal viewpoint indicated, economic corporations reformulate democratisation from the logic of private economic interests (Brown, 2015).

By way of illustration, it is possible to point to the example of the spin-off, Scytl. This company, which specialises in electoral modernisation, is linked to Telefónica S.A., and in 2016, it created a subsidiary in the form of a private limited company (Open Séneca) that operates what the company calls a “platform”, offering consultancy: “Civiciti: Experts in citizen participation”. Civiciti offers services and operations related to “participatory processes” to councils such as Logroño, Narón and Granollers, and facilitates participatory budgets in Lloret de Mar and Lleida.

Scytl has become the global leader in the electoral modernisation market and we now see the opportunity to do the same in the space of participatory democracy, a market that we believe is sufficiently mature for new solutions. (statement by Pere Vallès, CEO of Scytl, in eleconomista.es. 24/02/2016)

In this same presentation, the Global Manager of Telefónica Open Future makes use of the discourse of the crisis to sell its product when she points out that:

Currently, the communication of governments with their citizens is limited in most cases to the electoral process that occurs every four years, something that is insufficient for the new generations of citizens who demand that they be listened to in the decisions that affect their day-to-day lives, and request tools that allow them to interact with their politicians. (Ana Segurado, Global Manager of Telefónica Open Future, eleconomista.es. 24/02/2016)

Apart from the fact that the terrain of the democratic crisis opens the way for the entry of business agents, what is happening is that a circular sequence regarding the implementation of democratisation is naturalised, one that favours a medicalisation of participation. The content and origins of this crisis are not spoken about; what is mentioned is the existence of a “crisis of democracy”, “of democratic efficiency”, “of citizen confidence”, etc. for which it is necessary to take participatory measures, all without putting at risk the representative system and the work of the political parties. Those who propose participation (political parties and companies) do so setting a limit at guaranteeing the maintenance of their own existence, giving rise to a “participatory bias” (Navarro, 1999).

This systemic notion of crisis causes an unfolding of a range of institutional participatory services that results in a dispersion of deliberative and participative devices, which have little relationship with each other but which create an appearance of possibility (in the intervention of the decision). To give coherence to this dispersion, devices are presented as being part of a “system” (system of institutional participation) or a common “regime” (of institutional participation). Both ideas (system and regime) are favourable to a systemic view of the world that links up with the mechanistic topos of the crisis in democracy while also fitting in with the regulatory drive that neoliberalism uses to maintain a state of affairs that is advantageous to agents with an accumulation of global capital (Brown, 2015; Slobodian, 2018; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2019).

The second movement is related to the neoliberal bureaucratisation of participation, which is essential in order to understand the organised lack of interest created by the neoliberal turn. Considering that in Spain, much of the public action in participation has been channelled through regulatory projects (laws, regulations, etc.) (Navarro, 1999; Ganuza, 2010), it can be seen that in the seven practices given below, there is a new bureaucratic rationalisation that is made specific in the normalisation of instruments affecting ethics and dispositions and the resulting entry of bureaucracy into the private sphere, both matters that are characteristic of a neoliberal logic of managing what is public (Hibou, 2012). Following Brown (2015: 151), the legal framework becomes a medium for disseminating neoliberal rationality applied by private companies. Specifically, the seven particular practices of a new bureaucratic rationalisation are (1) a greater tendency towards the standardisation of a monosemous way of understanding participation, (2) the greater presence of methods for channelling rationalisation, (3) more legal procedures, (4) the integration and naturalisation of formulas for the abstraction and objectification of participation, (5) the individualisation of participative practice and the rupture of community logics, (6) the normalisation of devices that cover morals and dispositions and (7) the elitist professionalisation of participation.

The third movement that gives the participatory turn in Spain a neoliberal character is related to the commercialisation and progressive privatisation of public action, which arises, partly, from the authorities’ willingness to debureaucratise and the appearance of NPM, which results in a new legal framework with a strongly moralising content (Brown, 2015). In Spain, given the discourse of the crisis in democracy and bureaucracy, for which a need for citizen participation is seen, institutional participatory services have shown, from the first decade of the twenty-first century, an accumulative management whose goal is profit, both politically and economically speaking, as well as an increase in devices in favour of competition. At this time, it is possible to talk about the configuration of a “social market in participation” and a “neoliberal market in participation” (Martínez-Palacios, 2019). The first is guided by the principles of fair commerce; the second is based on the idea that participation can and should be sold as a good for making money. Therefore, this movement is characterised by a change from an artisan approach to participation to the industry of citizen participation, something that has been mentioned by other authors (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018).

4 The Commercialisation of Citizen Participation

There have been many debates dealing with the practice of outsourcing, but of them all, the one about what and how far to outsource stands out, for the implications it has in terms of moving towards an empty state. The question is, where should the limits of outsourcing be? The reply to this question provides not only information about the NPM model applied by a public authority but also information about the state model and its orientation in the defence of public rights based on practices that outsource core activities or those belonging to the strategic nucleus related to the State’s authority and secondary activities, which derive from the political outcomes of the first, which can be provided by an external agent.

Public participatory services include a series of actions related to the central activities of authorities (legislating, taxation, development, etc.) and others that do not compromise the nature of the State. The key matter today is to ascertain whether the authorities’ activities that are being outsourced touch the core and also to ascertain the way in which hiring one, or other, kind of agent (public limited companies, cooperatives, research centres) affects the way the result is monitored as well as how this affects the consolidation of the CP services markets. That is to say, it is necessary to understand how the State is built up through public action in participation by means of an instrument whose origin is found in the search for business efficiency.

In theory, the uses of outsourcing can be explained by many factors: a search for profit, savings, citing efficiency and quality in public provision, a technical deficit in terms of provision, etc. With regard to public action in participation, there are jobs that require resources, personnel and the impulse of the triggering of the participatory imperative that is deduced from the “legal framework of participation” (Salvador & Ramió, 2012; FEMP, 2015). This need, which is not only technical but also related to the acquisition of political commitments, is in fact responding with a strengthening of discourse on the subject in the political field as well as a regulatory impulse. Both discourse and regulation are core state activities. The actions that result from this central activity (training, dynamisation, etc.) are already being outsourced or only partially provided by public authorities. The fact that there are few job descriptions and new jobs for technical participation agents, while there is an increase in companies that, in different ways, offer participation services, gives an idea of how well established this phenomenon is in Spain.

In general, with a more or less defined political mandate, companies carry out areas of public action that range from running workshops that have been designed by technical municipal agents, which respond to a reflexive and political strategy, to complete coverage of the practice that might be activated after making a statement of the “we want to do something in terms of participation” kind. In accordance with Fraser (2008), the logics that are induced by market discipline, the short timescales defended, based on a search for effectiveness, and the significant presence of temporary jobs are affecting the target dimension of governability, something that is happening internationally in the form of the outsourcing of participatory democracy in countries such as Taiwan (Poe Yu-Ze Wan, 2018), where the institutionalisation of participation involves a systematic channelling of participative budgets, outsourced to associations, NGOs and academics, which causes a boom, such as the one that took place in the country in 2015. This is accompanied by a State that distances itself from the procedure and only intervenes at the beginning (designing the budget). The increase in both suppliers and in the competitiveness of companies reinforces a relation of dependence and clientelism that acts in detriment to a logic based on empowerment and in favour of a kind of participatory coaching. In other words, companies compete, not to offer the best participation service, but to offer the best service for controlling results through participation. According to the author’s results, this coaching leads to the “destruction of a public ethos” at the cost of an increase in a commercial logic, according to which “the lowest bidder wins the project, a clear self-exploitation of workers occurs and projects, for which there are not enough resources, are competed for” (2018: 10–12).

In addition to this scenario, which shows that public participation services are becoming a political procedure oriented towards the accumulation of legitimacy, there is an established ethos in terms of aggressive competition, the precarity of a group and the dissolution of any projects that cannot be located in the productivist accumulative logic. Although Spain is not in Taiwan’s situation, the phenomenon of outsourcing is nonetheless well established, and its consequences need to be studied in order to avoid a radicalisation of the NPT.

To this end, we provide an analysis of the services offered by the agents which can be hired by authorities for participation purposes. By analysing the nature of and the services provided by 96 consultancy companies, we hope to offer a sketch of the outsourcing phenomenon. However, there are many more companies and agents than have been found in this research, and so we insist on all possible caution given the clear limits of the sample. As a reference point with respect to the limits we are working with, in an investigation that shows considerable similarities to the one presented here, the Mazeaud and Nonjon team identified in France around 226 consultancy companies (or similar) from the CP world, up to 2015. In fact, in their study of the French participation market, the authors use the term “nébuleuse” (“nebula” or “nebulous”) (2018: 175) to describe “the variety of profiles and practices” presented and carried out by these consultancies. Both of these characteristics, with certain nuances, are the starting point for a description of consultancy work in Spain.

With regard to the first, in the case of Spain, the metaphor of the nébuleuse is very revealing. Here we take on the concept as understood as halfway between a lax approach, such as diversification, and the sense used by Cox (1987), as a managerial structure of academic agents, corporations and authorities oriented towards achieving a political consensus favourable to global capitalism.

This intermediate use of the notion of “nébuleuse” helps us to characterise the reality involved in the practice of outsourcing participation in Spain. Specifically, we consider that we are faced with a reality in which there is a comprehensive difficulty due to the dark nature implied by the different understandings of the notion of “nébuleuse”.

The casuistry inhabited by the agents that offer CP services is very diverse: from some that were founded between 1960 and 1990 and which since the year 2000 have offered CP services, to single-person coaching and consultancy companies created since 2001 by former managers, and secretaries of public authorities who coach authorities because when leaving they take with them the authority’s list of contacts. It is also possible to find small cooperatives that are critical of the neoliberal discourse, research groups created between 1990 and 2000 that focus on participatory democracy and “catch all” companies, among other cases.

With regard to the services offered, it is possible to find everything from those that cover the management of grants to the design of participatory budgets. This complexity covers the existence of consultancy companies that specialise in CP services and whose existence and activity is dedicated to this, as well as others that offer participation among other products, including market consultancy, the design of documents that are not related to participation, and “consultants in social and market research that render service for the setup of participation processes, market research and social studies” (mission statement of the company Consultores Investigation Social y de Mercados), etc.

Furthermore, we propose that this uncertain reality contains a particular nébuleuse, in the sense used by Robert Cox. It contains a “formal and informal network that is ever more identifiable, although not embodied in a single agent or agency including state, corporations and intellectuals that work towards a formulation of politics of consensus oriented at the maintenance of global capitalism” (Cox & Schechter, 2002: 33). This network is closely related to Brown’s definition of neoliberalism, introduced at the beginning of this chapter. For Brown, neoliberalism is characterised by monetising all areas of public and private life (2015: 21) – in this case, towards the maintenance of the NPT and towards the organisation of the politics of uninterest. The use of this meaning of nébuleuse makes it possible to characterise a way in which the neoliberal side of the participation services market appears.

With regard to the second idea, tied to the plural character of the market, in Spain, it is interesting to use, as a way of thinking about that plurality, the difference between the social market and the neoliberal market of CP services. The social market is characterised by offering services oriented according to the principles of the social and solidarity economy, an “approach to economic activity that takes into account people, the environment and sustainable development, as a priority, above other interests” (REAS solidarity economy charter). Here we find research groups, consultancies and freelancers, as well as some of the attitudes of certain technical participation agents who work in public employment. The second, neoliberal market, is characterised by its Coxian nebulosity, by orienting participative practice according to capitalist criteria of productivity and profit, understood in accordance with the understandings of NPM.

Looking at the situation of these 96 consultancy companies, it is possible to observe the existence of some peaks in the emergence of these agents in the years: 1999, 2000–2006 and 2011–2013 (cf. Graph 1).

Graph 1
A graphical analysis depicts the chronological organization of 96 consultancies from the year 1967 to 2017. There is a fluctuating trend with peaks of 4 in 1987, 8 in 1999 and 7 in 2013 respectively.

Chronological organisation of the 96 consultancies studied by year of creation. (Source: Martínez Palacios, 2019: 100)

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One of the elements that would explain these peaks is the effect of legislative action, an activity that has been defined as central to the form of neoliberalism identified by Slobodian (2018). Therefore, in explaining the 1999 peak, it is important to know that, by that date, the Spanish Autonomous Regions had already approved many of the instruments of governmental participation: citizens’ initiatives, sectorial councils, etc. What is more, the echo of the Porto Alegre participatory budgets was starting to have an effect, and the public authorities did not yet have a corps of technical agents. Thus, the move from activist to artisan through a foundation offering participation services is an essential one. The form of a foundation has been chosen by many activists who have sought to channel their activities in such a way as to affect institutionalised public action (e.g. the Pere Tarres Foundation).

With regard to the second peak (2000), it is interesting to remember here that this marked the beginnings of the first participatory budgets in Spain and between 2001 and 2002, laws were passed that favoured the creation of a CP services market: Organic Law 4/2001, regulating the Right of Petition; Organic Law 1/2002, regulating the Right of Association; and Law 50/2002, on Foundations. With regard to the 2013 peak, it is worth establishing a link with the passing of Law 19/2013, on transparency, access to public information and good government – which was a clear beginning to the strategy of open government in Spain – and the connection to digital participation of the consultancies created at this time (Komunikatik, Novagob, Delibera, Kuorum) which offer “methodologies for transparency” and participation.

Therefore, Graph 1 involves a nébuleuse, one that it is necessary to look more closely at but that responds to a reality: the existence of a demand for institutional participation that indicates the existence of a market in citizen participation services.

When talking about a market, it is important to highlight, as Callon does in the study of hybrid forums (2001), that the market is not an abstract institution. In this regard, teleological discourses regarding their nature are not relevant here. It would not make sense, and it would be inexact to talk about markets in general, and so it is preferable to speak about markets, in plural, which are organised and structured historically and progressively. Furthermore, attending to the use of markets gives our analysis greater exactitude.

In this regard, there are many characterisations proposed in order to organise this plural. Following Fraser and Jaeggi (2019: 27), it is possible to distinguish between the use of markets for distribution (focusing on the delivery and sharing out of intangible goods) and their use for allocation (oriented at the use of resources for projects that go beyond the individual and reach the collective). Therefore, for greater precision, we can not only talk of markets in participation services but also specify what is referred to by the use of markets; the participation services market is characterised by allocating to social resources (which are none other than forms of capital) uses oriented at collective goals. These collective goals are publically sheathed in the framework of the crisis of democracy but hide, as has been explained above, goals of accumulation of political legitimacy or political and economic profit.

On this point, it is important to indicate that the market forms that occur in capitalist societies have a characteristic incorporated into the logic of exchange that orients them (accumulation-oriented exchange): they establish an instrumental relationship with the product. As Jaeggi says:

…to treat something as a commodity produced for sale is to alter our relation to it and to ourselves. This involves de-personalisation or indifference and orients relations to the world in terms of instrumental, as opposed to intrinsic values. (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2019: 29)

So the indifference that gives oxygen to neoliberal bureaucratisation is constitutive of the capitalist markets. That is to say, one cannot be understood without the other: talking about the neoliberal bureaucratisation of participation means talking about the organisation of uninterest and of its specific expression in indifference.

One of the characteristics of the commercialisation of CP explained in this diagnosis as the third constituent movement of the NPT is the institutionalisation of the logic of competitiveness in the response to the demand for services, a demand oriented to responding to the need to accumulate political legitimacy. When Laval and Dardot say that the “market is a social mechanism that makes it possible to mobilise information and communicate it to others through prices”, they insist that “the economy’s problem is not a general imbalance, but of knowing how individuals can best make use of the fragmentary information they have” (2015: 145–48).

Therefore, the authors point out that competition is a driving factor that defines the nature of this neoliberal market. In Spain, the political evidence of the existence of competition is very clear. A politicisation of participation happens, not in terms of a discussion of topos, but rather in terms of the political use of the debates regarding the management of participation in order to obtain political profitability.

Currently, a municipality can hire the consultancy that best fits with its participation framework and philosophy. The breadth of the market makes this possible. This becomes a weapon of political struggle, and there are open conflicts in this regard because the opposition in a municipality considers that the council hires participation services not according to objective criteria, but rather to cronyism and patronage practices.

Competitiveness not only reveals itself in the political field. This logic confronts and puts into competition two ways of seeing participation, in such a way that the struggle for the creation of meanings is already with us. The ideal types of the forms that compete between themselves are as follows: one is focussed on the idea that participation can and should be sold (explained below as a nébuleuse, a neoliberal market in participation, the sophists of participation), and the other defends the view that participation can be sold but it should not be oriented for sale and commercialisation (which we refer to in terms of the social market of CP).

4.1 The Nébuleuse: The Neoliberal Market, or the Sophists Who Coach the Authority

According to the Spanish Coaching Association (ASESCO), the first rule of coaching is “to be profoundly convinced that people can do everything they believe can be achieved”. The second is to know that “they will have to be constantly reinforcing that conviction”. The first rule involves pretending that structures do not exist, as if life were not vulnerable and finite; the second means to make up a space in which to accommodate the agents, dynamics, products and instruments that make it possible to carry out the work of strengthening an illusion: a market. All those elements have been brilliantly analysed as a legitimising foundation of neoliberal discourse by Ehrenreich (2018) in Smile or Die, and so it should not be a surprise that the principles of coaching applied to participation present certain challenges to those who position themselves critically in this practice. These principles fit very well into the neoliberal project of organising a lack of interest in interest, of knowing the rules of the game, the subtext, the one that is really operating, into the nobody enters who does not participate in the affairs of the polis because they do not understand their importance.

Those who believe that participation can and should be sold situate themselves within the discursive framework referred to in the statement by Pere Vallès, CEO of Scytl, in El economista, in February 2016 (cf. Sect. 4 of this chapter), according to which there would exist a mature market for participatory democracy in which to sell democracy-focussed products. According to the data collected, these are particularly consultancies created in the 1980s (e.g. Euroconseil, Estrategia Local and others) that are public limited companies, with more than 10 staff, who offer participation services that function according to the logic of accumulation in order to “improve the effectiveness of political leaders and the public institutions” (Estrategia Local).

These agents coach “institutions administered by any of the democratic political options”, helping to build an internal organisational structure of participation (structure administrative bodies or administrative modelling of participation), and their list of services speaks the language of the market. So, as they point out, they carry out “citizen participation operations” when they refer to the creation of participative budgets, plans and policies (Estrategia Local). In short, among the important agents in this nébuleuse, it is possible to find a profile made up of public or private limited companies, including medium to large corporate groups, that work in multiple territories on different scales – sometimes in different countries – offering all kinds of services, not just participation. In the sampling of the profiles of the agents at the head of these companies, it is usual to find men, often industrial engineers with a postgraduate degree in organisational innovation.

As sophists, they know that in order to hold a position in the nébuleuse, it is necessary to have a rhetoric that is appropriate to the variations that exist in the configuration of the field of power. So, the rhetoric used by those who offer their services according to this approach stands out by, firstly, underlining flexibility, adaptability and possibility of carrying out administrative coaching on CP based on the neoliberal rationality of the accumulation of symbolic goods:

EVM.net is an ecosystem of people, tools and processes that are organised in a flexible and innovative way to give effective, efficient and high added value solutions to the different challenges and problems that occur in any area of society. (EVM consultancy)

We facilitate the “optimisation of resources and the maximisation of impacts.” (97 sf. Consultants)

Secondly, by using a commercial and productivist discourse oriented at the accumulation of profit and goods based on the implementation of ad hoc products that are both unique and customised. This personalisation of the service is no impediment to maintaining a principle of commercial existence characterised by the professionalism that is conferred on the ability to work with anyone who requests it:

What distinguishes us is our openness, professionalism, rigour and responsibility. We offer efficient, successful solutions that can help improve efficiency in management and improve government. We are able to work with any person, organisation or authority, at any time, anywhere, since our central tool is knowledge. We are sociable people who work in an effective, flexible and results-oriented way, and in constant professional development. We seek to create connected spaces that promote creativity, allowing you to be more productive; spaces that, above all, make your professional life easier and happier. Together we can change our working spaces, organisational culture and the way in which we are with our clients. (Iritziak Batuz)

Tomás Calvo, talking about the Sophists of ancient Greece (1986: 69–74), explains that their professionalism, their way of seeing the professional, provoked criticism because, on the one hand:

They aspired to teach areté, an aspiration that was inadmissible for aristocrats because areté could not be taught, it was something characteristic of the nobility, and on the other hand, for democrats, because areté was indeed learned, but in the heart of the polis. The true education is community education.

Just like the Sophists, the agents that form part of this nébuleuse compete among themselves and with others to achieve the greatest number of students-customers to teach. Equally, they receive criticism from the participative aristocracy which sees the facilitation of any kind of agent as unnecessary, intuiting that any sort of mediation, even neoliberal mediation, might pave the way to a loss of privileges for those who already possess a participative habitus. They also face the reproaches of those who have a critical position with regard to the participation services market; reproaches of “infiltration”, commercialism and “patronage” (it was possible to hear this kind of discrediting remarks at the ninth participation education conference, “Patas arriba: el (a)salto de la participation”, which took place on October 28, 29 and 30, 2016, in Cordoba, which featured 56 people from the field of participation in alignment with the social market of CP), which makes it easier for them to present themselves as heroes of participation.

Third, by making use of the tool of conceptual stretching in order to achieve more, and more diverse, clients. This nébuleuse is propelled by a greater tendency to mobilise the discourse of “open government”, and so all companies that specialise in open government services can be found in this market. Furthermore, they tend to offer a definition of participation that is synonymous with communication, transparency and information:

ATC-SIG SL makes available to (…) council, a communication, transparency and participation team that works with the goal of improving the council’s communication, giving the municipal website more content in order to provide more information and to promote citizen participation. Our practice works to increase communication and improve transparency, thus contributing to greater participation. (Consultoría ATC)

With regard to the practices of those situated in this market, it is usual to find the offer of services based on a search for a balance between flexibility and security through standardisation. So they sell standardised products applied to the management of participation, such as the Predictive Index®, a tool created to “fire up productivity” and efficiently manage information about the creation of job targets whose logics are linked to the sphere of participation. Although the creation of evaluation indices or moulded participation products is not specific to this market, it is certainly more common, and something that is characteristic is the use of licence fees in their application. That is to say, the existence of the licence, which involves paying for a product, is fundamental in the nébuleuse, since these levels of standardisation through a tool or index are also found in the social market, in which, however, they are proposed with a common, open licence.

Despite the fact that the rhetoric of efficiency is present in this way of being in the market, with its notions such as rapidity, flexibility, etc., those who are situated here make use of labels that are characteristic of other practices, those more typical of slower pace and another, artisanal, way of understanding participation. Here it is obvious that market competition is also a fight, a competition for the meaning of categories; a fight to mean. One of the firms studied, for example, introduces the notion of craft, and its discourse is reminiscent of a neoliberal practice of collaborative management of authorities, offering products with copyright:

We are bespoke consultants. We have the spirit of the artisan, which allows us to adjust to each reality. Our interest is focussed on facilitating and accompanying the processes of development of people, teams and organisations. We are committed to continuous improvement and innovation, with very practical methodologies that are applied to each context. (Prímula consultants, which is a signatory of the first Aragon Participa methodological workbook in citizen participation)

Coaching authorities in participation is accompanied by a series of discursive ornaments/accessories that emphasise innovation and the ability to mobilise contacts, resources and networks of actors – which are generally mentioned using the English word “partner”. What is more, they depict the consultancy as being at the cutting edge of the industry. This discourse sustains, in symbolic terms, the sophistic or technical capital that characterises the nébuleuse. The following example illustrates this idea well.

Civiciti (Barcelona, Madrid and Seville)

Founding date: 2000

With over 20 years of experience in participation processes in different sectors, we support your project to a successful conclusion.

Definition: We are experts in participation, and we help those who want to participate. To participate is to share, get involved, become committed… To participate is to discover, debate and decide. At Civiciti, we respond to the growing demand for the transparency and management of participation processes, offering data for analysing and taking better decisions. Civiciti is a dynamic, multidisciplinary company which understands participation as a continuous, everyday process. We accompany our customers and offer a bespoke solution for each need.

Our experience and project allow us to enrich Civiciti constantly and to offer the latest innovations in participation. At Civiciti, we link up with the industry’s best companies in order to offer the most complete solution for our customers. Our partners have a very special place in our strategic development, and for this reason, we are permanently with them, rewarding each collaborator’s commitment and involvement. Through our joint cooperation agreements, we offer an integrated service of maximum quality for the benefit both of our partners and of the end users.

  1. Source: Own elaboration based on the consultancy’s 2018 list of services

In light of this characterisation, it would be interesting to think about the role of these agents who intervene in the market, in a neoliberal way, as sophists, artisans in name only, concerned about innovation, who form an active part of a Coxian nébuleuse in that they appeal insistently to the network of partners they are able to mobilise to achieve the goals of the public authority. An invisible yet effective network that shows how little priority is given to building a community ethos. The important thing is to have habitus, in all senses of the word, but, above all, in the most profound way: the one that allows the agent to make forecasts of the future in a variable market regarding what will, and what will not, have value in the field of power.

4.2 The Social Market in Participation

With the aim of differentiating themselves through a critical stance on the use and handling of participation, the social market in CP services is structured around social and solidarity economic networks, such as the Madrid Social Market and the REAS group of networks. Not all consultancies or groups that include the majority of the principles of the social and solidarity economy are nominally in a network, but in their lists of services, they always make reference to elements related to networks. This is, precisely, a characteristic that acts as a boundary between one market and the other.

In terms of the profile of agents that we find here, it is worth pointing out that they are companies, mostly cooperatives, made up of less than 10 people, who come from different areas of the social sciences, humanities, social work, social education and psychology. Here we find a strong presence of cooperative consultancies headed by women who develop a rhetoric related to a semantic group that links up with social justice, CP, the community, concern for time-taking, knowledge recognition and the importance of building trust and commitment. There is an activist pathos of commitment to the cause of participation that clashes with the extractivist logic of the market but that is necessary so that participative systems subsist. Without the free (unpaid) work that is extracted from the existence of this underground complicity that moves the agents of the social market, it would not be possible to undertake many participatory processes.

Consequently, the lists of services include goals such as the following: the “search for a fairer society” (Jaume Bofil Foundation); an interest in “careful, scientific, useful responses” (Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation); the need to orient their work towards “improving democratic quality” (EIDOS); and the need to offer a definition of participation linked to community, social justice and community development. Following a topos that is critical of crisis (often linked to a discourse on the care crisis), they talk about participation in order to “situate people and communities at the centre of life, committing to a redefinition of the public within the commons space” (CIMAS).

As well as a defence of common goods, in this market, unlike in the nébuleuse, it is possible to find critical and feminist approaches to participation, which means that talking about the care crisis and putting people’s lives at the heart of decision-making processes brings reflection, often in intersectional terms, on the economic, social and administrative model that sustains society and social life. They feature the growing influence of the discourse and practice of the feminist economy. That is to say, their point of view is that talking about participation involves talking about the material and symbolic structures that organise life:

Feminism and the gender perspective touch all of our actions. Currently, our activity covers five lines of work: training and raising awareness, research and consultancy, communication, cultural management, and participation. (Pandora Mirabilla)

This small cooperative was founded from a commitment to inclusion, empowerment and participation so that we can journey towards greater social justice. The Aradia that has inspired our name used witchcraft as a tool of social resistance against the forms of oppression experienced by the most vulnerable people. We take magic into training and research as instruments of struggle against forms of domination that are still current today. (Aradia Coop.)

Despite internal differences, the common element among the consultancies in this market is a commitment to an artisan approach to participation, criticism of indifference and a search for longer timeframes in which to weave relationships (e.g. the Cooperativa de Iniciativa Social, Emprendimiento y Consultoría Social highlights this, as one of its principles: “involvement, the realities that we tackle in our work do not leave us cold”). This criticism of fast turnovers and dispassionate working methods in participation is actually a criticism of the dominant management model in market and economic relations.

Given the struggle for the meanings that characterise the neoliberal era, the need to distance oneself from this market is clear. Some consultancies have detected this, and so they feel obliged to coin concepts that differentiate them from those who are promoting a participation nébuleuse. This is the case of the Plevia cooperative, made up of three women from the social sciences, who have innovated the term “signature consultancy”:

Signature consultancy grants meaning to the way we carry out our work, and we have referred to the world of cookery to give an idea of what we do and what we offer customers: a great space full of scents, flavours and textures, in which three chefs give free reign to their creativity and their experience in order to create unique dishes with our own personal seal, through a harmonious mixture between ingredients that are traditional to each place (its people) and impeccable creation processes. (Plevia)

If the sophists of participation clash with the aristocrats and the artisans but are favoured by the inertia of the nébuleuse, being in the market with a critical perspective is a constant struggle given the discomfort involved in the precarity and uncertainty created by planting a permanent doubt about the dominant habitus. The discomfort is very much due to the cold of experimenting without models to follow and to the disposition of an “outsider habitus” (Ripio, 2015) which has to resist the warnings and admonishments to return to the path of normality. Those admonishments are daily occurrences, occur through naturalised practice and are channelled via authoritarian formulas of exercising power.

These attempts at domestication that are characteristic of neoliberalism and necessary to the policy of building a lack of interest appear from the moment the process of forming the organisational project (foundation of the consultancy) begins. For example, when, on a course offered by a local institution for advising new cooperatives and companies, one of those who formed part of the social market in participation was invited to remove “feminist” from the company’s mission statement so that it would appear less controversial when offering its services to a public authority.

Furthermore, the attempts are channelled throughout the procedure for commissioning the service, even in the practices of authorities that are part of the nueva institucionalidad approach to government which try to institutionalise a more critical form of CP. An example of this second idea can be found in the demand made by critical (or not) public authorities when hiring consultancy services from cooperatives in the social market, in which they ask that studies be done with a new perspective, but these authorities ask the cooperatives to establish comparisons with the tendencies identified above. Specifically, when requesting new statistical analyses regarding old categories that allow comparison, it is proposed that the questionnaire’s questions not present radically different considerations. For example, with regard to the gender variable, the introduction of another variable, which would make it possible to work using the intersectionality tool in participation, is frowned on, because it would make the job of comparison impossible.Footnote 3

5 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have looked at the particular form adopted by the participatory turn in Spain, for which a genetic analysis of the institutionalisation of public action in participation between 1978 and 2017 has been carried out, by means of the study of a series of political products that today constitute part of the country’s participation industry.

After the analysis of the empirical material (see Table 1), we have concluded, supported by Marxian interpretations of neoliberalism (Bourdieu, 1997; Hibou, 2012; Brown, 2015; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2019; Slobodian, 2018), that the participatory turn in Spain has a neoliberal nature, which involves a greater presence of private business corporations in public decision-making and a reassessment of the importance of legal capital when it comes to designing the participatory structures of government. Specifically, there are three movements that lead us to this conclusion.

The first is the naturalisation of a topos of the crisis in democracy that allows large economic corporations to introduce their citizen participation products, oriented at the accumulation of capital. Furthermore, this topos is designed based on a sequence that includes a medicalised idea of participation.

The second movement deals with the neoliberal bureaucratisation of participation. We have mentioned seven rationalisation practices by which the bureaucratisation of participation is currently being carried out in Spain. In this regard, we have mentioned the importance of taking into consideration the paradox of the project of debureaucratisating democracy, bureaucratising participation. Furthermore, we have underlined that it is not a question, for now, of eliminating all bureaucratic practices in the institutional design of participation, but of reflecting on the effects created by privileging the accumulation of legal and social capital in agents when integrating and designing a participative process. Something like the institution of a “reflective bureaucracy”.

The third movement, covered in greater depth, is related to the commercialisation of participation. We know that the move from the artisan approaches in participation of the 1970s to the participation industry of the 2010s has resulted in different citizen participation markets (Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2018). The text has identified the social market and the neoliberal market. In this regard, in future studies of the workings of the citizen participation market, it might be less interesting to carry out a descriptive analysis of the tendencies of each market, and rather to study the uses made by states of these, and to discern the role played by bureaucracy in them.

In these pages, we have outlined the main features of the diagnosis related to the idea of NPT. Without a doubt, there are many aspects of each of the turn’s movements that could be looked at more deeply. We wished to focus particularly on the commercialisation of participation because of the challenge facing participation in this country, that of having to preserve its radicalism in the midst of the process of modernising government by means of NPM programmes in which a criticism of bureaucracy tends to be resolved with more bureaucracy (Hibou, 2012; Baiocchi & Ganuza, 2017). Looking to the future, what is needed is to continue to study each of the movements mentioned here, examining in greater depth some of the instruments for the implementation of public action that have not been covered here; these instruments include the collaboration agreements that are set within the framework of procedures involving the outsourcing of citizen participation among public authorities of different sizes and third parties. From the systematic study of these and other documents that are central to the authority’s workings, it will be possible to calculate more precisely the degree to which participatory neoliberalism dismantles democracy.