The democratising capacity of new municipalism: beyond direct democracy in public–common partnerships
研究了西班牙巴塞罗那的公民资产项目，发现公共-社区伙伴关系通过整合共同生产和民主控制而非仅靠自我管理实现民主化，对城市治理研究者有参考价值。
New municipalism, in its endeavour to democratise urban politics and policy, employs innovative strategies including public–common partnerships, which seek to support citizens in self-managing public goods and services. Proponents of new municipalism claim that these partnerships have a democratising capacity, as self-management is seen as an expression of direct democracy. In this article we examine this democratising capacity. By adopting an abductive methodology, the article analyses a case of a public–common partnership, the Citizen Assets programme promoted by Barcelona en Comú in Barcelona, Spain. The research findings show that the Citizen Assets programme does have a democratising capacity. However, democratisation is not achieved exclusively through self-management, which itself needs to be democratised, but by integrating different modalities of democratisation into the policy process, namely co-production and democratic control. Theorising this integration as a ‘non-appropriable’ form of policy making, the article makes an original contribution to research on democratisation in the context of a specific new municipalism-inspired policy programme.