Browsing by Author "Bua, Adrian"

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    Agenda Setting and Democratic Innovation: The Case of the Sustainable Communities Act (2007)
    (SAGE, 2012-01-12) Bua, Adrian
    This article suggests that a common feature among democratic innovations is the lack of an agenda setting function. First, it argues that a lack of control over their own agendas opens democratic innovations to manipulation by elites. Second, it argues that democratic innovations focused on setting the policy agendas of public authorities can serve to democratise the policy process by providing citizens with a tool to place issues on the public agenda. The article analyses a series of actual and potential institutional designs that divert from the dominant ‘direct-democratic’ nature of agenda setting innovations. It finishes with a discussion of the UK Sustainable Communities Act (2007), a process designed to allow communities to propose policy to government through their councils.
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    Between governance‐driven democratisation and democracy‐driven governance: Explaining changes in participatory governance in the case of Barcelona
    (Europeam Journal of Political Research, 2020-09-19) Bua, Adrian; Bussu, Sonia
    Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice‐versa, the mechanisms through which bottom‐up, open spaces can be co‐opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance‐driven democratization’ describes top‐down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy‐driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co‐exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.
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    Democratic innovations and the policy process
    (Edward Elgar, 2019-12-05) Bua, Adrian
    This chapter situates democratic innovation within broader processes of institutional change in public administration and develops the argument that they have vulnerable potential to act as a democratising force, through purposive institutional design. However, democratic innovations are a complement, rather than a substitute, for existing institutions, with which they interact in complex ways. The chapter focuses on the mechanisms through which the outputs of democratic innovation are transmitted to the policy process. The chapter argues that democratic innovations face two, competing, pressures. The first is technical and regards ensuring policy-making ‘reflexivity’ necessary for the efficient governance. The second is normative, and has to do with increasing levels of responsiveness necessary to ensure legitimacy. Different institutional designs for transmission mechanisms ‘fix’ the tension between reflexivity and responsiveness in different, and imperfect, ways. The chapter differentiates between three broad categories and illustrates how they operate using paradigmatic cases of democratic innovation.
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    Embedding Participatory Governance
    (Taylor and Francis, 2022-03-20) Bussu, Sonia; Bua, Adrian; Dean, Rikki; Smith, Graham
    This symposium examines the challenges and opportunities of recent efforts at embedding participatory governance. It draws together original research that engages theoretically and empirically with some fundamental questions: •What are the challenges of embedding participatory governance in policy-making? •What happens when social movements have opportunities to shape the institutionalization of PG processes? Can they reanimate the radical potential of citizen participation for social transformation? •How can the tensions between the different demands of lay citizens, organized civil society, political parties, and public officials be managed? In this introductory article, we provide a definition of embeddedness, outlining its spatial, temporal, and practices dimensions, in so doing distinguishing embeddedness from institutionalization, with which it has often been used interchangeably. Our aim is to delineate the breadth of the concept, drawing together its many uses into a systematic framework that can both guide future research and practical experimentation. In particular, our hope is to turn more attention to the informal practices that are essential for embedding. The contributions to the symposium shift attention from institutional design to embedding dynamics and how these work to open or close spaces for meaningful citizen input.
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    New Developments in Urban Governance: Rethinking Collaboration in the Age of Austerity
    (Bristol University Press, 2022-01-21) Davies, Jonathan S.; blanco, Ismael; Bua, Adrian; Chorianopoulos, Ioannis; Cortina-Oriol, Merce; Feandeiro, Andres; Gaynor, Niamh; Gleeson, Brendan; Griggs, Steven; Hamel, Pierre; Henderson, Hayley; Howarth, David; Keil, Roger; Madeleine, Pill; Salazar, Yunailis; Sullivan, Helen
    The 2008-2009 Global Economic Crisis (GEC) created an opportunity, eagerly seized by many national governments and international organisations, to impose a prolonged, and widespread period of austerity. Austerity is widely recognised to have done enormous damage to social, cultural, political and economic infrastructures in cities and larger urban areas across much of the globe. As the GEC was also the first such crisis in what is widely considered “the urban age”, (COVID-19 merely the latest and worst), austerity measures were chiefly administered through municipal and regional mechanisms. A great deal has been written since the crisis, about the way austerity was experienced, governed, resisted and urbanised. This volume considers these issues anew, by reflecting on the multi-faceted and shape-shifting concept of “collaboration”. It reflects on the theme of collaborative governance, considered from the perspective of resisting austerity, or otherwise finding ways to circumvent or move beyond it. The insights we draw about collaboration are directed towards locating agency found or created in urban arenas, for resisting or transcending austerity. The book draws on insights into austerity governance from comparative research conducted in Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Greater Dandenong (Melbourne), Leicester, Montreal and Nantes.
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    Participatory-deliberative processes and public policy agendas: lessons for policy and practice
    (Taylor and Francis, 2018) Bua, Adrian; Escobar, Oliver
    Participatory and deliberative processes have proliferated over recent decades in public administration. These seek to increase the effectiveness and democratic quality of policy making by involving citizens in policy. However, these have mainly operated at local levels of governance, and democratic theorists and practitioners have developed an ambition to scale these up in order to democratize higher tiers of government. This paper draws policy lessons from research on a “multi-level” process that held a similar ambition. The Sustainable Communities Act sought to integrate the results of various locally organized citizen deliberations within the policy development processes of central UK government. In doing so, it aimed to democratize central government problem definition and agenda-setting processes. The paper distinguishes between achievements and failures explained by process design, and more fundamental obstacles to do with broader contextual factors. As such, it identifies lessons for the amelioration of design features, while recognizing constraints that are often beyond the agency of local practitioners. The findings offer practical insights for policy workers and democratic reformers seeking to institutionalize participatory and deliberative innovations.
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    The political system of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
    (Tirant Editorial, 2021-09-08) Bua, Adrian; Escobar, Oliver
    El sistema político británico es considerado un sistema poco usual, con peculiaridades que se fundamentan en sus complejos orígenes históricos. Esta perspectiva se desarrolla en gran parte en obras clásicas de la politología británica especialmente en la época imperial (Bagehot, 2001; Dicey, 1885; May, 2015), Fundamentando una tradición de estudios políticos que podemos clasificar como la “Escuela Británica”, con fuertes secuelas en el presente, se puede leer entre líneas un discurso de excepcionalidad especialmente con referencia a los procesos de formación de estados modernos desde el siglo XVII en otras partes de Europa. Principalmente, se considera que, con diferencia de la historia política convulsiva con momentos históricos constituyentes que se ven en otros estados europeos como con el francés, el sistema político británico ha podido gozar de cierta estabilidad histórica y continuidad institucional, evolucionando a través de procesos históricos donde diversas reformas se sedimentaron de forma incremental y generalmente harmoniosa con las instituciones pre-existentes. Este discurso forma gran parte de la identidad y supuesta integridad del sistema británico. En este capítulo estudiamos el desarrollo histórico de esta caracterización, describiendo su evolución y principales características. La narrativa del capítulo tiene dos funciones trasversales. Partimos de la forma de entender este sistema político desde la Escuela Británica, con propósito subsecuente de deconstruirla, detallando sus principales puntos ciegos y la erosión de las bases institucionales que la fundamentan, especialmente con la diminución geo-política del Reino Unido durante el siglo XXI. En segundo lugar, el capítulo procede con secciones que cada vez abarcan un abanico histórico mas reducido. Así pues, procederemos comenzando con (a) una descripción de las bases históricas, que fundamenta (b) las características del sistema político, y (c) el modelo institucional contemporáneo. Así avanzaremos a descripciones con un enfoque mas contemporáneo sobre (d) los poderes de las instituciones y relaciones entre ellas, (e) la organización territorial del estado británico, (f) el sistema electoral y de partidos, y acabamos con (g) la reciente salida de la Unión Europea (UE), reflexionando sobre su impacto en los puntos anteriores. En suma, el capitulo introducirá el contexto histórico, fundamental para entender la evolución del sistema británico, y procederá a actualizar al lector abarcando discusiones mas recientes.
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    Understanding Devolution: A Critical Appraisal of the Greater Manchester Devolution Deal
    (New Economics Foundation, 2017-03-07) Bua, Adrian; Laurence, Rachel; Vardakoulias, Olivier
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    Understanding the crisis of New Municipalism in Spain: The struggle for urban regime power in A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela
    (Sage, 2022-10-21) Bua, Adrian; Davies, Jonathan S.
    New municipalism in Spain arose from a major political wave, now in a period of crisis and electoral retreat. This paper applies a regime-theoretic framework to analyse new municipalist governance in two smaller city cases: A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela. It argues that whilst new municipalist electoral victories inaugurated a crisis for established regimes, the crucial weakness was that they did not consolidate new urban regimes. Municipalists faced severe governability challenges linked to the enduring power of older urban regimes. The paper suggests that this is explained by problems in establishing regime incumbency, the consolidation of the necessary governing capacity by a resource coalition to deliver its agenda and succeed politically. Although established regimes were weakened enough to lose elections, they maintained considerable capacity to constrain the municipalist project and shape urban governance, a significant degree of incumbency. This ultimately enabled them to recover office in 2019. We argue that a critical regime-theoretical perspective assists in understanding the wider crisis of Spanish municipalism and the multi-scalar struggle for hegemony as it plays out in the local state arena.
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    The Urban Governance of Austerity in Europe
    (Routledge, 2018) Bua, Adrian; Davies, Jonathan S.; Cortina-Oriol, Mercè; Blanco, I.; Chorianopoulos, I.; Feandeiro, A.; Gaynor, N.; Griggs, Steven; Howarth, D.; Salazar, Y
    The 2008 financial crash and ensuing austerity have brought critical perspectives on political economy into academic debates in democratic theory and public administration. One important area of contention regards “collaborative” and “network” forms of governance. Advocates argue that these comprise an epochal shift that resolves many pitfalls of state and market oriented governance, a consensus that was especially popular during the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This chapter reports research carried out in five cities in Europe (Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Nantes) exploring the impact of austerity politics on the ideology and practice of collaborative governance – would it endure, or be unravelled by, post-crash exposure to austerity and distributional conflict? The chapter concludes that severe austerity erodes the foundations for strong collaborative governance. The inability to survive the return of distributional conflict leads us to conclude that collaborative governance is fully functional only in times of growth.
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    Why is Austerity Governable? A Gramscian Urban Regime Analysis of Leicester, UK
    (Wiley, 2018-08-15) Davies, Jonathan S.; Bua, Adrian; Thompson, Ed; Cortina-Oriol, Mercè
    Austerity has been delivered in the UK, without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between Urban Regime Theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the paper considers how austerity was normalised and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring and austerity, positioning itself as a multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The paper explores historical influences on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity, while disorganising and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past-struggles, this process of organised-disorganisation produced a functional hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of “austerian realism”. The paper elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to inform further research.