austerity

Austerity in time and space: the case of Germany

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germany-96590_960_720In today’s post Felix Wiegand, Tino Petzold and Prof. Bernd Belina argue that while austerity policies have often been implemented as part of a short-term, often authoritarian political offensive (a “shock strategy” as Naomi Kline put it) in (West) Germany this was carried out “piecemeal” over a thirty- to forty-year-time frame, which also included the subsequent adaptive and normalising effects. The authors discuss several important historic markers and dynamics to illustrate this process while emphasising the multi-scalar and spatially unequal nature of implementing austerity.

The history of austerity in (West) Germany, following the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, began during the first half of the 1970s as the Fordist development model started to come apart not just politically, socially and culturally, but in particular economically. Two decades of relative stability of German society and the “brief dream of never-ending prosperity” were followed by a cycle of economic crises that had reached its temporary high point in 1974/75. During the first years, the (West) German state reacted to the effects of the crisis with counter-cyclical fiscal and economic policies based on Keynesian ideas. However, a turn to austerity policies was soon after carried out – at a time when power relations in German society shifted and a “national state characterized by market competition” was created.

This was started by the social democratic-liberal government coalition led by Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982. During his first government policy statement on May 17, 1974, Schmidt announced a change to how government debt will be managed. He said that “[t]he Federal Government will use all constitutional and political measures at its disposal to their fullest extent in order to commit federal, state and local authorities to cost-cutting budgetary policies starting in 1975.” The following year’s Budgetary Structure Law substantively implemented this announcement by putting the Federal government on a restrictive fiscal path.

The budget situation of states and municipalities worsened during the subsequent years of deindustrialisation processes as a consequence of the crisis and because of tax law changes such as the elimination of the payroll tax in 1979. As the local state experienced a fiscal crisis, local political projects were established that combined cost-cutting measures with early types of entrepreneurial urban policies – events that put in motion the long-term transformation of urban politics.

Also on the federal level, the focus shifted to austerity and neo-liberal supply-side politics towards the end of the social democratic-liberal coalition government (“Budget Operation 82”) and in particular during the conservative-liberal governments under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-1998). In his first government policy statement, Kohl put fiscal policy at the center of the attack on the Keynesian welfare state consensus by announcing his vision of a “well-managed country through well-managed budgets.” During the 1980s, the German government consolidated the federal budget and lowered public spending – similarly to developments in the UK under Thatcher’s leadership, albeit without the same intensity of conflict with organised labor.

The unification of the two German states in 1990 opened a window of opportunity for continuing the policies of the 1980s.  On the one hand, the policies of the German transitional privatisation agency supported an enormous privatisation project for making formerly publicly owned East German companies competitive for the global market. On the other hand, expectations for a speedy global market integration of these now privatised companies led to the (neoliberal) decision to forego tax hikes for financing German unification. Instead, the government opted for not interfering in the market in hopes of covering the cost of unification by an economic upswing.

After it became obvious early on that these hopes would not materialise, the German government responded with a classic “failing forward”, in Peck’s terms, of neoliberal policies. The growing public debt increased the pressure on the government for limiting new borrowing. As a result, municipal “budget consolidation plans” became popular during this time. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Stability and Growth Pact (1997) implemented similar policies on the European Union scale. The federal Savings, Consolidation and Growth Program (1993) aimed at cutbacks of around 35 billion Deutsche mark by slashing unemployment and social welfare payments by 1996. This policy was, however, only the beginning of a comprehensive reduction of welfare state services under the banner of budget consolidation characterized by a roll-back of the welfare state, cuts of public sector jobs and reduction of public investments.

There are similar connections between attempts at shrinking the welfare state and the policies of Chancellors Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) and Angela Merkel (since 2005). Massive tax cuts during the social democratic-green coalition governments under Schröder’s leadership, adopted with the intention of improving the competitiveness of German companies, exacerbated the structural underfunding of the state. Under Merkel’s leadership, public debt continued to increase during the peak of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis, as bailout packages for failing and troubled financial institutions worth billions of euros and further tax cuts were adopted. At the same time, Germany introduced several constitutional regulations and mechanisms such as the balanced-budget amendment (2009), the European Fiscal Compact (2012) and municipal “budget consolidation programs.” The constitutional changes institutionalised the neoliberal ideal of a balanced budget on various scales and further limited the financial scope of public expenditures. In recent years, this politics of constitutional austerity has been reflected, for example, in the German government’s 2010 austerity package, in public service staff reductions and inadequate compensation levels for state and municipal employees and – despite some concessions regarding social spending – in a new round of municipal cost-cutting measures.

The diverse nature of the individual measures enacted on the various scales of the state shows the significance of the spatial dimension in the process of implementing austerity in the Federal Republic of Germany. On the one hand, financial burdens that mainly arise from the delivery of welfare and public services, which have been funded through Germany’s federal system, have increasingly been shifted to lower levels of government – a classic scalar dumping. German states such as Bremen and the Saarland as well as many municipalities in the former industrial heartland have experienced the full brunt of de-industrialisation processes – in addition to the limited opportunities of income generation and the negative repercussions of tax cuts on government revenues. This has left many levels of government exposed to a form of structural underfunding and has established austerity as the norm even in the absence of cyclical crises. It becomes apparent that the spatial hierarchy within Germany’s government system has been used on a regular basis for imposing specific budgetary consolidation requirements and austerity policies onto subordinate levels of government – often against their will and beyond their capabilities. This practice has taken on a new quality with the institutionalised balanced-budget regulations that have been introduced at all levels of government since the 1990s and in particular after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The scalar linking and reinforcing of the individual mechanisms and policies across various government levels has created a tightly laced corset of austerity in Germany.

In a sense, all levels of government are impacted by austerity. A geographic perspective, however, shows that austerity’s tangible effects and the remaining room for action are unequally distributed across Germany. The local scale suffers the most from austerity. Within the federal government structure, municipalities are the lowest level of the spatial hierarchy and possess, despite their constitutional right to home rule, particularly little room for action. Especially (larger) cities are the focal points where public service agencies and poorer as well as marginalised populations are spatially concentrated. Cost-cutting measures are directly experienced by urban residents on a day-to-day basis and, more often than not, lead to an extensive crisis of social reproduction. As a result, austerity is hurting municipalities and, in particular, cities the most – although the extent differs from city to city and from municipality to municipality. The politics of austerity has affected first and foremost economically disadvantaged municipalities during the last decades and has even further reduced the already few resources that are locally available for addressing economic and social needs. On the other hand, prosperous cities and municipalities have been in the position to further improve their locational qualities through low taxes or exciting social and cultural attractions. This is one of the main reasons for why spatial disparities as well as the level of socio-spatial inequality between (and also within) municipalities has further increased in Germany during the last decades.

The case of the Federal Republic of Germany illustrates that scholarly research on austerity must draw its attention to the big picture of multi-scalar and spatially unequal processes whenever possible. This insight should prompt not only researchers in academia, but also all those who envision and organise an emancipatory politics, to meet this challenge. The everyday politics of austerity  and the associated incremental implementation of normalisation and adjustment processes force us to develop emancipatory strategies based on everyday experiences. At the same time, however, the spatially unequal nature of austerity impedes the development of political projects that would be comprehensive and far-reaching enough for confronting the multi-scalar linkages of institutionalised austerity. But that’s another blog post.

Felix Wiegand is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on (urban) austerity, crises and the transformation of statehood; Tino Petzold is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on multiscalar austerity in Germany; and Bernd Belina is professor at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on critical geography, austerity and criminology.

Austerity, security and conflict

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policia-bogotaIn today’s post Alke Jenss reflects on the synergies between austerity, security and conflict in the Latin American context.

In the Americas austerity programmes are nothing new. Neither is the loss of sovereignty concerning economic and social policies. Think of Mexico’s debt crisis in 1982 which set off a range of structural adjustment plans focusing on spending cuts and privatization in the region, or think of Argentina in 2001, and the similarities to European crises and “crisis management” will jump to your eye. Or think of Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship was representative of a liberalization laboratory deeply dependent on austerity measures and its repressive framing. Its imagery of necessities has carried on until today.

Now, there is talk of “intelligent austerity” supposedly needed to confront the structural reduction of growth in the region, based on the “end of the super cycle of raw commodities” (CEPAL). “Intelligent austerity” is supposed to avoid excessive cuts that would affect growth and thus taxes. The UN Economic Commission on Latin America (CEPAL) has warned that the cuts in (public) investment could lead to exactly that. So, austerity is once again on the table in Latin America.

One interesting example for renewed budgetary restraints on the national and the municipal level, considering the fall of commodity prices, is Colombia where one must ask what implications austerity politics has for the current peace process between the government and guerrillas. Three points can be made:

Firstly, the peace process hasn’t affected austerity measures even though original causes of the conflict have likely been exacerbated by cuts to public spending (extreme inequality, rural isolation, violent appropriation of land, missing life perspectives). Because of the fall of commodity prices of raw materials so central to Colombian the export structure, the cabinet has agreed to reduce the investment side of the national budget by 10 %. To combat the fiscal deficit is its central concern, especially since a fiscal balance-regulation was introduced in 2011; the Banco de la República’s high interest rates focus on inflation control. In 2016, the Santos government also tried to cut running costs by introducing an “Austerity Plan” for its own public administration personnel.

Secondly, austerity measures have not seriously undermined the exorbitant security budget. The armed conflict, interestingly enough, has never been presented as the costly undertaking it is, even though the expansion of the military budget between 2002 and 2015 in absolute terms is diametrically opposed to austerity – if you took the latter literally. The internal defence budget alone has revolved around 9 billion Euros since 2012 which are fed into the military fighting of guerrillas annually. Additionally one might consider costs of infrastructure damage. This makes it far more costly to maintain the war than to end it, even though the allegedly high payments to demobilized guerrillas were one point used by those opposing the peace deal subjected to referendum in October 2016. With this and other arguments focusing on the threats that FARC fighters represent to parts of society, the campaign for a ‘no’ vote succeeded . However the campaign leader, Álvaro Uribe, never mentioned that during his government term demobilized paramilitaries formerly involved in illegal economy were awarded ample support for setting up legal businesses.

Third, the politics of austerity deeply embedded in Colombian politics affect the chances for what we might call “sustainable” peace entwined with social justice. A transformative idea of peace which by definition encompasses social justice is hardly possible with an economic austerity policies, with so many people earning only minimum wage or being in long-term displacement with no realistic perspective to return to their villages. It is remarkable enough that the FARC guerrilla agreed to the peace process on the terms that the economic model as such would not be put under scrutiny. The agreements on agrarian reform might be far reaching but in a context favouring large-scale export focussed agrarian industries, where smaller producers under pressure and public investment is cut, reality will rather cement the extreme rural inequality co-produced by decades of forced displacement and violence directed at grassroots campesino movements.

The fourth point is relevant beyond the context of the Colombian conflict. It’s the punitive take on poverty that represents austerity policies’ flip side in Latin America. It will likely persist even if the peace deal is realized with some modifications due to the referendum: prison populations have grown excessively in the Americas (see the World Prison Brief), i.e. from 126/100.000 inhabitants in 2003 to 231 in 2014 in Colombia or from 156/100.000 inhabitants in 2003 to 214/100.000 inhabitants in 2014 in Mexico. Mexico is another fundamental example where the narratives of security and austerity feed into each other in simbiosis, yet affect only parts of the highly stratified society, while some, close enough to transnational capital flows and political, boast their cars and mansions on social media. It seems quite ironic that often, the latter have been union leaders on the one hand and sons and daughters of those entrepreneurs at least bordering on illegal economy with their negocios.

As UNDP reports for the region confirm, most inmates however, complemented meagre income with what is now called narcomenudeo (small scale selling of drugs) or committed crimes such as theft or robbery. They, as the clients consuming the by-products of the drug economy, seem to sit on the lowest steps of the social classification ladder. What role do these segments of population play for society in countries such as Colombia or Mexico? They fill in the large segment of low-skilled, informal and badly paid jobs whose access to social policies is worse than ever after historical structural adjustment has conflated already selective social security programs. The gruesome numbers of police killings and disappearances underline that these social sectors are denied the most basic rights based on class and racial classifications. Austerity and punitive measures are closely linked and reinforce each other. Arguments against a raise in minimum wage are usually based on austerity and the competitive advantages narrative. But as increases in minimum wage would mostly go into consumption this might even have positive effects on domestic demand. It would break the assumed linkage between reduced spending and more growth. As things stand, they provide a growing social base for illegal economy.

Security discourses in turn legitimize policies which leave out social questions or subsume them under a theme of threat. How this relation of austerity and the production of insecurity for parts of society plays out can be observed in contemporary Latin American.

Alke Jenss is a researcher and lecturer at Bielefeld University, Germany and has worked on insecurity and the state in Latin America.

Governing Austerity in Montreal

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In this post,  Gregoire Autin reports the findings from the exploratory research in Montreal, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies. In developing this case study, Gregoire worked with Professors Roger Keil from York University and Pierre Hamel from the University of Montreal.

In Montréal, we started our exploration of the relationships between governance institutions and austerity measures by interviewing executive members of important collaborative institutions. This was an interesting starting point as it allowed us to gather insiders’ views of collaboration at the metropolitan scale. We conducted 11 interviews and our questions were largely oriented towards meanings and origins of “austerity” on one side and the forms, functions and practices of collaboration in, with and against austerity measures on the other. While using the general comparative framework built for the research, we had to adapt and take into account the specific context of Montréal.

One of the main specificities is that the city was not really hit by the crisis in 2008 in particular; it has rather undergone different consecutive and ongoing crises since the 1970s. Consequently, austerity is never presented nor understood as a necessary policy in times of crisis. It is rather understood as a policy (and a politics) of state restructuring, rooted in a conservative and neoliberal ideology. Many respondents made a distinction between a supposedly necessary austerity in countries undergoing economic crises such as Greece or Spain, for example, and austerity measures rooted in a conservative ideology such as the ones implemented by the federal government under former Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Harper (2006-2015) and by  Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard’s Liberal provincial government. As such, the respondents’ understanding of austerity is strongly related to a deep dynamic of state restructuring in the context of a historic crisis of the Welfare-State. As an ideology, austerity – usually called “rigour” by the politicians in power – is upheld by conservative politicians, be it at the federal level of government under Harper’s reign or at the provincial level with Couillard’s government (in power since 2014).

One important aspect we investigated, and which remains to be further explored, is the articulation, at a local scale, of the different levels of government and decision-making. In Montréal, the history of collaboration is a long one: these different levels of government have always had to collaborate to some extent on different aspects. The three tiers of government – federal, provincial and municipal – don’t necessarily follow the same ideological approach. Thus, when the provincial administration undergoes serious austerity measures and cuts different programs, the municipal administration has to choose between increasing their participation in those programs (e.g. in public transportation), in order to supplement what has been cut at the provincial level, or maintain their financial participation and ask the other tiers of government to maintain commitments. This implies that the municipal government’s importance, at the local level, as a financing and regulating power, increases with the relative withdrawal of the provincial and federal governments.

But collaboration operates also at a different level, not only between the three tiers of government but also with actors of civil society, community organisations, the business sectors and trade unions. This is one of the notable features of Montréal where such tripartite consultations and collaborations have existed for a long time. Many community organisations get caught up between managing and contesting austerity measures which puts them in an uncomfortable place of tension: this fine line between providing a service and becoming a substitute to the state must always be walked by the different actors involved in collaboration. This is a sign of the conflicts and tensions of the state restructuring process going on in Canada and Quebec in general and more precisely in Montréal. After the failure of two successive urban regimes (from the 1950s to the 1970s and from the 1980s to 2010), Montréal is still in search of a new regime. It is interesting to see how collaboration mechanisms are redefined within austerity measures and how this impacts on the willingness of different social, economic and political actors to build a new urban regime.

Austerity measures are the harshest for the poor and underprivileged particularly in the health and education sectors. Reducing financing opportunities for the different institutions and community organisations, cutting in different programs, these measures usually target the welfare system and old social solidarity mechanisms. Even though it is difficult to predict what will come out of these austerity politics, it is still the poorer, the most underprivileged and the newest immigrants who will suffer most of it.

While those in power at the provincial level share a consensus around the “need” to reduce the public debt and, at the municipal level, the mayor has been willing to reduce its’ administration, in accord with the austerity ideology, other actors, notably the trade unions, community organisations and student movements, are actively contesting these measures. One of the main challenges these contesting actors face is coordination between them: in other words, mobilisation against austerity seems to be more sectorial than converging. Each actor faces their own problems and contradictions and this hinders the opportunity for collaboration and convergence in a movement against austerity.

This exploratory research allowed us to draw a general portrait of collaboration at the municipal level in Montreal, to look at the specificity of the context and, at the same time, the deeper trends and dynamics underlying austerity measures and programs and changes in collaboration patterns. What is particularly relevant to note is that austerity measures are not a new thing, born out of the 2008 crisis: it is rather rooted in a long historical process of state restructuring and redefinition of social solidarity and state legitimacy. It is in this perspective that we will have to continue analysing and studying collaborative governance and austerity in Montréal. The future research will focus more specifically on social practices looking at the way neighbourhood roundtables, managed by community actors, are promoting social values when negotiating or adapting to austerity measures.

Gregoire Autin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal

Austerity and Human Rights in Leicester

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Following the UN’s condemnation of UK austerity policies, Adrian Bua reports on the impact of that these are having in Leicester, based on exploratory research carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project.

A recent report by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has argued that the UK government may be failing to meet its international human rights obligations.  A range of concerns were raised, ranging from the limits imposed by the Trade Union Act (2016) on industrial action to lack of corporate regulation. However, notably for us, most of the challenges levelled at the UK government pivoted around austerity policies, and their disproportionate and discriminatory impact on the most disadvantaged. Specifically,  the UN investigative committee is expressed serious concern “about the disproportionate adverse impact that austerity measures, introduced since 2010, are having on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights by disadvantaged and marginalised individuals and groups” and reminded the UK government that austerity measures “must be temporary, necessary, proportionate, and not discriminatory.”

The UN is especially concerned about changes to the welfare system and the possible violation of social rights through cuts introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. This is a topic we researched in Leicester as part of the exploratory phase of our project ‘collaborative governance under austerity’. The report highlights a series of issues that resonate with our analysis in Leicester.

First, it highlights sanctions in relation to benefit fraud with the absence of due process. National changes to welfare have bought in a regime that regulates, disciplines and punishes – what academics call “workfare”.  We know anecdotally that sanctions are leading some people to fall “off grid” and disappear from official records. Agencies agencies from the statutory and voluntary sectors aim to pick up the pieces, but their capacity to do so is being decimated by austerity.

Second, the report highlights employment practices including a rise in zero hour contracts and precarious employment. In terms of employment, our research and review of case literature suggests that poor working conditions have increased in the textile trade [link to report] and especially the hidden and ‘informal’ economy. However, some respondents argued that the local authority was hesitant to do anything about this because it might put off investors – a key way in which Leicester aims to overcome austerity. If the issue as to be highlighted, Leicester might be tainted by association with the “sweatshop economy”.

Third, changes to social benefits including the reduction of the household benefit cap, the four-year freeze on certain benefits and the reduction in child tax credits are also criticised. In Leicester housing was an important issue, where the council used a strategy of amelioration through using discretionary funds to ensure that those most at risk maintained a roof over their heads.

Dr Adrian Bua is Research Assistant at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, and Researcher at the New Economics Foundation

Governing Austerity in Dublin

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This post outlines the main findings from the first round of research carried out by Dr Niamh Gaynor and Dr Eamonn McConnon in Dublin as part of the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project. It forms part of a series of blogs from the eight comparator cities in the project.

Situated at the centre of Ireland’s booming ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy from the late 1990s to 2007 and home to a quarter of the country’s population, Dublin has experienced a sharp contraction and decline since the rupture of the property bubble and associated banking crisis of 2008 onward.  The resultant austerity policies – adopted as a condition of an IMF/European Commission and European Central Bank bailout package in 2010 – have impacted significantly on the city at a number of levels.

Socio-economically, austerity has hit the poorest and most marginalised in the North and Inner City severely.  It has also impacted on a newly squeezed middle class, many of whom live in younger suburbs to the West of the city.  There has been a drop of 21 per cent in mean disposable income across the city and the drop in the income of the unemployed is reported to stand at 22 per cent.   Correspondingly, the rate of unemployment rose from 38,000 in 2006 to a high of 90,000 in 2012.  Although this figure dropped to 75,000 in 2015, interview respondents highlight consistent difficulties in meeting debt and bill payments, and poverty and inequality appear widespread and pervasive.  Political discourse and action on this has coalesced around the city’s massive housing crisis which is affecting working-class and middle-class families alike.  The combination of unemployment and escalating costs and taxes associated with austerity have led to widespread mortgage arrears and dispossession.  Homelessness is now a major issue across the city, most particularly in West Dublin.  With its roots in the city’s previous austerity cuts of the 1980s when the shift from local authority to public-private partnership management and provision began, the current housing situation is perhaps a harbinger of some of the more long-term impacts of austerity’s neoliberal prescriptions more broadly.

Administratively, the austerity-driven public recruitment embargo combined with a downsizing of the public sector has resulted in a 13 per cent reduction in staffing in local authorities across the country.  There have been significant attendant cuts to frontline services and supports.  According to one senior Council official interviewed for this research, Dublin City Council has suffered a 20-25 per cent cut to its overall budget and has gone from a personnel of 6,800 in 2010 to 5,000 today.  Other interviewees point to the ageing and somewhat fatigued workforce within the Council, suggesting there is little capacity or appetite for innovative governance within the city at this time of crisis.  Yet, somewhat paradoxically, many of the city’s institutions of collaborative governance – celebrated for their flexibility and innovativeness in the 1990s – have now been subsumed within the Council.  Notwithstanding these developments, there appears widespread agreement that the much touted opportunities for local government reform which formed part of the austerity package have been lost, and interviewees point to an ongoing torpidity and ineffectiveness within Dublin City Council.

Politically, a number of interviewees suggest that austerity has made a significant mark within the city due to the significant increase in the number of left wing ‘anti-austerity’ Councillors on the City Council following the last (2014) local elections.  While some interviewees see this as a positive development for the city, others bemoan the lack of experience of many of these new incumbents.  Others again point to their lack of power in any case as national political authorities continue to wield significant influence on the traditionally weak and powerless local council through both party allegiances and the central figure of the City Manager – a political appointee.  While the formal institutions of Council politics remain a focal point for interviewees and critics of austerity more broadly, interesting things are happening across a variety of more disparate sites within the city which point to a range of new political actors, new political alliances and new ways of doing politics.  Most noteworthy among these is the so-called ‘right to water’ movement – a national movement which is particularly active in coalescing around the newly introduced (2015) and much contested water charges.  Survey findings which show that over 50 per cent of those involved are first-time activists concerned with austerity more broadly rather than water charges per se, point to significant developments across the city’s broader public sphere.  And the fact that the water charges constituted the ‘red line issue’ in coalition negotiations between the two main political parties following the February 2016 elections attest to the political potency of this public sphere.

So what does all this mean for our overall research question – what happens to collaborative governance under austerity?  In Dublin our findings to date point to two things.  On the one hand, collaborative governance is continuing, albeit in a retrenched, rationalised and bureaucratised form which is now solely focused on coping with, surviving and managing the social fallout of austerity. The role for policy making and the flexibility and innovation associated with collaborative governance arrangements and configurations of the past is now gone and competition, rather than collaborative relationship-building and networking appears to be its overriding characteristic.  On the other, new sites of more radical, direct resistance are evident which, through many of the newly elected ‘anti-austerity’ City Councillors, are forming new alliances and coalitions.  Could we view these as new sites and forms of collaborative governance with new norms and practices, allowing for contestation and debate?  Or does this signal the demise of collaborative governance in Dublin?  Our next phase of research will focus on the two questions of a) if and how traditional collaborative governance actors and institutions interact with these new coalitions and interests and b) what the motivations, aspirations, plans and strategies of these new political actors and coalitions are.

Dr Niamh Gaynor is Lecturer in Development Studies and Dr Eamonn McConnon a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City Univesrity

Governing Perma-Austerity in Baltimore

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Our colleague Madeleine Pill reports on the findings from the exploratory research in Baltimore, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

The City of Baltimore has 621,000 residents, a quarter of whom are below the poverty line (US Census 2010).  An extract from the outgoing Mayor’s 2013 State of the City speech helps set the scene – ‘for over 50 years, Baltimore’s story has been dominated by a narrative of post-industrial decline. From 1950 to 2000, the city lost a third of its population. Jobs disappeared, crime rates rose, schools deteriorated, and many neighbourhoods destabilised. City government itself was left with a legacy of high taxes, growing liabilities, and crumbling infrastructure’.

Initial research interviews confirmed that Baltimore ‘is used to austerity and functions like that all the time’.   The city’s longstanding ‘culture of scarcity’ is linked more to the ‘de facto devolution’ of Reaganomics than the 2008 crisis, which is not regarded as a significant turning point for the city.  Its ‘fiscal squeeze’ had already resulted in deployment of the standard repertoire of measures (such as a city hiring freeze and pension and health benefit reform for city agency workers).  Only a minority of those interviewed saw these as political choices, the majority seeing them as part and parcel of the ‘muddling through’ required out of perceived necessity.

The City of Baltimore’s approach to its ongoing challenges has been to find ways to increase revenue and reduce public spending; partner with key local institutions to try to integrate systems and approaches; focus on economic development; and seek to attract and retain people to live in the City through a focus on neighbourhoods.  The latter policy realm of neighbourhood revitalisation/ community development formed the focus for exploratory research in the city.  Here the city’s ‘ed and med’ anchor institutions and its philanthropic foundations are key players, along with city government.

The strategies and tactics with neighbourhood implications include:

  • A Housing Typology was adopted by the City of Baltimore in the early 2000s as an asset- (rather than need) based way of prescribing policies and prioritising city resources for its neighbourhoods. The typology prioritises neighbourhoods ‘in the middle’ (where interventions are perceived as being able to help the market).  However, at the time of research the emphasis on the city’s ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods (with the policy prescription of demolition for site assembly) was boosted by significant funding for a 4,000 property demolition and redevelopment initiative from the State of Maryland.
  • “Change to Grow” is the title of the city’s fiscal plan (adopted in 2013), which seeks to address the city’s deficit and shows that city strategies are predicated on the need to deconcentrate poverty by (both retaining and) attracting the middle class to the city through better services, a better quality of life and less ‘fiscal stress’ . Achievement of this ‘meta-goal’ is linked to what a Community Development Corporation director described as Baltimore’s ‘niche’ providing a ‘low-cost [housing] alternative in a high-cost region [which] goes from Washington to Boston’.   This approach sustains the focus on neighbourhoods in ‘the middle’.
  • “OutcomeStat” is an emergent strategy, based on the principles of Results-Based Accountability, presented by city officials as a way of seeking to align non-profit and philanthropic initiatives and resources with those of city government by combining them in an outcomes-based methodology, using indicators grouped under (Mayoral) priority outcomes. Such approaches may herald the upscaling and rationalisation of the city’s non-profit organisations.
  • Self-help and self-provisioning of services in those neighbourhoods containing the necessary voluntary associative capacity is longstanding practice in Baltimore, where city government is challenged to provide ‘the basics’.
  • Urban boosterism of the downtown, waterfront area continues the pattern set in the 1950s and most famously realised in the 1980s Inner Harbor redevelopment. New downtown investment includes the current $1.8 billion Harbor Point waterfront development, which has received significant public subsidy via tax credits, which are also being sought for another significant development at planning stage, Port Covington.

Funding scarcity was linked by everyone interviewed to the need to work together.  The notion of ‘integration’ was widely used, linked to the rising policy realm of workforce development.  This has been championed by the city’s philanthropic and anchor institutions (acting through and assisted by the Baltimore Integration Partnership), and spurred by Johns Hopkins University and Medical System with its HopkinsLocal initiative.  City government adoption of the Baltimore City Anchor Plan (2014), through which anchor institutions regularly meet by geographic sector, underlines this joint working, though it was stressed by some that the anchors set the direction, ‘we do our own thing and the City kind of follows along with us’.

But where’s the citizen? In discussing working together, citizens/ service users/ community representatives were not generally mentioned, partnership interpreted as being between the city’s key institutions and its non-profit organisations. A government official critiqued the ‘whole infrastructure… [that] co-opts community voice and says, this is what the community wants’.  The absence of the citizen in these informal governing arrangements belies a European-style ‘collaborative moment’ in the city.

However, the riots which took place in the city in April 2015 in response to police brutality and misconduct proved to be a key focusing moment which was emphasised by all those interviewed.  A community activist explained that ‘the unrest awakened many people’ who are ‘talking about things they’ve never talked about before’.  Another commented, ‘it’s going to take courage…because these are systematic, inequitable things that are so entrenched in this city that we really have to blow this thing up and do it the right way’.

A proposition arising from the exploratory research is that Baltimore, as a result of the unrest in the city, seems to be at a critical juncture which has heightened collaboration in discourse and to an extent in practices and institutions.  For example, State funding support for the demolition/ site assembly strategy for ‘stressed’ neighbourhoods points to a partnership between the (Democratic) Mayor and (Republican) State Governor, despite their clashes regarding State funding cuts (to public transit and education).   Changes in practices and institutions, such as progress with OutcomeStat and workforce development, will be explored further in the major round of interviews currently underway.

Another priority for the current interviews is to talk to citizen activists and informal community leaders.  In the exploratory phase we found that the social movements and civil society activism obvious in the city are motivated by a deep sense of injustice – especially with regard to policing and housing.  We will explore what people mean by social justice in the city, and the similarities and differences between current protests against injustice and those of the 1960s.  Are the injustices the same or are there new spatial and economic inequalities?  We will explore whether a socially just Baltimore is possible and what local actors are seeking to and can achieve in this regard.  For example, one convening body explained that it had discussed structural racism and the challenge of ‘how it translates, how it gets funded or how more youth get engaged’.  Also, what is the potential for local political change?  For example, a national voice in Black Lives Matter, DeRay McKesson, sought (unsuccessfully) to gain the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Baltimore this April, but his candidature does indicate a ‘grassroots, community-driven, young, energetic constituency that is starting to gain momentum and have a voice’.

The research coincides with a particularly turbulent period of change in political leadership at federal as well as city level, ‘the Governor is still going to be here next year.  Our Mayor is not…  we also don’t know who’s going to be president next year’.  What happens at Federal level remains to be seen.   However, the bounded and devolved nature of city governance in the US means that Baltimore provides a rich case in which to explore the local particularities and responses to challenges experienced to a greater or lesser degree across all eight of the cities in this project.

Dr Madeleine Pill is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney

Workshop: Local Economic Development and Skills Under Austerity

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In this post, Jonathan Payne reports back on a two day workshop on local economic development (LED) and skills policy under austerity held by the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) in May.

The workshop brought together leading UK academics in the areas of LED, governance and skills to debate the changing institutional landscape around LED in England and the opportunities and constraints afforded by policy commitments to ‘localism’. This afforded a rare opportunity for academics interested in economic geography, local governance and skills to come together and discuss how the ‘localisation’ agenda is playing out in practice.

As Ewart Keep argued, for the last thirty years skills policy in England has tended to be a national project, focused on generalised workforce upskilling in pursuit of government targets. With government now promising to devolve more of the adult skills budget to local areas, there are questions around how much autonomy local areas will have and what level of resource they might draw on. Furthermore, past experience would suggest that a narrow focus upon education and training, or boosting the supply of skills, runs up against problems of weak employer demand for skill, linked to the way many firms in the UK compete, design jobs and manage staff. This is reflected in a high proportion of low skill, low wage jobs compared with many other advanced European countries, relatively low productivity, and problems of ‘over-qualification’ and ‘under-utilisation of skills’ within the workplace. As the UK Commission for Employment and Skills has argued, there are limits to what boosting skills supply can achieve on its own without wider measures to influence the ‘demand side’. The latter requires effective measures such as industrial policy, economic development and business improvement to grow the proportion of high skill jobs and upgrade the skill content of work more generally. Skills policy might work better if integrated and joined up with such activity.

The role of local enterprise partnerships, city-deals and combined authorities is clearly of relevance here for a number of reasons. First, government is promising to ‘empower’ local communities through these mechanisms to drive LED. Second, skills policy is being localised and skills often figure prominently within this agenda. These claims are controversial, particularly in terms of how ‘real’ localism is at time of funding cuts. However, localism is also a moving picture, and if skills and economic development are to be integrated as part of a more holistic approach, then this is one of the few areas where we might look for examples of progress (or not).

Many issues came to the fore during these discussions: the tendency for LED governance to bounce back and forth between different scales and for policy to ‘keep failing forwards’; the uneven capacity of LEPs; the role of power in devolving ‘risk’; the need to understand how local actors comprehend their situation and what motivates their engagement; the tendency for policy to eschew interventions inside the ‘black box’ of the firm; and the question of what ‘localism’ can tell us about the ‘neo-liberal state’ in a period of crisis management and the narratives it constructs. What is clear, however, is that research will be better placed to address such issues where academics work across disciplinary boundaries. LED, governance and skills are an example of one such interface where collaboration is likely to prove particularly fruitful.

Jonathan Payne is Reader in Employment Studies at De Montfort University and a member of CURA (Centre for Urban Research on Austerity) as well as CROWE (Contemporary Research on Organisations, Work and Employment

Austerity Urbanism – Scotland Style?

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In today’s post Annette Hastings discusses ‘austerity urbanism’ in the Scottish context.

It’s hard to counter the view that contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through what is happening in cities. Jamie Peck developed the ‘austerity urbanism’ thesis to explain the dimensions and significance of austerity in US cities. He argued – in a nutshell – that in the US some of the worst impacts of austerity were targeted on city governments and that, by targeting cities, austerity was effectively being targeted on the most vulnerable. Recent research suggests that the thesis developed for the US, holds for England. It confirms that the unprecedented cuts to local government budgets have impacted most heavily on poor cities. It also suggests that despite the intention of many city governments to shelter the poor and marginalised from the worst effects of austerity cuts, that cuts were beginning to harm the services relied on these groups – such as housing, social care, social work and advice services. The work also showed that it was poorer people and places that suffered more when cuts were made to the ‘universal’ services used by the broader population such as libraries, leisure centres and street cleansing.

But does austerity urbanism hold in Scotland? To the same degree? In the same kind of ways? Anti-austerity rhetoric and a sense of resistance is palpable in Scotland. It comes from politicians, from urban managers, from the mainstream media and from citizens and civil society. But does this lead to a distinctive austerity urbanism – Scotland style?  Some differences do stand out.

The Scottish Government has had less of a tendency than its Westminster counterpart to try to protect some public services while sacrificing others to the worst of austerity cuts. So whereas in England, local government has been subjected to much higher rates of cut than some other services such as Health, giving flesh to the austerity urbanism thesis, in Scotland cuts have been shared more equally across public services. While Scottish councils have experienced  big reductions in what they have to spend on key services – an 11% real terms reduction between 2011 and 2015  (which equates to about £100 per head of population) –  this is not as severe a picture as in England, where the reduction was on average about twice as big. However, this sense of protection in Scottish local government relative to England has now come to an end, with a much more severe local government settlement in place for the current financial year – with Glasgow City Council, for example,  facing a real terms cut of over £63million, and Edinburgh and other urban councils implementing cuts of £30million and more.

The targeting of poor cities for grant cuts has not been as stark in Scotland as in England either. Poorer councils have lost a little bit more than better off ones and, like England, there is a post-industrial and urban skew to cuts, but in Scotland these patterns are more to do with population loss than the policy design. It is important to note though that historically in Scotland, the deprivation premium built into the local government finance system to compensate more disadvantaged councils for higher levels of need was historically less generous in Scotland than in England. That situation has been reversed since the onset of austerity.

But despite these differences, it is also clear is that austerity in Scotland has been harsher than it needed to be. Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has had the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound – a power which has never been used despite the anti-austerity rhetoric of successive Scottish Governments. Moreover, a new Scottish Rate of Income Tax has been in place since April 2016, giving the Scottish Parliament even more capacity to vary levels of income tax. In early 2016, the SNP Government proposed (and had agreed) a Budget in which a clear commitment not to vary income tax levels was made, a position maintained in their Party’s manifesto in the recent May 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.  And the ‘winners’ of these elections, the SNP alongside a resurgent Scottish Conservative Party, stood alone amongst mainstream parties during the election campaign in that they did not argue for increased personal tax rates to ‘pay for public services’ . This would suggest that it is not only in Scottish polity that the desire to counter austerity agendas with increased taxation is controversial, but that this agenda is also controversial with the Scottish public.

So yes, we can perhaps detect some ‘Scottish style’ aspects of austerity urbanism, but the extent to which these differences are durable and more than rhetorical is debatable.

Annette Hastings is Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow

Governing Austerity in Athens

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In today’s post our colleagues Ioannis Chorianopoulos and Naya Tselepi report the findings from the exploratory research in Athens, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Local authorities in Greece have limited collaborative governance experience, despite persisting national authority attempts towards this direction during the last three decades (Chorianopoulos, 2012).  A legacy of authoritarian administration for the most part of the twentieth century and clientelistic politics since return to democracy (1974), arrested the development of local relational dynamics, shaping instead a centralized governance mode heavily dependent on the national level.  More recently, formal collaborative responsibilities in EU Structural Funds were met by local authorities halfheartedly.  Regulations were followed to the letter in order to avoid penalties but collaboration was largely symbolic, consisting of roundtables in which local socio-economic groups and organisations were consulted to provide their informed consent to municipal proposals.  Examples of more dynamic collaborative stances did surface, but they were treated in the literature as contextually defined responses, challenging a centralized type of administration.  It is in this frame that the City of Athens was approached in an attempt to explore the traits of collaboration, this time in austerian conditions.

Meanwhile, the latest local authority Act (2010) attempted to infuse a collaborative logic to local affairs by obliging municipalities to set up new participatory platforms, and by widening their degree of discretion to launch partnership schemes with local businesses and civil society groups.  Our initial “access point” to the research field was the “Deliberation Committee”, a mandatory collaborative governance initiative foreseen in the local authority Act.  Concurrently, we also investigated municipal mobilization in other policy areas, as it was becoming known that the City Hall is actively initiating collaborative schemes.   As preliminary research suggests, mandatory schemes followed the pre-austerity route of rubber stamping City Hall plans.  The volume and the traits of collaborative schemes launched by the municipality on its own initiative, however, defied expectations.  The gravity of the sovereign debt crisis and the impact of concomitant austerity measures on municipal finances and local socio-economic realities were key to this development.

Austerity and social need

Contractionary fiscal policy preoccupations shifted the attention of the national authorities to the local level, seen as a tier capable of absorbing a share of cuts to public spending.  Faced with reduced central government grants and real falls in tax revenues, the municipality was forced to reduce its budget by over 20 per cent since the onset of austerity (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1: City of Athens: Overall Budget by Fiscal Year (2010-2016). Source: (City of Athens, 2016)

Meanwhile, the share of Athenians whose equivalent disposable income fell below the poverty threshold has more than doubled, reaching 26,1 per cent, while a further 8,1 per cent of the population experienced severe material deprivation.  Consequently, the latest census results registered a 16,9 per cent decrease of the city’s total population, amounting to a decline of 133.336 people due to falling birth rates and almost no net immigration.  The steep rise in municipal unemployment and poverty figures, and the clearly defined population decline trend, suggests that it is in the city that “austerity bites” (Peck, 2012).

Collaborative shift

The City of Athens responded to austerity-stemming impasses via the launch of collaborative governance initiatives.  Prominent examples of such schemes include, amongst others:

  • Rethink and Reactivate, a physical intervention project in the city centre, organized and funded by the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
  • INNOVATHENS, a public-private consortium that supports start-ups in the tech sector, engaging six associations of IT firms and co-funded Samsung.
  • Resilience, an attempt to define and address the key challenges the city is facing, guided by 100RC – a Rockefeller urban network.
  • synAthina, a new municipal unit facilitating community groups to implement and communicate their activities, funded by “Bloomberg Philanthropies”.
  • Solidarity Hub, a social assistance centre for 8000 registered people that face severe poverty problems. The scheme is funded by EEA grants, obliging City Hall to collaborate with NGOs.

The repositioning of the local governance centre of gravity towards collaborative grounds underscores a profound departure from the pre-austerity stance of centralized administration and limited policy-making interaction with the market and civil society.  Currently, almost all municipal policy areas engage sponsors, donors and partner groups, including community groups and activists.  In the social policy field, in particular, the City of Athens endorsed an overtly “enabling” role, facilitating NGOs to pursuit funding opportunities on its behalf.  As a result, social policy goals for the 2015-2019 period were fashioned on an ad hoc basis and appear in the respective blueprint underscored by the “subject to funding availability” annotation (City of Athens, 2015: 5).

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Food bags awaiting claimant citizens in the “solidarity hub”.

Informal collaborative vehicles and adversarial stances

Our next goal in this attempt to approach the changing matrices of  Athenian urban politics, will be to map and investigate key examples from the variety of grassroots collaborative initiatives that have sprung up in the city during the last years.  Cases in point include the large number of complementary currency systems and time banks, social pharmacies, medical centers, soup kitchens and farmers’ markets, all organized at neighborhood level by spontaneously formed solidarity groups.  It is the perceptions of austerity and collaboration of activists participating in this movement that we aim to explore.  Their degree of engagement in the corresponding municipal programmes, and their views on the collaborative example pursuit by the City will also be examined.  Municipality respondents reflected eloquently on this issue:

“I mean, you have the top down kind of consultation that most countries like the UK have gotten really good at doing.  So they know how to talk and they also have a strong civil society. Which we didn’t have. But then […] what you have here is bottom up collaboration.  You know what I mean? In a network kind of way. …this is the new organizing pattern. Right? … but there is no conversation with the top.  And the question is; does there need to be conversation with the top?” (Athens-UP2-F).

Dr Ioannis Chorianopoulos is Associate Professor and Naya Tselepi a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of the Aegean.

Barcelona: Crisis Austerity and Socio-Political Change

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This post summarizes the main findings of the case study of Barcelona from the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies. The case study was led by Ismael Blanco with help from Helena Cruz and Yunailis Salazar (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

The case of Barcelona is particularly interesting in the context of a study that interrogates transformations in the forms of relationship between the local state and civil society during crises. The interest of this case study lies, on one hand, in the strength of the participatory and collaborative tradition of Barcelona, which dates back to the early years of democracy (1980s). In this sense, it is interesting to analyse the extent to which this tradition constrains and conditions the possibilities of institutional change in the politics of urban governance, neutralising the effects of a crisis that has been particularly severe. On the other hand, Barcelona has become particularly important  since the local elections of May 2015, which led to the formation of a new radical-left government led by the Mayor Ada Colau, former leader of the social movement against housing evictions in Spain. In this context, Barcelona illustrates the strength of social mobilisation against austerity in Spain and the strategy of a significant part of this movement to occupy the institutional arena, generating profound changes in local and national politics. Our future research will be particularly concerned with how far a radical government can alter the power relations between the public, the private and the community sectors, enlarging the opportunities for citizens’ direct participation and overcoming the injustices of austerity.

The impacts of the crisis in the city of Barcelona have been intense in terms of unemployment, poverty and foreclosures. Such impacts have been distributed unevenly between different groups and urban areas, creating a more polarized social and spatial structure. The socio-spatial inequalities in the city have grown significantly since the outbreak of the crisis, reversing a sustained trend of inequality reduction since the 1980s. The intensity of the socio-spatial crisis stands in stark contrast with the good health of municipal public finances. The last municipal budgets of 2015, for example, closed with a surplus of 100 million euros – the textbook neoliberal budgeting strategy.  As part of the national austerity drive, Spain has witnessed as strong tendency for the  re-centralization of political power with serious consequences for both local (and regional) autonomy – for example deficit budgeting was prohibited in 2011.  However, the institutional capacity of the City Council of Barcelona remains relatively high thanks to the strength of municipal finances and the special powers conceded by the Municipal Charter of 1999. Such Charter, for example, allows the City Council of Barcelona to intervene in policy fields like housing, education and health through public consortia composed of the regional and the local government.

In analysing the role of collaborative governance in addressing the socioeconomic crisis, we must recall that participation and public-private and public-community collaboration have had a very important role in Barcelona since the 1980s. Collaborative governance in Barcelona precedes the “collaborative moment” observed in different parts of the world during the economic boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. Apart from various forms of public-private partnership such as joint ventures, structures of participation and public-community collaboration in Barcelona have been gradually built up, first under the 1986 Rules of Functioning of Districts and Citizen Participation and later under the Rules of Citizen Participation of 2003. It has contributed to developing a strong culture of inter-sectoral collaboration and a wide range of formal rules and institutions consolidated by the passage of time and the interests and habits they have generated.

Institutional path dependency in the field of collaborative governance in Barcelona is strong, as could be observed during the only period of conservative government the city has known in recent times (2011-2015). While the new government tended to be very critical of the participation model established under the leadership of the Socialist Party of Catalonia, changes in the formal architecture of participation in the city were minimal. Informal changes were more subtle, encompassing strategies such as residualisation of existing mechanisms, institutional layering  by creating mechanisms that overlap pre-existing ones , and the adoption of a  narrative influenced by neoliberalism around notions such as open government, social co-responsibility and social innovation. Some of our respondents thought that under this government there was a deep, though subtle, weakening of participation and incremental social welfare privatisation.

The 2011-2015 mandate coincided with a period of resurgence of social movements and alternative social practices in the city (and across Spain) stimulated by the outbreak of the 15M indignados movement. The 15M movement emerged spontaneously in different cities in the spring of 2011, although its origins were linked to the activity of previous movements like Real Democracy Now!, Youth Without Future, and the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages. The 15M also overlapped with a set of sectoral mobilisations (Mareas) fighting austerity in areas such as education, health and culture. The anti-austerity movement has retained great vitality in Spain, and polls indicate strong growth in the levels of interest and political participation among citizens. The de-centralized and urbanized structure of the 15M amid the growing disaffection of citizens with political and dominant economic institutions has favoured the emergence of a multitude of alternative social practices such as time banks, agro-ecological consumption cooperatives, ethical banking and urban gardens. Such practices – which experienced a strong growth since 2011 – have been particularly strong in Barcelona, ​​connecting with the cooperative and self-management traditions that existed in the city throughout the twentieth century.  A key lesson from our study is that the national anti-austerity movement is an urban movement, built in cities and neighbourhoods and rooted in longstanding urban traditions of organising and cooperation.

Barcelona en Comú – previously called Guanyem Barcelona – is an electoral alliance born in 2014 out of the confluence of anti-austerity social movements, alternative social practices, left-wing parties (such as ICV and United Left) and emerging political forces (like Podemos and Equo). The formation of this coalition stimulated a multitude of alternative candidacies at the May 2015 elections in Spain. The so-called “change candidacies” took office in 4 of the 5 largest cities in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Zaragoza and Valencia) – as well as in many other small and middle-size cities with regional importance such as La Coruna in Galicia and Cadiz in Andalusia. The case of Barcelona is especially significant, as the new Mayor Ada Colau is not only the first woman to govern this city, but had a significant political role as the leader of the main organization of the anti-housing evictions movement in Spain (La PAH).

Our exploratory research shows that the new government has a strong commitment to radical change in the model of participation and collaboration between the public, private and community sectors in the city. One of the key ideas that it intends to promote is a form of co-production linked to the ‘commons’ (that inspires the name of Barcelona en Comú) and social innovation. Under Colau, the meaning of “social innovation” has shifted from entrepreneurship and takes a more radical meaning, linked to the ambition of transforming power relationships through community action. The notion of co-production involves, according to some respondents, taking a step beyond citizen participation towards generating more horizontal relationships between public institutions and citizens, increasing citizen empowerment and enabling citizens to take over the management of goods and services.

It is still too early to assess the accomplishments and limitations of the new government, though the evidence collected in this exploratory phase points to a significant continuity in the formal structures of participation after one year – perhaps due to institutional path dependency (by which we mean the constraining influence of past decisions, practices and actions) and the minority position of the new government, which faces significant challenges in getting its agenda and financial proposals approved by the City Council.

During the next phase, we will focus on analysing changes in the relationships between local political institutions and civil society in four key areas: the formal structures of consultation and participation (like neighbourhood councils); spaces of deliberative democracy (like the participative process for the elaboration of the Municipal Action Plan); community management practices (such as community management of public urban plots and disused buildings); and policy co-production (covering both pre-existing and emerging practices). A key question is whether the new government is able to undertake radical institutional change, despite barriers such as “path dependency”, institutional resistance, corporate and neoliberal opposition and the lack of a formal majority in the council.

Dr Ismael Blanco is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Public Law and Research Fellow at the Institute of Government and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)