The Impacts of Participatory Governance on Cultural Development: Evidence from European Capitals of Culture

Participatory approaches to cultural decision-making are increasingly supported in the international and European discourses as means to foster cultural development, promoting capacity building, legitimacy, and social capital. However, their beneficial effects are both empirically contradictory and theoretically under-investigated. With the aim of providing an evidence-based account of the function of participatory decision-making in culture, this thesis analyses how, why, and under which circumstances participatory governance impacted on cultural development in four projects promoted in the two European Capitals of Culture of 2013 - Marseille-Provence (France) and Košice (Slovakia) –under the umbrella of the “City and Citizens” criterion. The thesis combines the theoretical assumptions of the “expansive” theories of democracy (Warren, 1992) with the “pragmatic conception” proposed by Fung (2007) and adopts the methodological tools offered by the theory-testing variant of process tracing. Hence, it advances an analytical framework of causal mechanisms able to explain how and why the impacts of participatory governance of culture can change within different contextual conditions. This work defines cultural development as a long-term process that includes cultural production and reception and is sustained by a network of cultural relations. In addition, it conceptualizes participatory governance as a three-dimensional institutional space (including representation, communication, and power delegation) that can trigger developmental dynamics thanks to consensus-oriented face-to-face dialogue among a variety of cultural stakeholders. Referring to the empirical evidence collected in the four case studies, the thesis argues that the impacts of participatory governance on cultural development depend on the intensity of trust that is reached among the actors involved in the process. In presence of fully-fledged trust, as showed in the project PARCeque (Marseille) and in the Exchanger Obrody (Košice), participatory governance can lead to cultural development, activating a reinforcing chain of capacities, legitimacy, and social capital that nurture cultural relations in the long-term. On the contrary, in absence of fully-fledged trust (i.e. mistrust and “calculus-based” trust), as proved by the project Jardins Possibles (Marseille) and the Exchanger Važecká (Košice), participatory governance of culture can exacerbate feelings of manipulation or group dynamics, fostering contestation movements or isolated cultural production.