The Participatory Turn at Local Level in Time of Crisis: Processes, Conflicts and Paradoxical Effects

In the past decades, private, civil society and third sector organizations, or even the citizens, have been more and more involved within the decision-making processes. In the case of welfare policies, participation has gradually been considered a positive strategy at contrasting the crisis of legitimacy of the welfare states, to ameliorating the policy implementation in dealing with the new societal challenges, and to exploiting the informal resources of the grass-roots organizations. Nevertheless, some controversial issues must be taken into consideration, because to date it is still hard to understand why participation has become so significant in public discourses, in which ways it affects the policy processes, what will be the effects of the economic downturn, which role will participation have to deal with its challenges. The paper investigates these kind of issues in the case of the Tuscany (Italy) welfare reforms, strongly oriented to the participatory turn, and its developments in the urban area of Pisa, revealing a kind of participation that could be described as an ephemeral-decorative factor of the “new” institutional design, with a declining capability to move the institutional attention towards the various effects of the economic crisis and the other ongoing transformations of the urban context.