But Who Will Speak for the People?

Ambiguities, Controversy and Closure in Participatory Democracy

Gianpaolo Baiocchi
NYU
New York, NY 10012

Nicole Summers
NYU
New York, NY 10012

Draft Date 3/16/2016

 But Who Will Speak for the People?
Ambiguities, Controversy and Closure in Participatory Democracy

This article analyzes an innovative, and relatively successful, experience in Chicago its
Participatory Budgeting process. Treating it as process-in-the-making we are
attentive to moments of uncertainty and controversy over the first year of its development.
As a process of direct democracy, it is profoundly ambiguous: it is, in principle, open to
all, but it had no way to adjudicate between different ways of knowing and making claims
that of technical experts, democratically elected office holders, and newly-established
neighborhood leaders. And because it is a bottom-up process that in principle does not
privilege certain groups, it generated ambiguity over who gets to speak for and on behalf
of the whole. Each of these ambiguities generated controversies, which generated
political talk that implied utopian alternatives, but which were then settled in ways that
closed off these alternatives, in the end reinforcing the power of experts and re-valuing
the role of established community leaders against newcomers. We contend that the
critical literature on participation should be more attentive to moments of conflict,
ambiguity, and closure when the outlines of participatory processes are collectively
produced. [citizenship; participation; expertise; urban politics]

Rogers Park, a lakefront neighborhood at the Northern edge of Chicago, already had a
reputation for being a quirky and liberal neighborhood when Participatory Budgeting
arrived there in the Fall of 2009. Known around Chicago for being slightly at odds with
the Democratic party machine, Rogers Park was notorious for its artist collectives, its
rambunctious community blogs, its experiment with community policing, and a city
councilor who once attempted to pass legislation to ban fois gras in the city. But
Participatory Budgeting, or PB, was something else altogether. Harkening to
experiments among left wing municipal administrations in Latin America in the early
1990s, it was mostly associated in the United States with social justice activism like the
US Social Forum, and had never actually been attempted in a city government as was
tried in Rogers Park that year.
So it was with understandable fanfare that the wards Alderman, Joe Moore, brought that
first years process to a close in the Spring at a well-attended community event to
announce its results. Between October and April, dozens of volunteers had gathered
ideas and developed projects that could be executed using the wards infrastructure
budget, before opening up the list of projects to a ward-wide vote. Of the proposed
projects, twelve were chosen, including the wards first dog park and a community
garden. Now, as the end of the process, as the winning projects were announced, the
alderman repeated what he often said, that his main job was to step out of the way and
let the community decide on its priorities. That successful first year made waves, and
made local news before being taken up nationally as the first instance of a novel form of
direct democracy on US shores.

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Yet, the process had not been without controversies and conflict, the main one being over
the leadership of the process. In particular, many participants were unsure about the role
of the Steering Committee, a group of community activists appointed by the alderman to
oversee the first year of the process. Some participants felt it was essentially a group of
friends of the alderman who exerted undue influence on what was supposed to be a
democratic process. Steering Committee members, on the other hand, felt they had
volunteered hours and hours of work, from designing the rules to facilitating workshops,
and did not deserve the criticisms. So intense was this controversy that a few weeks after
the celebration, it nearly ended the possibilities of another cycle altogether. This was one
of a number of controversies that nearly derailed the process that first year. These salient
struggles were occasioned by ambiguities implicit in the participatory process itself,
particularly over issues of technical expertise and representation.

This article explores the centrality that ambiguity played in the first year, and how much
energy and effort was dedicated to bring to closure to controversies generated by these
ambiguities. In Chicago, those moments were key because they occasioned the
reformulation of political horizons. New political relationships and hierarchies emerged,
redefining central roles of authority and who gets to speak for and on behalf of the
community. Paradoxically, in this case, the resolution of controversies re-inscribed the
power of officialdom and of traditional community activists. The case illustrates a
broader argument about ambiguity and participatory democracy in the contemporary
United States. Participatory reforms, like Participatory Budgeting, are widely praised for
seeking to broaden the body politic, by democratizing access to expertise and
representation. But in practice, such reforms are ambiguous or silent - about the
precise limits of expert rule or sources of informal authority within its settings. We
believe it is in the political struggles over such ambiguities that these issues are actually
decided. Moreover, it is within these political struggles where the type of talk and
conversation prized by democratic theorists took places -- where participants question
and challenge the dominant modes of participation -- and therefore, we suggest, is where
the radical potential of participatory processes may lie. We explore these issues in this
essay, based on one year of ethnography and interviews in and around the 49th Ward.i

The Ambiguous Meaning of Participation

By the time of Joe Moores experiment, the first of its kind in the US, there were already
dozens of experiences in Europe, countries like Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany,
England, and Albania, and hundreds more in Latin America (Allegretti et al. 2004;
Cabannes 2006; Herzberg et al 2010). Celebrated as a simple and effective way of
connecting citizens to their government, Participatory Budgeting, or PB, has been
adopted in some form in at least 1,500 cities around the world beyond its original site of
Porto Alegre, Brazil. Though no longer linked to leftist parties or political projects, many
versions of PB around the world bear close semblance to the sequence of events in
Chicagos process: an elected official dedicates part of a budget to the process, there are a
series of open meetings in which citizens propose and debate specific uses for the money,

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followed by some kind of vote to rank order projects, and implementation of winning
projects.

With the multiplication of these experiences, there is by now a wide-ranging, often

positive, literature on participatory democracy, including on participatory budgeting
(Eggers 2005; Geissel 2009; Ganuza and Francs 2010). This includes emerging
scholarship on US Participatory Budgeting processes (Crum et al 2013; Lerner and
Secondo 2012; Gilman 2013; Su 2012; Stewart 2014) that complements what is a very
vast literature on Participatory Budgeting in general, and in its global diffusion phase
(Baiocchi and Ganuza 2014; Porto 2013; Allegretti 2014). Participatory Budgeting in
Europe and North America is today quite distinct from original experiences in Latin
America, where it was connected to left political projects and to more complex
administrative reforms.ii In contrast, North American experiences have had more an
overarching civic (rather than overtly political) orientation and have been only been
linked to small administrative reforms and small budgets.

The scholarship on North American and European experiences has, appropriately,

generally focused on to civic learning (Su 2012), finding positive results. Scholars have
also asked about the broadening of decision-making to non-traditional stakeholders. In
the case of Chicagos PB, for example, Stewart et al. (2014) have shown that the
decisions made in the 49th Wards PB resulted in projects widely distributed throughout
the ward and that these projects represented a new and distinct spending pattern than
from previous years or nearby wards. Finally, and relatedly, scholars have investigated
the inclusiveness of these experiences. And here, the evidence really points to challenges
and the importance of particular contexts; some PB experiences, like the one in New
York City (2011-present) are generally inclusive of women, people of color, and the
poor, especially in some districts. Others, like the 49th Wards were less inclusive,
tending to privilege the participation of homeowners and college-educated whites
(Stewart 2014).

The literature on PB processes nearly always references the presence of conflicts and
controversies, if not always making broader analytic points about the meaning of those
conflicts. In the case of US processes, observers and scholars have noted pitched debates
over the process itself and its boundaries in several of the processes (Gilman 2013,
Lerner and Secondo, 2012; Stewart et al 2014), though this conflict is usually presented
as of secondary importance to arguments about the achievements of the process itself.
An exception is the analysis of Ganuza and Nez (2012) about PB processes in Spain and
France, where it occasioned conflict between activists from established neighborhood
associations and those from alterglobalization movements. The outcome of the
conflicts were determinative of the shape of the process as it tended to set precedents for
the future.

We build on this latter set of insights, which to us function as a useful adjunct to the more
general critiques of participation as neoliberalism (Hickey and Mohan 2004). For
some, participation has become the buzzword of the neoliberal era. (Leal 2007).

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As part of a new rationality of government participatory prescriptions emphasize some of
the most important characteristics of the neoliberal citizen: self-regulation, responsibility
for her own problems, and a non-conflictive partnership with the state, instead of
conflictive mobilization, disruption, and politicization (See Li 2005; Ong 2006).
Through these logics people are transformed into individuals who are to be active in
their own government, (Rose 1996:330) in what Herbert (2005) has called the trapdoor
of community, wherein the neoliberal move to devolve state obligations resonates with
long- standing desires to make communities effective sites of moral development
(Herbert 2005: 28) A number of studies have in recent times come to address
participation in the US and Europe in urban settings from this perspective. (Dike, 2007;
Grundy & Boudreau, 2008; Imrie & Raco, 2003; Marinetto, 2003; Schofield, 2002).

Insightful as those approaches are, we are concerned with the possibility of the
suppression of contingency and the assumption of a series of inevitable stages moving
from the abstract to the concrete. (Lascoumes and Le Gales 2007:10) Indeed, as
scholars have shown, the arrival of reforms like these is not without friction or
contestation, and can also spawn unpredictable forms of political struggles that
challenge state power and keep the meaning of good governance and democracy in play
(Sharna 2013:35). We take some inspiration here from Actor-Network Theory,
particularly the early work of Callon and Latour (Callon 1986; Latour 1987:29), who
insist the construction of facts is always a collective process in which heterogeneous
actors come together around issues and agree to work on them jointly (Latour 1987:29).
These scholars insist on studying processes in the making, before the controversies
involved in its fabrication are closed, before the complexities of its inner working are
taken-for-granted and before the patterns of organizational power and influence[] are
forgotten or rationalized. (Preston et al., 1992, p. 564).

In other words, rather than assuming Participatory Budgeting arrives on the scene as
ready-made to test it for its effects (is it truly inclusive? Does it promote civic learning?),
here we ask what it actually becomes by honing in on early moments of uncertainty and
examining how they were settled. We are thus attentive to the the moral and
performative dimensions of membership which define the meanings and practices of
belonging in a society. (Holston and Appadurai 1996:2000).

The re-appearance of Local Democracy in Chicago

The 49th Ward (known as Rogers Park) is uniquely demographically representative of

the city of Chicago, with a population of about 60,0000 of whom roughly 10% are Asian,
30% are white, 30% African American, and 30% Latino. The Ward is also economically
diverse, and is known as a hub of progressive grassroots activism. While the Ward
boasts pockets of affluence, it also contains high-crime neighborhoods where violence
and shootings are not uncommon.

Alderman Moores move in the summer of 2009 to begin to work on participatory

budgeting was inspired by his participation, two years prior, at the US Social Forum and
his connections with Cities for Progress, a national network of progressive city officials.

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That it might score him badly-need political points after his previous election -- which he
won in a close run-off as a third time incumbent -- was a convenient by-product,
according to his public statements on the subject. He was put in touch with the
Participatory Budget Project, a nascent network of volunteer-experts interested in
implementing it in North America, that provided him with guidance based on experiences
elsewhere.
Aldermen in Chicago have little control over the general City budget, as it has
historically been considered the mayors prerogative. While the City Council (made up
of the citys fifty aldermen) technically authorizes the budget, that authorization is in
practice a rubber stamp. Considered by some to be in exchange for this broad cession of
authority, each alderman is granted menu money for infrastructure projects in their
wards. Aldermen have total discretion over how this fund is spent, which, at worst,
allows them to use it as a form of pork to cater to particular constituencies or
neighborhoods, and at best, to address genuine unmet needs in the community. Either
way, the public is generally unaware of the existent, yet alone expenditure, of this pot of
money, and decisions about how it is spent rarely face scrutiny.

Menu money became the obvious choice for Moore when he decided he wanted to adopt
PB in his Ward. With no existing public process in place for the expenditure of the fund,
he began by convening a Steering Committee (SC). The goal of the SC was to get
early community buy-in, as well as to ensure that decisions about the design and structure
of the process were made in a community-based, democratic fashion consistent with the
projects goals. The SC was made up of leaders of various community and neighborhood
organizations, from executive directors of established non-profits to heads of block
associations. In general, these individuals were people Moore knew and trusted. Moore
also worked closely with the Participatory Budgeting Project in the early stages of the
process.

PB was introduced to the broader community in November 2009 through nine

neighborhood assemblies held throughout the Ward. These assemblies were broadly
advertised through fliers and emails, resulting in a total attendance of about forty
residents at each meeting. The assemblies lasted about two hours long and had a tight
agenda roughly broken into two parts: first, a presentation given by the aldermans office
about menu money and PB, and second, breakout discussions facilitated by SC members.
During the breakout sessions, residents debated community needs and brainstormed
possible projects. At the end of the assembly interested participants were invited to serve
as community representatives, or Community Reps, in the next phase of the process.
About sixty residents volunteered across all the neighborhood assemblies.

The Community Reps were divided into six thematic committees: transportation, traffic
safety, public safety, parks and environment, streets, and art and other projects. Each
committee was tasked with developing concrete project proposals that would ultimately
be voted on by the community at large. The proposals were required to be specific (e.g.,
mural in a particular location), to include a price estimate, and to meet approval
requirements set by the relevant City agency that would be charged with implementation.
Beyond those requirements, however, committees were given broad discretion regarding

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the types and number of projects they could propose, as well as the process they would
undertake to determine which proposals they would submit to the community vote. The
six committees ultimately proposed a total of thirty-six projects.

The community vote took place on a Saturday at a local high school. A ballot was made
with the thirty-six projects and each project was presented on a poster board in the school
cafeteria in a sort of science fair format. As decided by the Steering Committee, all ward
residents age 16 and over were allowed to vote for up to eight projects. Following a
massive get out the vote effort led by both the SC and the Community Reps, about
1,600 people ultimately showed up to cast their ballots. The projects that won the most
votes were funded up to $1.3 million, the total amount of the Aldermans budget. Moore
announced the winners that night at The Glenwood, a neighborhood bar.

While the mood during the announcement of the projects was celebratory and unifying,
the months leading up to that moment were decidedly less so. Contestations and
controversies pervaded the process, beginning shortly after the initial neighborhood
assemblies and continuing through the final vote. The protagonists of these controversies
were the 100 or so core participants of the process during that year. These were the
Community Reps, a group of about 90 deeply involved residents in the various
committees, and the Steering Committee, the dozen or so founders of the process. In all,
these core participants were generally better off, more educated, more racially
homogenous than the Ward as a whole, much as the literature on civic engagement has
consistently described (Wilson 2012). Yet, they were entirely new voices in the
governance process from a wide range of activist and civic backgrounds, not accustomed
to the time-frames, limits, and demands of government. Their participation, as formal
equals, in this process, occasioned a series of questions to which the participatory
procedures were silent, or ambiguous: on the limits of expertise, and on which styles of
participation were entitled to speak for the whole.

Dilemmas of Expertise

Participatory democracy is profoundly ambiguous on expertise: it values the knowledge

of participants, and upholds decisions made in a participatory manner against those made
behind the veil of expert knowledge (Elster 1998). But what is the line that divides
expert knowledge from the popular mandate? At what point must the popular mandate
concede to the specialized knowledge of experts? The contestation between techne and
demos has been an ongoing preoccupation of democratic theorists, and it has been well
documented in ethnographies of participation (Fischer 2009). Participation implies a
collective space and also presumes a certain equality between participants, with each
person a partner in a shared world, but "presupposing that one can play the same game as
one's adversary." (Rancire 2007:78).

Early on in the process, participants fully expected to be able to play the same game as
government experts. Over the course of the four month-long process of developing
project proposals, Community Reps stepped into the work of governance. They debated
priorities, and quite naturally, in the words of one Rep, begun to probe questions of

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feasibility, and delved into seemingly simple issues of cost. In so doing, they begun to
act in spheres normally occupied by other representative bodies the Alderman and his
office, City agencies, and others. Yet, constant queries over feasibility and costs raised
eyebrows among employees of City agencies, who were accustomed to deference on
these issues. They were the engineers, the city planners, and the career technocrats who
believed that their experience working on infrastructure projects accorded them a certain
degree of authority on it. The work of the Reps, however, signaled that new modes of
representation might not merely mean new faces of power, but also new forms and styles.

The transportation committee proved to be one of the most dedicated committees from
the very beginning of the Community Rep process. Many of the Reps were drawn to the
committee by a concern for biking safety in particular. Cycling enthusiasts, they were
particularly worried about the existing biking infrastructure in the Ward, which consisted
solely of bike lanes directly abutting car traffic. They researched other cities models and
learned of a design known as curb shifting, which allowed bike lanes to be separated
from cars by the construction of a curb between them. Thrilled, they immediately began
work on developing a project proposal based on this design.

In order to land a project proposal on the final ballot, committees were required to obtain
feasibility approval from the relevant City agency that would be responsible for
implementation. Thus, the Reps on the transportation committee connected with the City
of Chicago Department of Transportation to discuss their project and win its stamp of
approval. As curb shifted bike lanes were not within the DOTs existing menu of
projects, DOT proposed a meeting with the committee. While DOT envisioned this
meeting as a presentation of the possible options for bike lanes, the Reps on the
transportation committee had other objectives. The DOT planner assigned to staff the
meeting began with a PowerPoint presentation that outlined the existing options for bike
lanes. He described the various options, and then presented them to the Community Reps
as the complete slate of possibilities. The Reps, to the planners surprise, followed by
giving their own PowerPoint presentation. The presentation included a description of
curb shifting and the various cities around the country that had implemented it. They
presented curb shifting as a fully feasible bike lane model, with the hope and
expectation that DOT would consider it seriously. The DOT planner was taken aback.
His mannerisms and statements indicated that he quite clearly expected no response of
this sort to his own presentation. He fumbled, and then responded dismissively that curb-
divided bike lanes were infeasible because they would have to be at least ten feet wide to
accommodate City snowplows. The meeting ended in disarray.

The Reps response to this meeting was to build a rebuttal to the DOT planners claims.
They researched options, and learned quickly that smaller snowplows existed and could
be used to plow the bike lanes, proposing building, in the words of one, a five-to-six
foot-wide bike lanes and buy Bobcat snow plows and clear the way?. What was
more, the City of Chicago already used these plows on the lakefront bike path, proving
clearly that it was a technically feasible option.

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This experience left Reps with a more powerful lesson, though. They began to feel that
what was cast to them as a technical requirement was in fact something quite different -
- it was a policy choice, reflective of the politics and priorities of the City Administration.
They also disagreed wholly with the insulation of the choice from any sort of democratic
process. After interacting with the city planner first-hand, they saw no reason why he,
and not them, should have power to set the bounds for what types of bike lanes are and
are not permissible in their city. His claim to be the expert was not a product of real
expertise, they saw, but rather of power.

The Reps relentlessly pressed the DOT to amend their feasibility requirements over the
following months, to no avail. This spurred an internal controversy within the
transportation committee over whether they should accept the requirements as stated and
create a project proposal for standard bike lanes, or whether they should protest and not
include any bike lane project on the ballot at all. The members of the committee split into
roughly two camps: those who felt that any additional bike lanes were an improvement,
and those who felt that acceptance of the DOTs baseless requirements amounted to
nothing less than abandonment of the goal of sustainable environmentally-conscious
transportation. They eventually compromised, deciding to propose traditional bike lanes
with the phrase PHASE I included in the project title to indicate that they intended to
ultimately phase in curb shifted bike lanes.

The parks and environment committee similarly collided with the City experts over the
requirements they intended to impose for a proposed dog park (dog friendly area, or
DFA). As mentioned previously, in order to appear on the ballot all projects had to
include a price estimate. It was assumed at the outset of the PB process that price
estimates would be set by the relevant City agency, as for traditional menu money items,
such as street resurfacing and street lights, the City has set prices, which aldermen,
based on their consistent acceptance of them, either have no ability or no will to
challenge. For the DFA, the Reps connected with the Parks Department and learned that
the set price was $150,000. Reps were shocked by this information, and also dismayed
given that there was a general prediction brewing among Community Reps that lower
priced projects would be more likely to win the final vote.

The Reps responded to this information by demanding a cost breakdown. The City
refused to provided one, but did offer that the price reflected the costs of installing many
new features to the park, such as a doggie drinking fountain and a separate area for
shy dogs, that were necessary elements of a DFA per City rules. The Reps were
unsatisfied with this justification. They explained that the features were unimportant to
the committee, and that they were only interested in designating the park with its existing
features as a DFA. The City refused to budge, stating that the features were requirements
of a DFA designation. After much back and forth with the City, the Reps, like those on
the transportation committee, grew frustrated that what was simply a policy choice by the
City to require a DFA to contain certain aesthetic features was being presented as
technical.

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Faced with this resistance regarding the DFA requirements from the City, the Reps
decided to shift their focus to the $150,000 figure, taking the requirements as given. One
committee member, a landscape architect, came up with the idea to simulate a Request
for Proposals (RFP) for a DFA as if he were submitting one to the City. He performed a
price estimate for each of the required features, assuming the highest possible costs for
labor and materials. The total came to slightly over $40,000. The Reps once again
perceived that the City presented to be a technical necessity was nothing of the sort.
Rather, the technical cloaking served as a shield to insulate what was in fact a political
choice from public scrutiny.

The Reps responded by presenting their estimate to the City and demanding an
explanation of the nearly four-fold difference. The City still refused to provide a specific
breakdown of how they arrived at the $150,000 price tag. Instead, the City offered to
lower the price to $110,000 for the Reps proposed project, but said that they could only
do so if they removed many of the standard DFA features, such as a doggie drinking
fountain. The Reps were outraged at this response they had developed their own price
estimate after being told specifically that the DFA requirements were non-negotiable, and
now, all of a sudden, the City seemed willing to waive them without hesitation. This
simply reinforced the Reps belief that the technical requirements were not technical
nor requirements, but instead political decisions. The Reps continued to press the City
officials about the price to no avail. The City refused to provide further details about the
price and felt no need to heed to this new accountability structure in the 49th Ward.
The Reps eventually gave up, and decided to submit a DFA project to the final vote with
the Citys $110,000 price tag.

The stories of two projects one involving bike lanes, another a Dog Friendly Area
illustrate the struggles that took place between Community Reps and City agencies over
expertise- versus citizenship-based claims to power. Our point is not simply that the
contestation took place, but rather that it engendered a controversy that called into
question the ambiguous limits of the process, and then in its settling, set a precedent.
Concerns with the role of experts in the process in fact were a constant complaint by
many participants. A common refrain was that they had appreciated learning about the
rules and regulations in the city, but that they came to expect to be treated as legitimate
interlocutors, which city bureaucrats resisted. As one committee member stated, we had
a lot of contact with experts, and most of it face-to-face ... I cant say we were
impressed.

Although both the bike lane and the DFA projects generated several months of debate
and controversy, once each project was listed on the ballot, controversy essentially
ceased. The symbolic act of inscription -- listing each project with its cost on the ballot,
rendered some finality to the decision and closed the black box that had been opened.
The Bike Project went on the ballot within the citys stated parameters, and the Dog Park
went on the ballot at citys price of $110,000. And while the process generated much
discontentment and distrust of the seemingly arbitrary technical vetting process of the
city, leading participants to question and challenge at distinct moments of the process
why, in fact, the experts' opinions were afforded so much weight, in years following Reps

10

and participants came to expect an expert review and vetting of projects much earlier.
The precedent was essentially set that experts could veto projects in the early, idea-
generating, parts of the process and that there was little point in contesting their
decisions. The most participants could now hope for was early vetting of projects, so as
to not waste time with infeasible or excessively expensive projects.

Dilemmas of Representation

It's kind of like, the world is owned by people who show up. So show up. Participate.

But the central controversy that shaped the first year was that over the role of the Steering
Committee. A participatory process that is, in principle, open to all, recognizes different
voices. But which voices are the most legitimate representatives of the whole?
Democratic theorists and other scholars of participation and deliberation have long noted
that there are different styles of speaking and argumentation that come together in
discussion, some of which resemble rational, masculinist, ideal of the public sphere, and
many that do not (Eliasoph and Lictherman 2003). There are also different sources of
authority and respect in a community associated with different types of organizations, all
of them indexing an ambiguous and encompassing concept of community. Participatory
Budgeting, like any process of direct democracy or participation, relies on a number of
unspoken assumptions that do not make it into rulebooks or institutional designs, like
which styles count most and which social networks are more valued (Lichterman, 2002).
Interactions within this setting are governed by unstated rules about what styles and ways
of speaking are more valued than others, where some statements are permissible and not
others, and where some voices get to speak more naturally in the name of the people
(Bourdieu, 1991).

What sort of style of speaking and representing the community counts as the most
respected? A process, like the one in the 49th Ward, which brings together experienced
and inexperienced activists, members of block clubs and environmental activists,
homeowners and renters, and active Democrats and third party activists, implicit and
explicit differences in style and assumptions would inevitably clash. When lines of
conflict arose and groups coalesced with competing claims to speak on behalf of the
whole, who would adjudicate this, and on what grounds? This contestation took place
between and among Community Reps and the members of the Steering Committee.
Steering Committee members were, by and large, older homeowners linked to
longstanding civic organizations in the Ward, like preservation societies and
neighborhood associations. Community Reps were often younger, included many
renters, and were, in many cases either previously uninvolved in organizations, or
connected to newer groups, like environmental and bike activist groups.

At the very inception of the process, the Alderman invited activists from his ward from
organizations like prominent social service nonprofits, block clubs, and historic
preservation societies in order to provide both input into the design of the process and
assure community buy-in. The Steering Committee, as it became known, discussed
potential rules from a set of options provided by the Participatory Budgeting Project

11

based on other global examples. At these highly attended meetings in the Summer of
2009, they debated things like, what counted as a resident of the neighborhood to
participate in the process, what the minimum voting age should be, and what voting
procedures should be.

But as the Summer ended and the process started, participants at those Steering
Committee meetings had reduced to a core group of about a dozen who took on a variety
of other tasks. Even though the Alderman had by now hired one staff person to help the
process, it was clear the logistical needs for an undertaking of this magnitude were
greater than anticipated. So Steering Committee members not only designed posters,
recruited volunteers, advertised meetings, but also raised funds, staffed informational
tables, and facilitated assemblies. As a member of the Steering Committee recalled, it
was like I had a second job. It was great, but it was a second job. They became, in many
ways, the face of the PB process in Rogers Park.

But as the process moved on, other groups also rose in prominence. The Community
Reps, who begun to put in long hours as the process transitioned into the project
development phase, started to demand recognition as well. The Community Reps felt
like they were the ones now moving the process forward and had taken on ownership.
The rules did not stipulate what the role of the Steering Committee would be at this stage,
but nonetheless, Steering Committee members continued to have a bimonthly meeting
with the Alderman, where they discussed issues in the process as it came up. They had
also distributed themselves as mentors on each of the committees (made up of the
Community Reps). Mentors would clarify the process and act as go -between with the
Alderman. Sometimes they would give unofficial explanations for the aldermans
decisions, or make arguments for this or that project based on some insider information.

But this eventually gave rise to tension. Some Community Reps came to resent the
mentoring in their committees; others felt that an unelected body had no role in a
participatory process, and seemed to to simply be a group of unelected insiders or
friends of Joe. More troubling was that it was not clear to many who the members of
the Steering Committee were, nor what its mandate was. And more frequently, but more
subtly, there were tensions in style between the the slightly older, civic-minded, members
of the Steering Committee, and the younger, more activisty types who were prominent
among Community Reps. The latter group, raised on consensus meetings and political
correctness, were much concerned with inclusiveness and gender dynamics within a
conversation, and were more familiar with tools used to run meetings, like listing action
items and tabling items, and technology and web-based tools. Steering Committee
members, on the other hand, were more concerned with being respectful in their way of
speaking of city officials or the Alderman, but less worried about men speaking for long
stretches.

Shortly after the end of the first years process, Community Rep members approached the
alderman expressing a list of grievances about the Steering Committee, proposing they

12

help design a final evaluation. The alderman agreed and called a meeting to evaluate the
years proceedings.

The two-hour evaluation meeting centered on a survey, and asked how participants how
they felt about the process, with a series of pointed questions about the Steering
Committee. Facilitated by the alderman and two of the Community Reps, the meeting
was quiet, but tense until the alderman announced a Process Advisory Committee was
going to be formed to process the evaluation data come up with a way to move the
process forward with modifications for next year. As people started to volunteer to join
the PAC, members of the Steering Committee started to loudly complain. The
meeting erupted into an open confrontation between the Reps and the Steering
Committee members, and ended in generalized confusion.

Several angry emails were exchanged the following day. Several Committee members
felt insulted and betrayed. Some felt personally attacked. To one, this seemed like their
role was being usurped, describing this as a coup attempt. Another demanded to know
why the Steering Committee was not consulted about this agenda. Another said that she
was OK with the younger activists taking charge, but not with how they tried to do it,
making us feel like all of our hard work didnt mean much. Most felt their knowledge,
experience, and expertise in running the process had been disregarded, and felt strongly
that they should have been consulted about the evaluation process before the meeting. As
one later recounted, all of the hard work that we had put in, [it] was somewhat negated
by the negativity.

The reaction was so strong that the alderman changed his response again. The Steering
Committee and Alderman Moore met separately a few weeks later, at which point
Alderman Moore assured them that their experience and leadership in the process was
valued and they were not being replaced. He then dissolved the Process Advisory
Committee. Alderman Moore and the SC did transform the SC into a Leadership
Committee that would govern the process the following year. This committee was in
principle open to any interested former Community Reps and Steering Committee
members. It would formally run the process moving forward, and some thirty people
volunteered to be on it at first. But by the time the process started again, in the fall,
membership had dwindled to the point it was made up almost exclusively of former
Steering Committee members.

The precedent was set, and the implicit question the process posed was answered. The
kind of practice that would be most valued the way of speaking that would be
considered most legitimate was that represented by longstanding civic organizations .
After the first year, the Leadership Committee continued to play a very strong role in
shaping the tenor of the process. Its civic orientation pervaded the process as a whole,
and in many ways the 49th Wards participatory budget mirrored its practices and style.
The main leaders of the project continued to be those from the areas more traditional
civic organizations and the areas Democratic party. Less important were the kinds of
youth practices connected to movements like Occupy, for example, or more social-justice
oriented organizations that exist in the Ward. Occupy Rogers Park, for example, would

13

stage a protest in 2012 against the 49th Wards Participatory Budgeting process, accusing
it of lack of representativeness, diversity, and democracy.

Nonetheless, the 49th Wards process was hailed and celebrated as a success after its first
year as the first such process in the United States. A number of interested observers
lauded its innovation, creativity, and effectiveness at "democratizing democracy (Lerner
and Secondo 2012). Shortly afterwards, preparations began for year two; meanwhile
Moore invoked the success of PB to galvanize support for his campaign. In 2011, Moore
was reelected with 72% of the popular vote, after winning only narrowly in a run-off in
the previous election in 2006. Moore and others have publicly attributed his upsurge in
support to the introduction of PB and its widespread popularity. Meanwhile, Moore also
played an important role in helping diffuse the idea. In conjunction with the newly-
formed Participatory Budgeting Project, he gave several talks promoting Participatory
Budgeting. Its take-up in New York City, starting in 2011, can be directly traced to
Moores public speaking. Subsequently, other Wards in Chicago imitated the process, as
the city of Vallejo, in California, also borrowed the idea.

Discussion: Participation, Empowerment, and Ambiguity

Democracy is, as political theorists have long argued, fundamentally ambiguous.

(Connoly 1987). Robert Dahl (1989) has argued that the liberal idea of democracy as
rule by the people is ambiguous on at least two principal questions: Who is entitled to
govern? and Who is the people? The liberal idea of democracy can accommodate a
wide array of answers to those questions, as can instances of direct democracy. In fact,
sober theorists of deliberative democracy have argued that actual processes would be
riddled with such ambiguities (Elster 1996). With participatory processes whose
contemporary iterations are intended to bring citizens closer to government, the
ambiguities might be even more pronounced. What it is to govern in an instance of
direct democracy is never clear. And while they are intended to be broadly inclusive,
because they are also intensive, the question of how much to afford authority is also very
salient. Participatory Budgeting is only one expression of the enthusiasm for
participation in the United States, as in much of the world. Cities, in particular, began to
experiment with different forms of collaborative or participatory governance in large
numbers beginning in the early 2000s, marking for some the beginning of a new era of
citizen governance. (Eggers 2005) Though we cannot estimate the exact scope of their
diffusion, according to the National League of Cities in the US, at least 80 percent of
municipalities in 2010 were carrying out participatory processes (National League of
Cities 2010). But even a cursory review of the literature on these experiments shows a
vast diversity of meanings attached to what participation is supposed to be.

It is for these reasons that we turned to what Science and Technology scholars have
described as empirical philosophy. An ethnographic interest in practice can be
combined with a philosophical concern with the good to explore which good/bad scale
is being enacted, and how this is being done. (Lan and Mol 2002:84) We have had our
ears tuned to invocations of the good in the name of settling controversies. As Bruun-
Jensen suggests, the choice of how to engage citizens also involves a specific conception

14

of what it means to learn. For it is the citizens interiorization of expert knowledge that is
viewed as enabling the formulation of their singular perspective on the case. Like other
ethnographic accounts of supposedly monolithic processes, we here highlighted
messiness, ambivalence, and unpredictability (Vannier 2010; Curtis 2010).

But our finding is much more specific: moments of ambiguity served to define the
actually lived boundaries of the process. Underlying struggles for power and authority
between and among participants and City officials were negotiations over who gets to
speak for the community and the rightfulness of citizen demands. In the end, both
controversies were settled in ways that reinforced the power of city experts and the status
of a founding group of community activists. In an important sense, the boundaries of the
process became narrower in practice than at the start expert rule extended over a
broader swath of the process, and community leaders with standing became even more
important. The point is not so much the paradox that the process became narrower, as
scholars in many different contexts have documented the way that, for example, so-called
empowering reforms can reinforce exclusionary citizenship (Dotson 2014; Sharma
2013; Murray 2011). The point is that the boundaries were contested, and settled, over
ambiguities implicit in the process itself. This suggests that the terrain for contestation of
the limits of participatory reforms, and their ultimate potential to democratize the body
politic, extends beyond its rules and formal procedures to the things that rules and
procedures do not specify. This has, we believe, two fundamental implications for the
study and practice of participatory democracy.

First is that there is a greater amount of contingency in these processes than either
promoters or critics might suggest. By 2014 there were at least half a dozen
Participatory Budgeting processes in the United States, and eight more in the planning
stages. While the Chicago template was broadly influential and in fact, became the
blueprint that was adopted and adapted each of those processes is distinct, owing in part
to the nature of the outcome of these contingencies. The City of New York, for example,
relies on a broad array of social justice organizations to run its process, and as a result, it
is much more inclusive of people of color and social justice organizers than Chicago. In
New York City, too, there have been greater efforts at extending the citizen mandate over
expert rule.

But a second implication is that practitioners and academics ought to pay critical
attention to moments of ambiguity and uncertainty, rather than view them with anxiety or
as indications of failure. In a paradoxical way it was when participation seemed to break
down, when moments of ambiguity and uncertainty emerged, that the kind of inquisitive
talk and conversation prized by democratic theorists emerged. Rather than blindly
absorbing and reproducing narrow definitions of what participation meant, it was during
those moments that participants put forth alternative modes that, as participants they
were entitled to question expertise and question the claims of community leaders. It may
be that participations radical and utopian potential actually resides in moments of its
seeming failure.

15

16

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i
In addition to the observations and interviews, both authors also worked on the
project in different capacities. One as an academic volunteer-consultant, and the
other as a staffer in the Ward office. We were inspired by recent anthropological
work that calls for reflexive research practice from within organizations, such as
Mosses (2005) ethnography of development projects and Riles para-ethnography
(2004) of technocratic knowledge. We very much subscribe to the view that the
traditional division between field and desk does not hold for many of us whose
professional work continues to engage the relevant communities. (Mosse 2006 ) All
of the evidence cited in this paper, however, comes only from public meetings and
formal, explicit interviews; we also purposely avoid identifying detail
ii generally speaking, European and North American experiences are not driven or carried

out by political parties or social movements, they tend to draw fewer participants and
involve much smaller pots of money, and social justice tends to be a more muted part of
justifications of the process.

21