Ignoring people: The micro-politics of misrecognition in participatory governance

Abstract

Local governments across the globe increasingly aim to engage citizens in participatory governance, encouraging them to take an active stance in community activities and policy or planning decisions. Despite the inclusive and emancipatory ambitions, these projects often reproduce inequality and exclude citizens leaving them marginalized and misrecognized. In this paper, I argue that inclusion and recognition do not take shape via political ambitions or promising institutional frameworks but via informal face-to-face interactions among citizens and state actors at the street level. By drawing on 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in The Hague, the Netherlands, I critically unpack how the engagements among state actors and citizens misrecognized the latter as political subjects. Building on critical scholarship on the politics of recognition, I propose an agent-centered and practice-oriented approach that analyzes the micro-politics of misrecognition via (1) narrative analysis, (2) the detailed analysis of speech acts and emotional expressions, and (3) with a specific focus on analyzing the spatial practices that construe the geopolitical realm. As a result, I introduce the tactic of ‘ignoring people’ as a socio-spatial practice of politics. I found five socio-spatial tactics by which citizens were ignored during the very participatory process in which they were invited: disregarded elements of citizens’ stories, omitting their counter-narrative, neglecting citizens’ memories, showing disdain for their emotional expressions and being spatially absent from their protest. These insights require scholars interested in understanding the exclusive mechanisms of citizen participation, to turn to the micro-politics of interaction where the political is practiced and experienced.