WP42 Responsible

[UWE-44] - University of the West of England, Faculty of the Built Environment – Cities Research Centre (Bristol)

WP42 Responsible for Spread of Excellence

[UWE-44] - University of the West of England, Faculty of the Built Environment – Cities Research Centre (Bristol)

WP42 Objectives

To explore issues of accountability, representation and legitimacy in relation to the involvement of citizens and civil society in governance.

As forms of governance involving multiple actors increase in importance in European countries and open up new opportunities for civil society actors, issues of accountability, representation and legitimacy become increasingly significant.  Civil society actors in new governance spaces find themselves juggling their existing multiple accountability demands (from funders, members, service users and peers) with those of the partnership.  In addition the demands of participation within these spaces may pull them away from the institutions or constituencies that they are representing, creating a tension between leadership and representation.  There are also competing appeals to different sources of legitimacy: based on knowledge, skills, values or the participatory nature of the network or organisation they represent as well as tensions between traditional representative forms of democracy and the newer more participatory approaches that civil society organisations and citizens are involved in.   A seminar series in the UK, funded by the ESRC, which looked at the demands of public accountability in today’s complex public policy arenas, explored some of these tensions both in relation to civil society organisations and their partners.  This resulted in a special issue of the journal Public Policy and Administration.  However, although participants from the Netherlands and the US were involved in this, the focus was predominantly on the UK.  Nonetheless, the issues raised clearly have a wider relevance and are particularly pertinent to the Cinefogo aims.  They have emerged in papers presented to events in different cinefogo workpackages (e.g. WP14) and some of the issues relating to political representation and legitimacy are also being explored in  WP30M.   Issues of representation and accountability were also directly addressed in the report on Thematic Area no. 2 and would also have relevance to Theme 3.

This workpackage would offer an opportunity to widen the debate, review other existing work involving both academics and practitioner respondents and explore key themes in more depth.  These issues are clearly of intense concern for people operating in the new governance spaces and we would aim to produce a discussion/briefing paper accessible to policy makers and practitioners both within the civil society sector and partners in other sectors and circulated through their networks to help to clarify the issues as well as seeking publication of the papers presented in a journal special issue.

Cinefogo members with similar interests include Erik Amna at Orebro, who is proposing a related conference in May 2008 (discussions held already), members of the Centre for Democratic Governance at Roskilde University.  Colleagues at the University of Trento have also expressed an interest

WP42 Description of work

A workshop/seminar, which would include a review of existing research and scholarship on this issue in Europe.
A discussion paper for circulation among policy makers and practitioners and publicised through the professional press and other channels for influencing policy makers and practitioners.  We will also explore the possibility of publishing papers from the seminar in a journal special issue or in the Edward Elgar series.

WP42 Participants

• [UWE-44] - University of the West of England, Faculty of the Built Environment – Cities Research Centre (Bristol)
• [Örebro-50] - Örebro University (Örebro) - from 2007
• [RUC-1] - Roskilde University, Department of Social Sciences (Roskilde)
• [UNITN-24] - University of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research (Trento)

WP42 Documents

For documents of this work package, please go to CINEFOGO Outcomes Database and type WP42 in the Search field.