Citizen Participation and Democratic Innovation in Spanish Local Governance

Abstract

Through a documentary methodological strategy, which includes academic literature, official documents, and reports compiling experiences, this chapter examines the change in the structures of citizen participation that has taken place in Spanish local governments as a result of the transformative pressure exerted by new political actors and their experiences of democratic innovation over the past decade. The text presents the general features of the Spanish model before and after this change and also offers a panoramic view of the peculiarities exhibited by the participatory experiences of social and democratic innovation deployed by these new actors in local communities and governments. The chapter concludes that, in a uniquely favorable context, Spanish local governments were quite permeable to the transformation of the participation model, turning it into a transversal policy that fosters participatory democratic innovation. However, it is not clear whether this new policy (the so-called local participatory governance strategy) will withstand the change in the political cycle.