A Critical Analysis of “Participation”: the Case-study of the 2017-2018 Participatory Budget of Milan, seen from the Neighbourhood of Public Housing of San Siro

Abstract

Participatory processes are criticized by some scholars because they are often functional to the production of political consensus rather than orienting governmental decisions. Even if it is valid, this interpretation risks not considering the agency of the actors involved in these processes, reducing them to completely passive recipients of decisions already taken at institutional levels. Starting from a specific case study, that is the elaboration of a project proposal presented by a network of associations of the public housing neighbourhood of San Siro to the 2017-2018 Participatory Budget of the Municipality of Milan, in this article I will show how the analysis of “participation” developed in the field of linguistic anthropology can help in re-discussing and problematizing this category in other fields of social sciences, highlighting the spaces of negotiation that these processes still activate.