Conceptual Elements of Institutional Participatory Governance

Introduction

To analyze participatory governance is necessary to study the essential preconditions of the institutional framework. Political philosophers, partisan and elected politicians, and democratic activists are promoting the concept of institutional participatory governance with the intention to cure the ills of representative democracies, caused mainly by failures in the mechanisms of representative and participatory democracy where the interests of society seem far from political decisions. Organizational theories and practices emphasize the transference from stable institutional structures to more fluid networks structures, clusters and other organizational forms of association (Castells, 1996a).

Institutions, participation, and governance require to be conceptualized for institutional development. The conceptual forms of participatory governance with regional institutional and legal governance can be differentiated based on organizational cultures and structures, such as agreements of cooperation and working protocols (Haselsberger, 2007). Regional spaces and spaces of regionalism are different concepts in relation to cultural spaces of institutional participatory governance (Jones and MacLeod, 2004). The application of institutionalized forms of cooperation can be explained by the territorial and cultural proximity between the cross-border regions framed by the favorable spatial integration processes of administrative cooperation and the citizenship participation model¹.

A stable organizational structure regarding the institutional design formed by cooperation framework in cross-border regions and their cultural pre-conditions and thickness (Ferreira 2015). This institutional design should be a meeting point between institutions, governments, businesses, civic organizations, and citizens (Committee of the Regions 2014). Institutional isomorphism holds that organizational models, once institutionalized, become fuzzy, allowing organizational structures to become more like one another (Beckter, 2010; Scott, 2005; DiMaggio and Powell, 1999; Meyer and Rowan, 1999; Brunsson and Olsen, 1993).

Organizational models are the set of practices, routines, procedures, or techniques that an organization implements to achieve relatively stable objectives and goals, either through a planned strategy or because of its own inertia in the search for solutions to specific problems (Montaño, 2001; DiMaggio and Powell, 1999).

The new political processes entail an institutional construction of design among the various actors and institutions of political life and the issues of interest. Institutionalization is a stumbling block for the design, planning, and implementation of collaborative governance models that require the synchronization of action frameworks and regulatory provisions between local and regional authorities and ownership and legal responsibility, etc.

The construction of an analytical framework after the conceptualization of organizational and cultural conditions of institutional participatory governance serves as the construct of an empirical case analysis given the different forms of re-scaling differentiated in territorial, functional, legal, and institutional conditions. Empirical research in participatory governance on life-political issues and concerns requires methodological and conceptual innovation to expand the notion and unit of analysis of politics across formal political institutions, identification of publics in relation to the state, and the adoption or generation of the social phenomena such as the power, knowledge, institutions, and agency in the different spheres of social activities such as economy, science, and politics. These processes are constituted in the mutual shape of coproduction in empirical research.

The concept of institutional participatory governance has already spread across the nation-states’ borders to include active and passive forms of citizenship participation removing the different barriers and introducing inclusion and deliberation and avoiding antidemocratic tendencies (Kangas 2017). Research perspectives on models of inclusion are differently perceived and framed by translation sociology, (Czarniawska, 2002) policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000), and institutional transplantation (De Jong et al., 2002), supported by cognitive resources and conditionality instead of authority.