Pappa, A., & Paio, A. (2023, October). The role of commons-oriented policies in the transformation of urban governance: The case of the participatory budget BIP/ZIP in Lisbon [Poster Presentation]. In 2nd PARTICIPATORY DESIGN CONFERENCE. Transforming the City: Public Space & Environment, Inequalities & Democracy. Athens, Greece
https://en.participatorylab.org/conference2023
Posted on 05-05-2024
Abstract
This research focuses on the role of commons-oriented local strategies in urban regeneration, in transforming the urban governance through enabling local organisations and community groups, especially the most disadvantaged, to participate in local decision-making processes. The research is situated in Lisbon and the participatory budget program of BIP/ZIP.
Urban commons are urban resources, such as public spaces that are managed by their users in a non-profit oriented way following principles of direct democracy. They are mostly bottom-up yet are increasingly integrated in local strategies that promote collective management of resources through multi-stakeholder governance structures, such as the quintuple helix. PB is such a commons-oriented tool that facilitates collective decision-making on the allocation of public resources, be it funding or/and spaces also prioritizing disadvantaged groups.
The BIP/ZIP participatory budget aims to foster socio-territorial cohesion in Lisbon by integrating 67 ‘priority’ neighbourhoods. It promotes active citizenship through the establishment of partnerships among parish councils, citizens, local associations and NGOs that propose territorial interventions through concrete local actions3. Since 2010, the program has funded 416 projects with an implementation grant of up to 50K EUR/project, involving thousands of different partner entities.
The study employs a data-driven analysis to investigate the matrix of local partnerships formulated through BIP/ZIP (2011-2021) and their dynamic role in the transformation of the urban governance in the city of Lisbon. commonsd
Related vocabulary
Public-civic Partnership
Urban Commons
Area: Community participation
Public-civic partnerships (PCPs) or public-community collaborations, as discussed by Hopman et al., (2021), are forms of cooperation between the state and civil society. They involve transferring the ownership and control of urban resources to the hands of citizens. In this context, they can be viewed as commons-led institutional models, offering a ground of commoning the city. Consequently, they are also referred to as public commons partnerships (Milburn & Russell, 2019).
Public-civic partnerships offer alternatives to the traditional binary state and market dynamic seen in the public-private partnership (PPP) model, which gained prominence after 2000 as a new form of cooperation between the state and the private sector. PPPs are characterized by long-term arrangements in which private sector contractors take on design, construction, operational, and sometimes financial responsibilities, becoming providers of traditionally public services (European Commision, 2003). However, PPP models have faced criticism for privatizing public goods, services and spaces, often prioritising private investment over public interests (Horvat, 2019).
On the contrary, PCPs propose an alternative approach. Instead of relying on private investors for the development of crucial urban infrastructure, public bodies collaborate with communities to design, produce and govern this infrastructure as commons. By doing so, PCPs drive systemic change, offering innovative methods to democratize urban governance. They empower communities to transparently work with the public sector, determining the future of public assets such as food, care, water, energy, housing, and urban development (Heron, Milburn & Russell, 2021; Hopman et al., 2021).
In recent years, cities such as Barcelona, Bologna, Naples, Ghent and Amsterdam, among others, have been developing commons-oriented strategies and municipal networks that enable and promote PCPs. These initiatives are often facilitated through contracts or ‘collaboration pacts’ (Foster & Iaione, 2016) among different stakeholders, notably from the civic and social sectors.
The regulatory frameworks and operationalisation details, such as the legal form of the partnering entities, the duration of ownership transfers, and approved interventions in public spaces, vary from case to case (Bianchi, 2022). Experiences from the implementation of these policies show that several influential factors affect the development of PCPs. These are ideological, legal, political and economic in nature and include political will, existing laws, development strategies. material and funding sources, access to information, cooperation opportunities between the public and civic sectors, and further education of both realms on cooperation models (Cultural Creative Spaces & Cities, 2018).
Among the several types of resources shared through PCPs, many municipal strategies facilitate the sharing of public spaces, which has significant implications from a sustainable local development point of view. These strategies involve the temporary or long-term transfer of ownership of municipal spaces, including empty buildings and building parts, streets and open spaces, and industrial heritage sites, to citizens or various associations formed between them and other sectors. Through these partnerships, sites are regenerated, transformed, and used for the benefit of the neighbourhood, while the public sector retains a supportive role. Throughout this process, several places and services, such as communal gardens, neighbourhood parks, solidary kitchens, caregiving and solidarity services, as well as community, educational and cultural centres, are created locally, by and for the residents.
Created on 08-11-2023
Read more ->Area: Community participation
Urban commons are shared resources in the city that are managed by their users in a collaborative and non-profit-oriented way. The concept is based on the idea that urban resources and services that represent fundamental rights in the city should be accessible to and governed by the urban dwellers, to support the social capital and the sustainability of the urban communities. Hence, their value lies mostly in the social benefit produced during their use and they are therefore different from commodities that follow traditional market principles of profit maximisation and private ownership (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015).
The concept of urban commons is an extrapolation in the urban context of the notion of commons which historically refers to natural resources available to all and not owned by any individual, such as air, water and land. The commons discourse became significantly popular thanks to the fundamental contribution of Elinor Ostrom (1990) and particularly after she was awarded the Nobel in Economics in 2009. Ostrom presented cases and design principals for the collective management of common resources by those that use and benefit from them, challenging the predominant negative connotations that had peaked with Garret Hardin’s (1968) Tragedy of the Commons where he analysed the impossible sustainability of common pool resources due to individual benefits.
During the last fifteen years, a vast body of academic literature on urban commons has been produced, linking the notion to other urban theories, such as the right to the city (Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1996), biopolitics (Angelis & Stavrides, 2009; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Linebaugh, 2008; Parr, 2015; Stavrides, 2015, 2016), peer-to-peer urbanism and sharing economy (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015; Iaione, 2015; Iaione et al., 2019; McLaren & Agyeman, 2015; Shareable, 2018).
The notion of the urban commons encompasses resources, people and social practices (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015):
Commons resources are urban assets of various types, characteristics and scales (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015). Examples of commons resources include physical spaces, such as community gardens, street furniture and playgrounds; intangible elements such as culture and public art; services such as safety; digital spaces, such as internet access. Urban commons literature and practices have attempted to determine several typological categorisations of the urban commons resources, the most notable being that of Hess (2008), who classified them as cultural, knowledge, markets, global, traditional, infrastructure, neighbourhood, medical and health commons.
The commoners are the group that uses and manages the urban commons resources. It is a self-defined and organically formed group of individuals whose role is to collectively negotiate the boundaries and the rules of the management of the commons resources (Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015). In a neighbourhood setting, for example, the commoners may be individual residents, or community groups, cooperatives, NGOs and local authorities. De Angelis and Stavrides (2010) points out that commoners might include diverse groups or communities that are not necessarily homogenous.
Commoning refers to the collaborative participatory process of accessing, negotiating and governing the commons resources. The term was introduced by Peter Linebaugh (2008) and refers to the “social process that creates and reproduces the commons” (Angelis & Stavrides, 2010). Commoning is a form of public involvement for the public good (Lohmann, 2016). Commoning implies a commitment to solidarity and cooperation, to the creation of added value to the community, to democracy and inclusiveness and is connected to a hacking culture(Dellenbaugh-Losse et al., 2015). Hence, commoning practices can include various activities such as co-creation, capacity building and placemaking, support through learning, innovation, performing art, protest, urban gardening and commuting.
In contemporary societies in crisis, the urban commons theory is often used as a counter-movement to the commodification of urban life and as a response to complex issues, proving essential for the well-being of marginalised communities and for the provision of affordable and sustainable housing. Urban commons management conveys the re-appropriation of urban values (Borch & Kornberger, 2015) breaking silos of expertise and knowledge by adopting a collaborative approach to defining and solving the problems at stake. The practice of urban commons helps to build values of openness, experimentation, creativity, trust, solidarity and commitment within stakeholder groups.
Created on 14-10-2022
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Participatory budgets and Sustainable Development Goals
Posted on 29-10-2022
Nowadays, it feels almost impossible to speak about sustainability and not refer to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), developed under the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Agenda brings together economic, environmental and social stands of solutions to holistically address global challenges, based on the principle of “leaving no one behind”. The goals are set out in 169 targets and are formulated within five pillars: people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership.
Committed to the Agenda, the UN member states adapt their national and local strategies not only for the implementation of measures that contribute to the achievement of the developed goals and targets, but equally significantly for the monitoring of their progress in this direction. In this regard, countries and municipalities develop mechanisms to recontextualise the global targets and report their annual progress.
Placing people as a key pillar for sustainable development denotes that the measures and monitoring should exceed the macroeconomic indicators and look into mechanisms that care for how individuals’ life change for the better. Measuring the effects of such mechanisms at a local level can be a challenging matter, as they entail parameters that are in general consensus difficult to quantify. In this context, in my 4-month secondment at the Department of Housing and Local Development at the Municipality of Lisbon I explored the contribution of the ongoing BIP/ZIP participatory budget in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Lisbon.
Participatory Budgets
Participatory budgets are mechanisms for democratising public funds in the sense that they enable the active participation of citizens in the decision-making of how national or municipal resources are spent. Among the main effects of participatory budgeting discussed in the research community are the modernisation of public administrations through transparency and accountability, the efficiency in tackling cross-disciplinary challenges, such as inclusivity and inequalities through the collaborative ways of urban governance they introduce, as well as the reorientation of public expenditures towards least advantaged populations. Doing so, the structures and processes they provide are particularly relevant for the discussion on sustainable development and according to the UN Habitat’s Report (2020) they are considered as accelerators for achieving the SDGs.
BIP/ZIP
Portugal is seen as a paradigmatic case in disseminating participatory budgets issued by municipal agendas (Falanga & Lüchmann, 2019), counting more than 270 active programs in its mainland[1]. The BIP/ZIP Program in Lisbon that I am also researching as a case study beyond the limits of my secondment, was launched in 2011 as the first participatory budget implemented in a European capital city. The project annually funds bottom-up initiatives developed by local partnerships with the objective to promote social and territorial cohesion in priority areas.
During the four months that I was hosted at the Municipality of Lisbon, I was lucky enough to have access to the secondary data of the program and enrich my dataset with qualitative and quantitative information. Looking at the program’s data in correlation to the SDGs, I was able to draw direct and indirect links to specific goals and targets and deliver a preliminary data-driven methodology to measure the impact of the program for the city of Lisbon. Even at this early stage of the methodology, I could safely assume that after ten years of implementation, BIP/ZIP has a significant contribution on achieving the SDGs in Lisbon, so the emerging question is if it is taken into consideration when measuring the city’s progress towards achieving the SDGs.
To make a long answer short, my research showed that the program both at a strategic level and at the micro-scale of each project, is not really accounted in Lisbon’s SDG progress monitoring[2], which indicates that further effort should be made in integrating social indicators into the measuring processes.
Acknowledgements
The end of my secondment was celebrated with a presentation of the results and a very engaging discussion with members of the Department of Housing and Local Development and the BIP/ZIP Division. For this as well as for all the support and hospitality during my stay at the Municipality, I would like to thank Filipa Roseta, Vasco Moreira Rato, Gonçalo Armindo and Isabela Teixeira da Mota, as well as members of the BIP/ZIP Division Maria Antónia Victória, Teresa Tome and Monica Alfredo.
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Notes
[1] More information on http://portugalparticipa.pt/Monitoring/?tipo=816f6188-3bac-4dac-92af-3c0892b3018a&keyword=&district=&estado=
[2] For more information on Portugal’s SDG monitoring process with information at municipal level, please visit ODS Local at https://odslocal.pt/
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References
Falanga, R., & Lüchmann, L. H. H. (2019). Participatory budgets in Brazil and Portugal: comparing patterns of dissemination. Policy Studies, 41(6), 603–622.
UN-Habitat. (2020). Exploring the Role of Participatory Budgeting in Accelerating the SDGs: A Multidimensional Approach in Escobedo, Mexico.
Secondments
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