TY - JOUR
T1 - Renegotiating roles in local governments
T2 - Facing resistances to citizen participation in Chile
AU - Sanfuentes, Matias
AU - Garreton, Matias
N1 - Funding Information:
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (CONICYT/FONDAP/15130009).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - This article presents a reflective analysis of a participatory action research between the authors’ institution and the Community Development Directorate of Santiago Municipality. This work generated organizational change for implementing new citizen participation policies through a collective reflection about ambiguous roles and organizational paradoxes that allowed to harness the creative potential of emotions and embodied knowledge of public officers. Through workshops of organizational role analysis, a communicative space was built to contain the organizational contradictions generated by the lack of definitions of fieldwork agents’ roles and the insufficient institutional support. This led to implement a new approach for citizen participation, with an unprecedented inter-sectoral structure within this municipality. However, in the absence of structural incentives for internal cooperation, this development was abandoned by the authorities at the onset of an unsuccessful re-election campaign. Nevertheless, these temporary achievements show the usefulness of socio-analytic methods for transforming organizations in rigid institutional frameworks. This experience was a first attempt to provide institutional support for inter-sectoral citizen participation policies in Santiago, suggesting ways to generate and sustain long-term changes that are sorely needed in Chilean institutions.
AB - This article presents a reflective analysis of a participatory action research between the authors’ institution and the Community Development Directorate of Santiago Municipality. This work generated organizational change for implementing new citizen participation policies through a collective reflection about ambiguous roles and organizational paradoxes that allowed to harness the creative potential of emotions and embodied knowledge of public officers. Through workshops of organizational role analysis, a communicative space was built to contain the organizational contradictions generated by the lack of definitions of fieldwork agents’ roles and the insufficient institutional support. This led to implement a new approach for citizen participation, with an unprecedented inter-sectoral structure within this municipality. However, in the absence of structural incentives for internal cooperation, this development was abandoned by the authorities at the onset of an unsuccessful re-election campaign. Nevertheless, these temporary achievements show the usefulness of socio-analytic methods for transforming organizations in rigid institutional frameworks. This experience was a first attempt to provide institutional support for inter-sectoral citizen participation policies in Santiago, suggesting ways to generate and sustain long-term changes that are sorely needed in Chilean institutions.
KW - Participatory action research
KW - communicative space
KW - emotions
KW - learning from failure
KW - organizational change
KW - role analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058511329&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1476750318801470
DO - 10.1177/1476750318801470
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85058511329
VL - 19
SP - 411
EP - 432
JO - Action Research
JF - Action Research
SN - 1476-7503
IS - 2
ER -