A "Participative Washing" ? Local Political Order and Democratic Innovation.

How and why does the political order invest participative modes at local level? Based on an ethnographic study carried out in a rural area in the Hauts-de-France, this paper will show how the agents who dominate the local field – councillors and high-ranking officials - define the roles of the members of participatory innovations, in order to stabilize the state of the field in which they are dominant. We focus on the relationships between the members of participatory workshops (residents, parents, teachers), set up to draft the social and educational policy objectives of a territorial project, and inter-municipal councillors of this territory. These latter, dominants, ignore or reclaim the participants' activities, which reinforces their dominant position, fix positions in the local field and, at the same time, define the roles of each agent.

The proposal will emphasize the value of local social capital and of symbolic capital in the local production of public policies, expressed in re-appropriation of the work of participatory workshop members by local councillors. The degree of insertion of agents in the local order offers the possibility of putting certain policies on the political agenda -or not. For example, some parents and education professionals intend to prioritize the inclusion and support of disabled people. As members of a participatory workshop, they introduce this project to the assembly of local councillors. However, these dominants ignored the request as soon as the exchange was over, preferring to give an economic direction to the agenda that they manage, rather than the social branch outlined by the participants. Nonetheless, elected officials indicate that they use the democratic innovation to build their policies and, in other cases, they reinvest the proposals in reminding that they’ve initiated the participatory initiative. This paper will finally propose to interpret these practices as “Participative Washing”.