The Resilience of Democratic Innovations to Changes in Government

This paper examines the resilience of democratic innovations in the face of changing political will. Public-community collaboration is seen as an opportunity for enhancing citizen participation and fostering democratic innovation. The creation of spaces where organized citizens can collaboratively participate in the design and implementation of public policies that affect them represents a form of democratic innovation. This process involves the establishment of new mechanisms and institutions within public policy that contribute to "reimagining and deepening the role of citizens in governance processes, increasing opportunities for participation, deliberation, and influence" (Elstub and Escobar, 2019, p.11).

In this paper, we analyze the resilience of 'Patrimoni Ciutadà' program, approved by Barcelona City Council in 2016, which recognizes the capacity of citizens to manage municipal facilities with the goal of fostering citizen participation and community empowerment. The implementation of this program enabled collaboration between the associations managing these facilities and the City Council departments overseeing 'Patrimoni Ciutadà' (Pera and Bussu, 2024). However, following the 2023 municipal elections, the Socialist Party of Catalonia (a center-left party) won the majority, deprioritizing the public-commons collaboration spaces that had been established. This paper explores the resilience and transformation of these spaces under the new political leadership.

The results indicate that, although these collaborative spaces have been marginalized with the new government, a social imaginary has been cultivated in which community organizations play an active role and have a voice in policy development. This empowerment of community organizations has led to demands for the reopening and continuation of these participatory spaces.