Citizen Involvement without Citizens? a Critical Analysis of Participatory Dynamics in Public Innovation at the Île-De-France Region

In recent years, many public actors have sought to integrate citizens into the design and improvement of public services through what are termed democratic innovations. The “Smart” team of the Île-de-France Region, within the framework of the Smart Region strategy (2018-2021), aimed to fully involve citizens in the development of innovative public services in collaboration with public and private partners. As part of this strategy, the team sought to develop a new tool for citizen engagement called the “co-construction workshop.” However, this involvement is shaped by the constraints of “startup-style” public innovation, characterized by limited resources and tight deadlines.

Based on my PhD research, this paper presents an ethnographic analysis that combines political sociology and Science and Technology Studies, conducted within the Smart team on the citizen co-construction workshops organized between 2021 and 2022. By focusing on the challenges of inclusion and the institutional strategies employed, this study explores the tensions between the ambition of citizen participation and the reality of its implementation.

First, this paper will analyze how the Smart team defined citizens as key actors in the process, but primarily in economic rather than political terms. This ideal citizen, seen as both a potential consumer and a value creator, is tasked with addressing major social and environmental challenges through innovation, which redefines their role in the public sphere.

This paper will then examine the difficulties encountered in engaging the expected citizens, and the strategies developed to overcome these obstacles. Indeed, the regional team, supported by external consultants, often resorted to methods such as using personas (fictional representations of potential users of the innovations) or involving regional council staff to “play the role” of citizens during workshops. These practices raise questions about the relationship between genuine inclusion and substitution, where citizens are central in discourses but absent in practice.