Abstract
Participation across fields and disciplines is necessary to tackle today's grand challenges effectively – as they demand substantive participation of numerous actors with diverging interests. Furthermore, the issue of participation is a concern of politicians, civil society actors, of managers who, daily, enact different forms of participation with their collaborators seeking to reach their objectives. As a manager of a public multi-stakeholder initiative, I also faced the challenge of fostering participation to contribute to the objective of sustainable economic development of the south Croatian Islands through the European Union LEADER programme. LEADER Standing for Lien Entre Action de Développement de l'Economie Rurale. This dissertation stems from my managerial doubts and asks about how participation is constructed, defended, and practised. By answering these questions, I conclude that participation is a politically constructed process through time and across spatial scales.Chapter 1 analyses the political dynamics of the broader socio-political contexts in which Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) are embedded, taking a macro-level, processual perspective on how participation is constructed around the LEADER programme in Croatia (1999-2019). We demonstrate that participation was deployed in the country through two distinct regimes of participation, each featuring a particular mechanism of governance that privileges certain economic forms of production and exchange, as well as normative and cultural values that shape the type of participation occurring within the MSIs embedded in the regime.Chapter 2 examines how local actors organised around an MSI against a new, state-imposed, and EU-framed regulation that threatened local forms of livelihood on the Croatian peninsula of Pelješac, adopting a meso perspective on how the participation of local actors is defended. The study finds that appropriating dominant organisational logics from the national and European scales allowed the local actors to play the scales, i.e., accomplish the trans-scalar protection of participation at their local scale through time. They did so by constructing a (1) translocal alliance that grabbed different elements from varied local scales to build a (2) trans-scalar strategy which became central to the evolution of spatial scales. The findings suggest that local actors protect their political scale from broader hegemonic diffusion by appropriating dominant organisational logic to their advantage, thereby defending their interests and participation within their MSI.Lastly, chapter 3 builds a convergent mixed method research design to investigate the work of Local Action Groups – i.e., the publicly funded multi-stakeholder initiatives implementing LEADER - in Croatia, focusing on the micro perspective of how participation is used within an MSI. Analysis results in constructing a model for the practice of participation, identifying key variables around which the enactment of participation unfolds. These include the activation of territorial capital, the formation of a specific mode of governance, and particular deliberation practices. The model identifies the actions allowing to enact a substantive, as opposed to a simple procedural, form of participation. It provides an analytical approach that critically scrutinises participation processes.