Urban Governance: Models, Challenges and Citizen Participation

Urban governance is the set of processes, rules and relationships through which decisions about a city are made and carried out when power no longer rests with the city council alone but is shared among several levels of government, businesses, social organisations and residents. The term replaced urban government in the 1990s to describe a new reality: privatised services, semi-public agencies, partnerships with developers and citizen participation coexisting in the same city. Two political scientists, the Swede Jon Pierre and the Briton Gerry Stoker, set the framework with which that transformation is analysed today.

Jon Pierre and the four models of urban governance

Pierre, in his article Models of Urban Governance (1999), distinguishes four models according to who takes part and to what end. The managerial model treats the city as a service company that must be efficient and sees the citizen as a customer. The corporatist model negotiates decisions with unions, associations and organised groups, as in Scandinavian cities. The pro-growth model allies local government with real estate and business capital to attract investment, the dominant pattern in the United States. The welfare model prioritises redistribution and depends on transfers from central government. Every city combines several, and the weight of each explains its policies.

Gerry Stoker: from governing to steering through networks

Stoker, in Governance as Theory: Five Propositions (1998), set out the features that distinguish governance from traditional government: institutions and actors that are not public take part; the boundaries between public and private become blurred; actors depend on one another to achieve results; autonomous self-governing networks emerge; and the state stops commanding and begins steering through incentives and coordination. Stoker warns that this dispersion improves responsiveness but dilutes responsibility: when something goes wrong, it is no longer clear who must answer for it.

Challenges: coordination, equity and accountability

Coordination is the first challenge. The more actors intervene, the harder it is to keep a coherent direction, and goals diverge: the council seeks long-term cohesion, the contractor immediate profitability, the neighbourhood association the defence of its area. Equity is the second. Actors with more resources, developers, chambers of commerce, investment funds, enjoy privileged access to decision-making tables, while lower-income communities depend on participation mechanisms that are often consultative and late. Clarence Stone's urban regime theory showed that such informal coalitions govern many cities in practice.

Opportunities for participation and metropolitan cooperation

The opportunities are real too. Network governance has allowed social organisations to influence housing, climate and mobility policies that were once decided behind closed doors, and has brought tools such as participatory budgeting, born in Porto Alegre in 1989, or citizens' assemblies chosen by lot into municipal management. Cities such as Barcelona, Amsterdam and Bogotá have created digital platforms and neighbourhood councils with the power to propose, and metropolitan cooperation between municipalities makes it possible to tackle problems, transport, housing, water, that no single council can solve alone.

The challenge of contemporary urban governance is to combine the flexibility of networks with democratic accountability. That requires transparency about who takes part and with what interests, clear rules on how decisions are made and who answers for them, public technical capacity so as not to depend on private consultants, and mechanisms that give the least resourced neighbourhoods a real voice and vote. Pierre and Stoker agree that governance is neither good nor bad in itself: it is the framework in which it is decided whether the city is run for everyone or for those who already hold power.