Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona

Cities xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona Ismael Blanco ⇑ Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

a r t i c l e

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Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Governance Networks Urban power Urban regimes Urban policy Barcelona

a b s t r a c t Contemporary explanations of urban governance in Europe have underlined the increasing influence of the ‘networks paradigm’. For some, urban network governance revitalises local democracy by fostering a more plural, inclusive and participative approach to urban policymaking. For others, the shift towards collaborative governance facilitates the concentration of urban political power and the cooptation of civil society into the rationalities of neoliberalism. This paper argues that such accounts are excessively reductive, failing adequately to recognise the spatio-temporal complexities of urban governance trajectories in Europe. The paper argues that a reinvigorated regime-theoretical approach can help overcome the networks/neoliberalism dualism by showing how different coalitions mobilise different sets of resources over time and in different policy arenas. Prospects for urban democracy are not only determined by the evolution of structural forces like the 2008 crisis or global neoliberalism. They are also influenced by the outcomes of political competition between alternative coalitions within each city. The analysis of the case of Barcelona illustrates the value of such analytical perspective and of the research agenda that stems from it. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Contemporary explanations of urban politics in Europe have put their focus on transformations of urban governance in the context of a broader process of state restructuring. Prominent among the different theories and narratives analysing and explaining such transformations are those that since the late 1990s have claimed that traditional modes of bureaucratic government are being replaced by new modes of collaborative governance. Through the concept of ‘‘collaborative governance’’ – or others close to it like ‘interactive governance’, ‘governance-beyond-the-state’, the ‘partnership paradigm’, ‘joined-up government’, ‘network governance’ or simply ‘governance’ (in opposition to ‘government’) – this strand of the literature has underlined the increasing significance of collaboration between governmental and non-governmental actors in the making of urban public policies. Whereas public–private collaboration could hardly be presented as novel in the United States, its expansion in Europe has been much more striking because of the dominance of a state-centred policy approach, particularly in the context of the building and consolidation of welfare states.

⇑ Address: Mòdul de Recerca A, 1ª planta, Parc de Recerca de la UAB, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain. Tel.: +34 93 586 88 19. E-mail address: [email protected]

According to this narrative, the shift ‘‘from government to governance’’ is not exclusive but it is particularly evident at the urban realm. In a monograph about the British case, for example, Leach and Percy-Smith (2001: 1) concluded that the traditional conception of local government as ‘‘what the council does’’ had to be replaced by a new one in which local policymaking ‘‘increasingly involves multi-agency working, partnerships and policy networks which cut across organizational boundaries’’. In reaction to the criticism that such a shift might be a peculiarity of the UK (see, for example, Le Galès, 2002), John (2001: 174) stated that: ‘‘the charge of (UK) exceptionalism should be rejected, since the Netherlands, Germany and Spain are as reforming as the UK on certain dimensions (of governance)’’. In the same vein, Newman stated (2005: 85) that ‘‘the idea of a shift from markets and hierarchies towards networks and partnerships as modes of coordination is a dominant narrative’’. Network governance became a potent ‘orthodoxy’ (Davies, 2011; Marinetto, 2003; Marsh, 2008) in Europe during those years, both in political and academic discourses. A long time has passed since the publication of the work of authors like Leach and Percy-Smith (2001), John (2001), Denters and Rose (2005) and others who epitomised this narrative (e.g. Rhodes, 1997). Looking back, we can observe how enthusiasm about the meaning and the implications of this transformation has drastically diminished. In its original formulation, networks were supposed to ‘‘overcome the limitations of anarchic market

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.007 0264-2751/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Blanco, I. Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona. J. Cities (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.007

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exchange and top-down planning in an increasing complex and global world’’ (Jessop, 2003: 101–02). Networks potentially unlocked a third way between states and markets, extending the public sphere, empowering communities and cultivating inclusive policy making (Deakin and Taylor, 2002: 17; quoted in Davies, 2011). The critics of this perspective, however, have presented network governance as a fundamental facet of neoliberal hegemony (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Davies, 2011, 2012; Fuller & Geddes, 2008; Geddes, 2006; Swyingedouw, 2005). Rather than the development of new plural, horizontal and inclusive forms of network governance, critics say, what we observe in European cities is the increasing concentration of urban power in the hands of a few political and business elites. Discourses of horizontality underlying the network paradigm have colluded in drawing a veil of discretion over power relationships in the city. This paper starts from the premise that despite the differences in the uses and interpretations of network governance in different European countries, and despite the evolution of this debate over the last decade, there continues to be a fundamental tension between those who perceive the evolution towards the network paradigm as an opportunity to democratise urban governance and those who emphasise the highly asymmetrical nature of urban political power and its increasing concentration as a consequence of neoliberalisation. The central contribution of this paper is to argue that such accounts are excessively reductive, failing adequately to recognise the complex inter-relationships and dependencies among different modes of governing and spatio-temporal variation in different urban governance trajectories. Through the analysis of the trajectories of urban governance in Barcelona since the first democratic elections in 1979, this paper highlights the need to reconnect meta-narratives of urban governance with micro-level accounts of the ‘messiness’ of local politics and practices (Blanco, Griggs, & Sullivan, 2014). The paper argues that a reinvigorated regime-theoretical approach can help overcome the networks/neoliberalism dualism by showing how different coalitions mobilise different sets of resources over time and in different policy arenas. The paper contributes to regime theory by illustrating how patterns of regime-governance vary not only among cities, but within them too.

Was network governance such a good idea?1 During the 1990s and the early 2000s networks became a dominant concept in the theorisation of urban governance shifts in Europe. The move ‘from government to governance’ (Rhodes, 1997) was considered to be occurring not only at the local level but at the national and supranational levels too, reflecting a more fundamental change in the nature of political power, in the modalities of state-society interaction and in the modes of policymaking (Pierre & Peters, 2000). The debate on the meaning, the drivers and the implications of such transformation adopted different tones in different countries and evolved significantly. Original formulations for the emergence of the governance paradigm in the UK, for example, referred to governance networks as ‘self-organising, interorganisational networks’ enjoying a significant autonomy from the state (Rhodes, 1997: 15). One of the fundamental features of the ‘Anglo-governance school’ is the emphasis on the ‘hollowing out of the state’, mainly as the result of ‘‘market style policies initiated in the 1980s’’ (Marinetto, 2003: 595). Networks, in this context, were interpreted as a search for integration within an increasingly fragmented organisational landscape emerging from the privatisation 1 Such epigraph inspires on the title of a seminal paper by Stoker (2011) in Public Administration.

reforms of the Thatcherite era (Lowndes & Skelcher, 1998: 315; see also Rhodes, 2007). Bevir and Rhodes (2010) identified metagovernance theory as a ‘second wave’ in governance literature following the Anglo-Governance School. Based on the contributions of Nordic academics like Kjaer (2004) and Sorensen and Torfing (2005, 2008), among others, ‘‘metagovernance brings the state back in as the coordinator of governance networks and, in the case of governance failure, as accountable body of last resort’’ (Davies, 2011: 19). Metagovernance, in this latter sense, is partly a response to the problematic relationship between governance networks and democracy (Klijn & Skelcher, 2007), placing the responsibility of the ‘democratic anchorage’ of governance networks on state institutions (see Sorensen & Torfing, 2005). A fundamental debate in the network governance literature, thus, is to what extent (and under what circumstances) the shift ‘from (hierarchical) government to (collaborative) governance’ entails a more pluralistic and democratic style of government or, on the contrary, provokes an increasing concentration of power and weakens democracy. As recognised by Klijn and Skelcher (2007: 588), ‘‘in the absence of evidence, the debate has been polarized’’. The confrontation between the Differentiated Polity Model (DPM) proposed by Rhodes and Bevir (2003) and the Asymmetric Power Model (APM) by Marsh (2008) is a paradigm case for understanding the tensions within explanation of network governance. These two models offer alternative explanations on how power relations have shifted (or not) in the United Kingdom, although they have strong relevance for the debate on urban governance transformations – within and beyond the UK. In the remainder of this section we review the terms of such debate and its reflection in different accounts of urban governance developments. Bevir and Rhodes’ (2003: 41) main thesis was that ‘‘British government has shifted (. . .) from the government of a unitary state to governance in and by networks’’.2 The new polity, in their view, involves a continuing process of negotiation and exchange between different actors at different levels of governance (local, regional, national and supranational), and among different sectors (government, private and voluntary). The state has been ‘‘hollowed-out’’ from above by international interdependence, from below by marketisation and sideways by agencies, which has ‘‘undermined the ability of the core executive to act effectively, making it increasingly reliant on diplomacy’’ (2003: 58). In a context of increasing fragmentation and dispersion of resources, governments cannot monopolise the policy process anymore. This does not mean that they do not play a significant role. The concept of metagovernance, as suggested by Jessop (2003) points to the adoption of a new steering (and not rowing) role which entails: (1) setting the rules of the game; (2) shaping discourses/narratives/identities; and/or (3) distributing resources. Such a perspective tends to provide a fundamentally optimistic insight into the transformations of governance and political power. The fragmentation of political power entails more pluralism and opens an opportunity window for enhanced citizen participation in public decision-making. Although it is accepted that governance networks are not necessarily democratic per se (Bogasson & Musso, 2006; Klijn & Skelcher, 2007; Sorensen & Torfing, 2005, 2008, 2009), this strand of the literature tends to see potential in them for democratic renewal – particularly if they are properly metagoverned. Network governance also improves the capacity for providing effective and legitimate solutions to complex problems (Waagenar, 2007). A widespread perspective within this strand of the literature is that the emergence of the ‘networks paradigm’

2 Rhodes now tends to treat network governance as a story rather than as a transformative empirical phenomenon (see Rhodes, 2011).

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was an adaptative response to the increasing complexity and dynamism of societies (Börtzel, 2011; Kooiman, 2003). The shift to network governance and the purported democratic potential of this evolving transformation are particularly evident at the local level. Stoker’s (2004) conception of ‘‘networked community governance’’ reflected this sentiment. In his view, networking allows for greater effectiveness in tackling the typically complex problems of cities through cross-sectoral and multi-level networks. The model ‘‘retains a strong role for local government as a coordinator in order to join up the challenge of working across boundaries’’ (Stoker, 2011: 17). However, this role is supposedly performed by technologies of ‘‘soft power’’ including diplomacy, communication and bargaining.3 The APM was a direct response to the DPM and represents a good summary of the main arguments against the network governance model. The APM accepts that there has been a move from government to governance (Marsh, 2008: 257), but it emphasises the persistence and the intensity of power asymmetries, in contrast to the pluralist orientation of the DPM (see below). Where the DPM sees networks as a pervasive mode of governance; the APM contends that hierarchy remains dominant. Acknowledging new challenges to the authority of government, the APM nevertheless rejects the idea of a hollowed-out state and it emphasises the persistence of a strong centre. The APM thus underlines the asymmetric nature of exchange relations between different types of actors. Such asymmetries of power, according to the APM, are a reflection of structured inequality in society that is in turn reflected in networks themselves (Marsh, 2008: 257–258). In the urban realm, this approach has been extended and adapted through the critique of the neoliberalisation of cities. Brenner and Theodore (2002: 349) see cities as ‘‘strategically crucial geographical arenas’’ for the articulation of neoliberal policies and practices. In their account on how this process has unfolded in the US and Western Europe, they recognise the increasing significance of networks in urban policymaking, but their interpretation of the origins of the ‘networks paradigm’ differs from the most optimistic accounts. Based on the periodisation of urban neoliberalisation proposed by Peck and Tickell (2002), they frame the emergence of new networked forms of urban governance in the era of ‘‘roll-out neoliberalism’’ of the early 1990s, where the neoliberal project is reconstituted ‘‘in response to its own immanent contradictions and crisis tendencies’’ (Brenner & Theodore, 2002: 374). The new institutional arrangements typical of the ‘‘roll-out’’ era include the establishment of cooperative business-led networks in local politics, new forms of interfirm cooperation and industrial clustering to promote local economic development, and new city and metropolitan-wide institutions that promote cross-sectoral and intergovernmental coordination (Brenner & Theodore, 2002: 374). Thus, according to this perspective, networks mainly bring together urban economic and political elites, seriously eroding fundamental democratic principles such as representativeness, transparency and accountability (see Swyingedouw, 2005). Critical perspectives recognise that beyond elite-centred network arrangements, the ‘network paradigm’ has also entailed the development of new mechanisms of citizen participation, but they tend to see them as systems of co-optation and of enrolment for social and community organisations into the rationalities of neoliberalism – rather than as devices of citizen empowerment (Blakeley, 2010; Guarneros-Meza & Geddes, 2010). Davies (2011) goes one step further in this line of reasoning when, despite 3 More recently, Stoker has acknowledged that ‘hard powers’ of coercion, regulation and economic incentives have always played a much more prominent role than authors like Rhodes and himself originally claimed (Stoker, 2011).

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recognising the increasing importance of networking and the centrality of the ‘‘ideology of networks’’ in the ‘‘neoliberal hegemonic project’’, he emphasises the vitality of the hierarchical and coercive state for the maintenance of social order. More recently, this strand of the literature has emphasised how the global economic crisis started in 2008 has reinforced ‘‘neoliberal rationalities and disciplines’’, leading to a further entrenchment of ‘‘market-disciplinary modes of governance’’ (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2012: 265) which strengthen authoritarianism, solidify state-corporate networks and undermine the plurality of governance networks. To sum up, the perspectives here summarised accept that a profound transformation of (urban) governance is on the way; they accept the crisis of the old bureaucratic model and its gradual replacement by network arrangements. They also maintain that state institutions continue to perform very significant functions; and frame such shifts within broader processes of structural transformation such as the growing complexity and dynamism of societies or the expansion of neoliberalism. They both represent big narratives on how urban governance is being transformed. Thus, they are formulated at an analytical scale that prevents more refined analysis of the complexities of such transformations (and continuities) over time and across different urban spaces. The discussion of Barcelona shows that local practices are complex and evolving, and embody a multiplicity of trajectories. Consequently, the challenge for urban theory is to take a more nuanced approach to spatio-temporal differentiation in the development of urban governance. The paper argues that adapting elements of urban regime theory can help navigate these challenges.4

Differentiated urban governance trajectories: lessons from urban regime theory Interestingly, the debate about the trajectories and nature of urban governance in contemporary Europe resonate in unexpected ways with the pluralist-elitist debate of the 1950–70s in the US and its development through urban regime theory (for a review, see Harding, 2009; Mossberger, 2009; Stone, 2005). Underlying the DPM and other similar theories is a conception of power as fragmented across different policy areas and distributed across a plurality of social groups. Rhodes himself affirms that he ‘‘always explicitly agreed (he has) presented a broadly neo-pluralist argument’’ (Rhodes, 2007: 125). The critiques of the DPM posed by Marsh and others resonate with the elitist thesis that urban power tends to concentrate in the hands of a few (economic and political) elites and that power asymmetries essentially reflect urban social inequalities. Identifying parallels with community power studies and more specifically with urban regime theory is helpful in framing the debate about urban network governance for three main reasons. Firstly, community power studies and regime theory remind us that the urban policy process is intrinsically relational, that is to say, it involves more or less stable relations between government and non-governmental actors, which mediate the development of public policies (Harding, 2009). Beyond urban studies, different theoretical approaches like the policy networks approach, 4 In emphasising the need for more complexity-sensitive explanations of urban governance change, this paper accepts Brenner, Peck, and Theodore’s (2010) claim that ‘‘the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post-1970s capitalism’’. However, unlike the ‘variegated neoliberalisation’ approach, this paper does not presume that varieties of urban governance have to be subsumed within the neoliberal paradigm.

Please cite this article in press as: Blanco, I. Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona. J. Cities (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.007

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(neo)corporativism and inter-organisational theory have also underlined the intrinsically interactive nature of the policy process (for a review, see Klijn, 1997). Unlike network governance theories, what stems from such approaches is that public–private interactions are not anything new but something that has always occurred – a point clearly made by leading regime-theorist Clarence Stone (see Stone, 2009: 266–7). The literature on network governance, thus, faces a twofold – conceptual and analytical – challenge. The first (conceptual) challenge is to distinguish what is new in the network governance model – in what sense the ‘new’ network governance arrangements differ from the more traditional patterns of collaboration? The second (analytical) challenge is to scrutinise the different historical and geographical configurations of the ‘mix’ between old and new models of governance (Davies, 2011: 57) and the tensions and complementarities between them. Since its hey-day in the late 1990s and 2000s, the influence of regime theory in European urban studies has declined somewhat. Arguably, however, in emphasising the role of locality and variation in regime agendas and composition (Stone, 1993), it can assist us in overcoming the conceptual silos in which the network governance debate seems to be mired. As Mossberger (2009: 43) states, ‘‘the possibility of variation in regime agendas distinguishes regime analysis from other political economy approaches’’, which makes it a good antidote against the tendency, criticised by Provan and Kenis (2008: 233), to treat governance networks ‘‘as undifferentiated forms, as if they all could be characterized in the same general way’’.5 Of particular importance is the distinction elaborated by Stone (1993) between maintenance, development, middle class progressive and lower class opportunity expansion regimes. The main goal of development regimes is to expand and to develop the city. As they require significant resources they usually involve a coalition between local political and economic elites. Middle-class progressive regimes focus on such measures as environmental protection, affordable housing and urban amenities in neighbourhoods. They consist of electoral and political coalitions among progressive groups from all across the city. Lower class opportunity regimes focus on the expansion of opportunities for disadvantaged communities and urban areas and are made of coalitions between community-based organisations, NGO’s and communitybased public agents. Finally, maintenance regimes focus on the administration of routine functions of city government and therefore need fewer resources from the private and the community sectors. Regime-theoretical approaches often adopt this typology in order to define dominant modes of governance across different cities (see also Pierre, 1999). However, the heuristic can also be adapted to explore different coalitions between government and non-governmental actors across urban spaces and policy fields within particular cities. From this perspective, the governance of cities would be determined by the balance of power among potentially competing coalitions.6

5 The interpretation of regime theory as a theoretical framework for the analysis of governance variation can be contrasted to Pierre (2014). In his view, one of the fundamental characteristics of urban regime theory is its focus on coalition building between local political and business elites. Our perspective is closer to Clarence Stone’s (2005: 313–314), for whom the key question of regime theory is ‘‘who needs to be mobilised to take on a given problem effectively’’ – ‘‘neither business nor any other group is necessarily a required member of the governing coalition’’. The centrality of business in US urban regimes is reflective of the historical and institutional particularities of US cities, not a theoretical preassumption of regime theory. 6 Stone (1993) anticipated that middle-class progressive and lower-class opportunity expansion regimes would be infrequent because of the difficulties inherent to mobilise resources behind the sort of agendas they pursue. The argument of this paper is that these types of coalitions can be built in at least some particular policy areas. Moreover, they can act as a counterweight to development regimes or they can press maintenance regimes for change.

The regime-theoretical approach thus poses three main challenges to network governance theories and their critics: first, to build evidence-based typologies that identify and classify different patterns of formal and informal interaction between government and non-government actors; second, to posit the conditions in which different modes of governance develop; and, third, to analyse the (im)balances of power between alternative coalitions across and within cities. Thirdly, urban regime analysis can also be of great help in the study of the conditions that favour the development of different governance modes. Regime theory, argued Harding (2009: 35), shows that ‘‘cities and urban life are produced and reproduced not by the playing out of some externally imposed logic, but by struggles and bargains between different groups and interests within cities’’. Or, as explained by Collins (2008: 1179), ‘‘the seeds for regime theory lie in early attempts to confront economically deterministic variants of Marxian urban political economy and to demonstrate that political agency matters in urban affairs’’. However, as one of the fathers of regime analysis reminds us, the emphasis of regime analysis on local political agency ‘‘does not mean that the governing coalition operates in a social and economic vacuum; the socioeconomic environment is a source of problems of challenges to which regimes respond’’ (Stone, 1993: 2). One of the fundamental aims of urban regime analysis was ‘‘to explain how communities respond to broad social and economic changes’’ (Stone, 1993: 7). Urban studies of network governance would benefit from a more thorough identification of the factors that mediate global, socioeconomic transformations and the specific configurations of governing over time and across distinct places. Beyond the large-scale social and economic forces usually identified by the literature as the drivers of network governance other local and/or agency factors come into play, such as political leadership, political and corporate cultures, institutional frameworks and social mobilisations (Geddes & Sullivan, 2011). Against this background, exploring the complexities of urban governance continuity and change brings us to consider, at least, three main questions:  First, from a longitudinal perspective, to what extent do networked forms of governance replace, displace or coexist with other logics of governing such as bureaucracies and markets?  Second, from a comparative perspective, what different modes of governance develop in different places and in different policy fields (urban planning, economic development, social welfare, environment, etc.)? How power is distributed between different sets of actors? Do trends of innovation and continuity significantly differ across places and policy issues?  And third, how can we explain urban governance change and variation? How are macro-level forces, such as the crisis of 2008, or the hegemonic expansion of neoliberalism, accepted, adapted or resisted at the local level? What factors filter the impacts of the global? How the (im)balances of power between alternative coalitions generates different modes of governance within cities? The following section illustrates the value of such analytical approach and of the research agenda that stems from it through the case of Barcelona (Spain). The analysis of this case does not aim to provide exhaustive answers to the questions that have been raised in the theoretical part of this paper, but it just wants to illustrate the explanatory limits of the big narratives and the need to reconnect them to the empirical analysis of the complexities of local politics and practices. Such analysis also shows how the analytical perspective of regime analysis can prove helpful in this sense.

Please cite this article in press as: Blanco, I. Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona. J. Cities (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.007

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Governing the city of Barcelona: from government to governance?7 Over the last 40 years, two types of stories (or narratives) have been offered about how urban governance in Barcelona has shifted since the first democratic elections in 1979, reproducing the ‘boosterist’ and critical accounts reviewed in the first part of this paper. They both accept the increasing significance of different types of collaborative arrangements in the city, but make very different assessments of this development. The first story, mainly told by official bodies, talks about the gradual evolution towards a model of governance characterised by: (a) institutional and administrative decentralisation – through the establishment of 10 district areas with significant political and administrative powers since the mid 1980s; (b) citizen engagement – through a wide variety of participatory channels at a sectoral, district and neighbourhood level regulated by local norms of citizen participation passed in 1986 and modified in 2003; (c) public–private cooperation – through the creation of semi-public agencies and different types of bilateral and multilateral contracts and agreements with the private and the community sectors; (d) inter-governmental coordination – through different types of agreements including public consortia in the social welfare and education areas; and (e) strategic planning at a metropolitan scale as one of the main arenas for intergovernmental and multi-sector cooperation (Ajuntament de Barclonea, 1999). According to this perspective, this approach to institutional innovation has been driven by the need to face significant policy challenges (like the urban transformation of the city to host the 1992 Olympic Games) that the City Council could have not solved alone (Blakeley, 2005: 1663). Governance networks have allowed for the mobilisation of a great variety of public and private resources and the building of a wide political and social consensus among the main public, private and community organisations. The ‘‘Barcelona Model’’ of governance, from this perspective, distances itself from both the traditional model of Public Administration (bureaucratic, hierarchical) and the privatising and marketising strategies typical of neoliberalism (for a critical review of the ideological roots of the ‘Barcelona Model’ see McNeill, 1999). The second story talks about a city historically governed by a business-dominated elite, which in essence, is the same one that controlled urban policies during the Franco regime. McNeill (1999: 126) states this very clearly: ‘‘. . . rather than a rupture with Francoist town planning, as had been hoped in the late 1970s, it made sense to talk of the continuities encapsulated in the Olympic project. The characteristics of Francoist urban development – the social dominance of finance capital, the resuscitation of celebrated land use cases defeated in the 1970s, the prevalence of zoning changes of dubious legality, and the continued dominance of road-building schemes – still pertained to a certain degree throughout the 1980 and 1990s’’. He continues: ‘‘The private developers who had been the target of such vehement opposition in the 1970s would still be found at the forefront of many of the city’s major developments in the 1980s and 1990s’’. In line with neoliberal accounts of urban governance, critical perspectives on the ‘Barcelona Model’ see network governance arrangements like the Metropolitan Strategic Plan as highly asymmetrical arenas con7 The analysis of the Barcelona in this section is grounded in the combination of an extensive review of the literature on the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban policy and near to 100 in-depth interviews made to different types of actors (local authorities, public employees, social activists, and experts) in the frame of several studies in which the author has been involved since 2000: his own doctoral thesis on regeneration policies in Barcelona; an evaluation of the Local Forum of Social Welfare; a comparative research on urban regeneration policies in the historic centres of Barcelona and Madrid; and an on-going research on the transformation of urban governance in the context of the crisis in several British and Spanish cities (including Barcelona).

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trolled by institutional and economic elites (Bonet, 2012; Casellas, 2006). Invited spaces of citizen participation, including consultative forums (of Social Welfare, Environment, Education, etc.) tend be seen as mechanisms of civil society co-optation and enrolment, rather than instruments of empowerment (Blakeley, 2005, 2010). The transformation of the city’s governance is interpreted by these critical accounts through the lens of urban neoliberalisation and its attendant dispossessions (Capel, 2005; Casellas, 2006; Charnock, Purcell, & Ribera-Fumaz, 2013). Which is the better story? Both, arguably, capture aspects of the transformation of urban governance in the city, a transformation in which the emergence and the development of new network governance arrangements and discourses coexists with the persistence of power asymmetries, hierarchies and old (and new) urban elites. However, if both are right, it means that both are also wrong, because neither narrative tells us a complete story. A more indepth analysis, viewed through the lens of regime theory, reveals profound variations in the governance dynamics across different periods, policy arenas and spaces. The complex spatio-temporality of urban governance change in Barcelona A common theme in the literature on the ‘‘Barcelona model’’ of urban governance and transformation is the differentiation between a set of periods which entail significant changes in the way the city has been governed since the restoration of local democracy in 1979. The most accepted classification distinguishes between four main periods since 1979 (Balibrea, 2006; Blanco, 2009; Borja, 2004; Capel, 2007; Montaner, 2004): – During the first half of the 1980s, most of the efforts were put in the consolidation of representative institutions and the rationalisation (bureaucratisation) of administrative structures. During this period, almost no formal mechanisms of citizen engagement were set up, although continuous (informal) contacts and negotiations between the new democratic elites and community organisations took place (García-Ramon & Albet, 2000: 1333). – After the decision to stage the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona in 1986, the need for public–private and inter-governmental collaboration became pressing. Mixed-public companies, public consortia and other types of collaborative arrangements proliferated and consolidated (Casellas, 2006).8 In parallel, the passing of the Regulatory Norms of the Organisation of the Districts and Citizen Participation in 1986 boosted institutional and administrative decentralisation and favoured the creation of a number of formal channels of citizen engagement both at a sectoral and a district level (Borja, 2004). – In the aftermath of the Olympic Games, Barcelona entered a period of economic crisis, caused both by the evolution of the global economy and the budget imbalances caused by the Olympic Games. Public–private cooperative arrangements consolidated in this period, although the public leadership of these arrangements drastically diminished. Moreover, the proliferation of New Public Management tools – such as outsourcing – reflected a process of neoliberalisation of urban policies and governance (Balibrea, 2006).

8 An example of this type of development is the new institutional architecture set up at the end of the 1980s to unblock the spatial transformation of the historic centre. New institutional arrangements included a mixed-capital company with a majority of public stocks (PROCIVESA) and the ARI Management Committee, which run the implementation of the regeneration plan. The latter was made up representatives of the local and the regional administration and of the four neighbourhood associations of the district.

Please cite this article in press as: Blanco, I. Between democratic network governance and neoliberalism: A regime-theoretical analysis of collaboration in Barcelona. J. Cities (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.10.007

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– The celebration of the Universal Forum of Cultures 2004 signalled the beginning of a much more contradictory phase. On the one hand, the previous phase framed the emergence and the strengthening of a network of social organisations – supported by some prominent scholars and intellectuals of the city – that was very critical of the ‘‘Barcelona model’’. Partially as a response to such criticisms the City Council started to explore new channels of citizen participation in fields like neighbourhood regeneration and social policy (Blanco, 2009; Bonet, 2012), for example through the Community Action Programme launched in 2005, which recognised and expanded the model of community development plans throughout the city. However, many large-scale urban development projects, like the transformation of the surroundings of the high-speed train station of La Sagregra, continued to be planned and executed in a highly technocratic way. The economic and financial crisis that began with burst of the housing bubble in 2008 has entailed significant changes in the governance of the city. After more than 30 years of a centre-left coalition government led by the Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC), the conservatives (CiU) won the elections and entered into office for the first time since 1979. It is too early at this juncture to assess the consequences of the combination of government change and the economic crisis, but it is possible to highlight a number of cases exemplifying the increasing influence of organised economic sectors with tangible results in different policy fields. These include a municipal ordinance that privatises public space by allowing a larger presence of bar and restaurant terraces in squares and streets; the lifting of the ban on building new hotels in the old district; the privatisation of the management of water services and the outsourcing of the management of public nurseries. Three main ideas stem from this analysis. First, to a greater or lesser degree, collaboration (formal and informal) has always been part of the governance of the city, as regime theory anticipates. Second, the temporality of governance shifts in Barcelona does not match the bureaucracy-markets-networks sequence proposed by network accounts of urban governance. Rather, the Barcelona case illustrates the tendency for different governance modes to emerge, coexist and come into tension with each other over time. Third, shifts in the balances between governance modes reflect the evolution of power imbalances between different coalitions of actors. This issue will be further analysed below. Multiple and varying modes of governance across urban spaces and policy areas Although it is possible to identify clear trends in patterns of governance within the city, there are also significant spatial differences within it – for example through the variable strategies for urban regeneration in different parts of Barcelona. On the one hand, the predominant regeneration model is driven by the City Council’s Urban Planning Department. This model articulates around cooperative relationships between the urban development departments of different tiers of government – local, regional, national, European – and between public and private agents such as ground owners, estate agents, and service companies. Citizen participation in this operation is usually scarce and the rest of departments – social, environmental, etc. – tend to be excluded. This is the regeneration model adopted in the city’s historic centre, the seafront and areas named as New Downtown Areas.9 9 Poblenou, a traditional industrial working-class neighbourhood transformed into a knowledge-based economic district is one of the paradigmatic cases of this model. For a critical analysis, see Casellas and Pallarès-Barberà (2009), Martí-Costa and Pradel (2012) and Charnock et al. (2013).

On the other hand, since the mid-90s, and in response to the evident socio-spatial polarisation in the city, an alternative model of regeneration has emerged from grass-roots neighbourhood initiatives and the work of social services (Blanco, 2009, 2013; Rebollo, 2012). This model emerged from new collaborative relations between social and community organisations, public services in the territory (schools, community health centres, social services, etc.) and administrations’ independent professionals. In some cases, this practice has received support from supralocal governmental actors such as the Social Welfare Department of the regional government. Examples of this model are the community plans of Trinitat Nova, Roquetes and Verdum, in the working-class district of Nou Barris. The differentiation between strategies of regeneration in different areas reflects the sharp differences between the governance modes in different policy areas. For example, the urban planning department is the only one in the City Council in which we cannot find a city-level mechanism of citizen consultation. This is not to say that no participation devices have been used in this policy field, but that they tend to be ad-hoc instruments of negotiation with the citizens affected by specific urban projects. For many urban developments, however, there is no citizen involvement (Bonet, 2012). Besides, the Social Welfare Department – particularly since 2004 – has been very active in the promotion of new instruments of citizen engagement and collaboration (Godàs & Gomà, 2009), such as the Acord Ciutadà per una Barcelona Inclusiva (Citizen Agreement for an Inclusive Barcelona) which fosters the coordination between a large amount of public, private and social organisations for the implementation of the Municipal Plan for Social Inclusion. Since 2004, this department has also supported the practices of community planning initiated by the neighbourhood movement in the late 1990s and committed itself to the expansion citizen engagement throughout the city. To sum up, a number of public policies in different districts and in different policy areas are currently articulated through different types of network governance arrangements that bring together different coalitions of actors. Patterns of (formal and informal) relationship between government and non-governmental actors significantly vary across cases. Networks, as recognised by Provan and Kenis (2008) can adopt very different forms, can respond to very different purposes and can encompass very different types of actors, mobilising different configurations of resources. This idea is developed by urban regime theory through the typology discussed earlier. The type of governing coalitions that predominate in New Down-town Areas and in policy fields such as tourism and economic development, for example, resemble the development regimes identified by Stone (1993). Community development and urban revitalisation policies in the peripheral areas of the city, tend to be formulated in a way that combines elements of middle-class progressive and lower class opportunity regimes (Stone, 1993). Network governance variations in Barcelona as cases of intra-urban resource coalitions The spatiotemporal and issue complexities of the Barcelona model of governance can be interpreted as the result of the interplay between a variety of local and global, structure and agency factors. The economic circumstances of the city, linked to the cycles of the international economy, certainly play an important role in the evolution of governance modes. Processes of economic globalisation and inter-urban competition have favoured the consolidation of (local and international) business elites as key actors in the governance of the city. The international economic crises of the mid-1990s and the current have also paved the way for different types of privatisation and marketisation reforms. Successive

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economic crises have favoured the expansion of neoliberal ideas in the city, gradually weakening the public leadership of processes of urban transformation. Barcelona has received the direct influence of the neoliberalisation process analysed by authors like Brenner and Theodore (2002), among others. However, beyond such structural factors, the particularities of the Barcelona model of governance respond to different types of local and agency factors. The issues at stake in different public policies play an important role since they raise different types of expectations which mobilise different types of actors (Lowi, 1972): more concretely, the more intense the expectations of economic profit for business actors, the less the opportunities for citizen engagement. In general, large-scale urban development projects (like in the so-called New Downtown Areas) have been less permeable to citizen engagement than social policies, something anticipated by the urban regime literature – which states that different policy agendas require the mobilisation of different resources, which are in hands of different actors. Corporate cultures specific to each policy area (police, urban planning, social services, etc.) also influence the differences between modes of governance developed in different departments of the City Council. Local political leaderships filter the influence of global and structural conditions, as observed by Geddes and Sullivan (2011). Barcelona has been governed by a coalition of different parties for more than 30 years, giving place to different governance styles in different policy areas run by different parties. The different political leaning of parties has interacted with the distinct corporate/administrative cultures that predominate in each policy field. The entering into office of a new conservative coalition (CiU) has also entailed significant changes in the governance dynamics in the city, as pointed out earlier. Last but not least, social mobilisation also plays a significant role in the configuration of urban governance. After a certain decline in the 1980s, there was an upsurge of new urban social movements in the 1990s that established strong links with the no-global movement (Martí-Costa and Bonet, 2008). Ironically, these social movements and the scholars that give them support have elaborated a story of the Barcelona model – the narrative of the concentration of power in the business and political elites – in which the role of such movements tends to be neglected. Examples of the critical role of social movements in the configuration of urban policies in the city include the expansion of community development plans in the district of Nou Barris since the end of the 1990s; the reallocation in social housing of the residents directly affected by demolitions in the rehabilitation of the old district; and the development of participatory processes in a number of urban remodelling projects such as Gardunya square in Raval, Eïvissa Square in Horta, ‘‘Compromís per les Glòries’’, ‘‘Calaix de Sants’’ and ‘‘Forat de la Vergonya’’ (Bonet, 2012). In summary, the global forces identified by the network governance literature as the main drivers for urban governance shifts have certainly played a significance influence in the city of Barcelona. However, these factors have been mediated by a set of local and agency factors which have contributed to the evolution of multiple governance modes over time and across urban spaces and policy issues. As Stone states (2005: 324), urban regime analysis can prove helpful, as it ‘‘concerns how local agency fits into the play of larger forces. Local factors are shaped by and respond to larger structures, but the appropriate lens for viewing this wider field is local agency – what motivates actors at this level, what affects their ability to cooperate or puts them into conflict, the leverage they can gain in tackling problems, and in general what they make of the structural forces in which they are enmeshed’’. The study of Barcelona points to the co-existence of at least two relatively stable regime-types: the classical Stonean development regime, and an empowerment regime centred on relationships between the social

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movements and sympathetic local authority insiders in the field of social policy. An interesting question for future research might be how far these apparently antagonistic regime-like practices collide, and how sustainable a dual-regime system of governance turns out to be in the longer term. Concluding comments The analysis of governance shifts in Barcelona over the last 40 years confirms the increasing significance of the ‘networks paradigm’. Since the beginning of municipal democracy in 1979, traditional forms of bureaucratic and representative government have been complemented (not replaced) by an increasing range of formal collaborative arrangements between different tiers of government, different municipalities of the metropolitan region, public and private business actors, and different types of social and community organisations. Barcelona is a paradigmatic example of the increasing influence of network governance in European cities. However, the case of Barcelona also shows the analytical, the theoretical and the normative deficits of competing meta-narratives of urban governance transformation (Blanco et al., 2014). Analytically, such narratives are unable to grapple the complexities of differentiated urban governance trajectories. Theoretically, they tend to oversimplify the kind of factors accounting for urban governance developments. Normatively, they run the risk of overemphasising the strategic coherence of Third-Way or neoliberal projects, while ignoring the explanatory capacity or the existence of alternative approaches. This paper has underlined the value of an American literature – urban regime theory – for overcoming the dualism in which the European literature on urban governance change is trapped. Pierre (2014) argues that urban regime-theoretical studies continue to face serious difficulties travelling in time and space. However, this paper shows how a flexible application of regime theory can help us understand the spatiotemporal and issue complexities of differentiated urban governance trajectories in Europe and reframe research agendas in a way that overcomes the analytical dualism associated with the study of networks and neoliberalism. The analysis of the Barcelona case also illustrates that urban regime formations are neither so coherent nor so stable as a focus on cities as a whole tends to suggest. Regime formation varies, not only across cities but also within cities. The urban governance literature should pay attention to the spatiotemporal variation of governance within cities, the different types of coalitions built around different issues (and across urban spaces) and their relative weight over time. The prospects for urban democracy are not only determined by the evolution of structural forces like the 2008 crisis or global neoliberalism. They are also influenced by the outcome of political competition between alternative coalitions within each city. Acknowledgments This paper has benefited from two grants awarded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Gobierno de España: a Ramón y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship and the CSO2012-32817 research project. The author also wants to thank the comments of three anonymous reviewers and the support of Professor Jonathan Davies. References Ajuntament de Barclonea (1999). Barcelona: Gobierno y Gestión de la Ciudad. Una experiencia de modernización municipal (Díaz Santos, Barcelona). Balibrea, M. P. (2006). Barcelona: Del modelo a la marca. In Forum de cultura, democratizem la democràcia. 19.11.06.

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