Conceptual Institutional Elements of Participatory Governance

Introduction

To analyze participatory governance is necessary to study the essential preconditions of the institutional framework. Political philosophers, partisan and elected politicians, and democratic activists are promoting the concept of institutional participatory governance with the intention to cure the ills of representative democracies. Organizational theories and practices emphasize the transference from stable institutional structures to more fluid networks structures, clusters and other organizational forms of association (Castells, 1996a).

Institution, participation, and governance require to be conceptualized for institutional development. The conceptual forms of participatory governance with regional institutional and legal governance can be differentiated based on organizational cultures and structures, such as agreements of cooperation and working protocols (Haselsberger, 2007, p.7). Regional spaces and spaces of regionalism are different concepts in relation to cultural spaces of institutional participatory governance (Jones and MacLeod, 2004). Application of institutionalized forms of cooperation can be explained by the territorial and cultural proximity between the cross-border regions framed by the favorable spatial integration processes of administrative cooperation and the model of citizenship participation model.

A stable organizational structure regarding the institutional design farmed by cooperation framework in cross-border regions and their cultural pre-conditions and thickness (Ferreira 2015). This institutional design should be a meeting point between institutions, governments, business, civic organizations, and citizens (Committee of the Regions 2015a, p. 38). Institutional isomorphism is a phenomenon pointing to the shape influencing the morphology.

The re-politicization processes of politics lead to an institutional discursive construction of design between the diverse actors and institutions related to political life domains and issues at stake. Institutionalization is a stumbling block for design, planning and implementation of shared governance models that requires the synchronization of several trans-policy frameworks and regulatory provisions between local and regional authorities and ownership and legal responsibility, etc.

The construction of an analytical framework after the conceptualization of organizational and cultural conditions of institutional participatory governance serves as the construct of an empirical case analysis given the different forms of re-scaling differentiated in territorial, functional, legal, and institutional conditions. Empirical research in participatory governance on life-political issues and concerns requires methodological and conceptual innovation to expand the notion and unit of analysis of politics across formal political institutions, identification of publics in relation to the state and the adoption or generation of the social phenomena such as the power, knowledge, institutions, and agency in the in the different spheres of social action such as economy, science, and politics. These processes are constituted in mutual shape of coproduction in empirical research.

The concept of institutional participatory governance has already spread across the nation states borders to include active and passive forms of citizenship participation removing the ceiling barriers and introducing inclusion and deliberation and avoiding antidemocratic tendencies (Kangas 2017). Research perspectives on models of inclusion are differently perceived framed by translation sociology, (Czarniawska, 2002) policy transfer (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000) and institutional transplantation (De Jong et al., 2002), supported by cognitive resources and conditionality instead of authority.