LISTENING FROM THE MUNICIPALITY'S PERSPECTIVE: TRANSDUCTION AND DOCUMENTATION

From the municipality's perspective, participatory events were about taking oral and written suggestions from residents and transducing them into policy recommendations and budget items, which could then be approved and implemented by the elected municipal government. I use the term transduction (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Rubel and Rosman2003; Gal Reference Gal2015) instead of translation to highlight that these processes are not only concerned with the denotational content of residents’ suggestions, but also about moving across semiotic modalities, from targeted conversations between neighbors, to statements written on post-it notes and butcher paper, to tables in policy documents. These transductions worked to legitimize policy decisions, as they appeared to emerge from citizens’ voices, instead of being imposed by the municipality.

The annual Area Boost program plan determined which projects would be prioritized in the following year and how funding would be allocated. In the year I observed them, participatory events began with a series of themed workshops that took place at various times over several weeks. During my fieldwork, the themes, which had been selected by the local advisory board to the Area Boost, ranged from environment and climate, volunteering, housing, youth belonging, and public health. Following these workshops was a larger public meeting where Area Boost employees presented the initial recommendations on all five themes and allowed residents to provide final input.

The first step in the transduction process from input to policy occurred in the smaller workshops, which were held at different publicly accessible places around the neighborhood. Attendance ranged from eight people at the environment and climate workshop, to over sixty at the one about youth belonging. All workshops had a ‘café dialogue’ format, as they called it, which was also used by many of the local organizations in the neighborhood, where attendees sat in groups of about five people around tables covered in large pieces of paper. Each table discussed prompts, while one or all participants jotted down notes on the paper. At the end, each table shared the important points from their discussion with the room (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The result of a similar ‘café dialogue’-style meeting organized by the Tøyen Housing Association. All photos by author.

In the days following these workshops, Area Boost staff, who had collected all of the graphic artifacts from these workshops, organized them into numbered points that they typed and printed out on sheets of A4 paper that they could then hang around the outer walls of the tent where the concluding public meeting took place (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The Housing station, before the meeting began, with typed up points from the Housing workshop.

During this final public meeting, held on a Saturday afternoon in a large tent set up outside the Grønland subway station, each attendee was given ten small post-its to vote on the points from the workshops that they thought were the most important, and a few larger post-its in case they had anything they wanted to add. As was the case at almost all of the local meetings I attended, most people grouped around the station about youth, with some of the younger attendees giving all of their ten votes to the same point (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

The station on Youth Belonging. The most votes are for point 3: ‘Youth must have access to jobs or other possibilities for activation’.

The voting system, along with the dozens of pizzas provided for attendees, gave the meeting a festive atmosphere. Just as Wilf (Reference Wilf2016) argues that the use of post-it notes by consultants and entrepreneurs in New York City are a salient index of a ritual of creativity, the post-it notes at this public meeting were a Peircean rheme of the ‘innovative’ (nyskapende) character of the kinds of participation and local engagement the Area Boost program is meant to create. Policy in an Area Boost does not come out of dry documents and meetings alone, but through the active involvement of potentially all citizens. These meetings had a kind of immediacy to them that more traditional ways of doing local politics through representation do not—anyone can write a comment on a post-it. At the same time, the post-it notes at the Area Boost public meeting work to create a kind of idealized liberal public sphere, where the suggestions from the general public become completely detached from the people making them. While the municipal employees worried about diversity and representation and made sure to document that not everyone was white and middle-class through photographs of the events that were included in a report on the participatory process, the connection between each suggestion and the person who made it was erased. The only thing we can know about the participant is what their handwriting looks like (Figure 4), but even that disappears as the Area Boost employees type up the comments into their reports (Table 1). While the Area Boost likely used this format to make everyone's contributions appear equal, where ‘quiet’ and ‘loud’ voices all become the same volume, it also took away a form of accounting for which residents the city eventually was seen to be listening to over others.

Figure 4.

Handwritten additions, including ‘MORE LEISURE CLUBS FOR youth’, ‘Youth who sell narcotics in the whole area lack activities in the youth club in Grønland’, ‘VIF [local football club] as a partner’, and ‘Leisure club Grønland’.

Table 1.

Translation of table in report on participatory process (Områdeløft Grønland og Tøyen 2018:9).

As the public meeting ended and residents began to trickle out, Marte,Footnote ³ an Area Boost employee, moved around to the five stations in the tent, photographing all the post-it notes and the votes that people had left so that she could later type them up in the order of which had received the most votes. In the weeks following the public events, Marte and her colleagues collated the initial suggestions from the workshops and any additional suggestions written on post-it notes in a table in their report about the participatory process (Områdeløft Grønland og Tøyen 2018). They annotated each piece of input with comments and a suggestion for how to carry out the idea. For example, the handwritten suggestion above in Figure 4, ‘MORE LEISURE CLUBS FOR youth’, was typed up in the report with the following recommendations, in the same format as the point about youth employment that had been on the typed list in Figure 3.

The recommendation column in Table 1 points to an area of the Area Boost budget that incorporates these suggestions or includes them as a ‘new area of opportunity’ where an Area Boost policy and future budget item should be developed. They also link the comment to the specific, numbered goals of the Area Boost's strategic plan. The Area Boost staff's job is to take up comments from local residents, transducing them from thoughts jotted on a piece of butcher paper or a post-it note into a recommendation that can be nested under a strategic goal. The main goals were broad enough, and the citizen input structure had been directed enough, that this transduction always appeared to be possible. I never witnessed a citizen suggestion that the municipality could not take up. These series of transductions also show how municipal listening surpasses the here-and-now of sound production. Instead, listening here involves a series of ‘resonances’, where particular words linger until finding a referent (Marsilli-Vargas Reference Marsilli-Vargas2022). An initial statement like ‘Youth must have access to jobs or other possibilities for activation’, takes on new meaning through post-it notes, as it no longer becomes a suggestion from one resident alone, but a wish of many Tøyen residents. For Area Boost employees, these resident words then come to reach a new referent of which the initial speaker may have been unaware: the numbered strategic goals and particular budget areas.

After the Area Boost staff had completed the meta-report and the program plan, which included a budget, the documents were shared and discussed with the local advisory board, which I discuss in the next section. The documents then moved through the elected district committees, with written recommendations from the district manager that came verbatim from the local advisory board's official recommendations. These recommendations were taken up by the district council, and the plan continued to move up to the city council, who had the final say on budgeting. While the final program plan included a summary of the main themes that emerged from the participatory workshops, they were no longer written as direct reported speech from participants, but instead as general themes, expressed in nominalizations and tenseless constructions (Table 2). A form of what Geertz (Reference Geertz1988:145) has called ‘ventriloquism’, where an interpretive voice claims to speak from within another group instead of about it, these nominal phrases are aperspectival, seeming to come collectively ‘from the neighborhood’ instead of from one group within it. Photos of the participatory meetings in the separate report on participation showed off the diversity of participants in terms of gender, ethnicity, and age, but the recommendations themselves erased any diversity in opinion, or anyone who may have refused to speak. The neighborhood's voice became facts that would be easy for politicians to process, and, most importantly, could easily be attached to pre-existing budget categories.

Table 2.

Translation of portion of ‘Summary of recommendations from workshops and the public meeting to the new local program plan’ (Oslo indre øst-satsingen - Delprogram nærmiljø 2018:14).

For the municipality, listening culminated in budgetary allocations. The implementation of budgeted projects might provide further opportunities for residents to participate, but the major decisions of the kinds of programs and interventions had already been made. While these stages of transduction from citizen input to budget allocation were all carefully documented to make transparent how priorities came from the needs and desires of the local community, as Mazzarella has observed, there is a ‘paradoxical tendency of transparency measures to yield, in practice, new opacities’ (Reference Mazzarella2006:476). The actual process of transducing comments on post-it notes into budget line items was opaque to most of my interlocutors,Footnote ⁴ who wondered if their participation was just a formality to provide legitimacy to what the municipality had already decided, or if the city listened to some groups of people but not others.

While every document these meetings created is publicly available, I do not know of any residents, aside from the four advisory board representatives I discuss in the next section, who consulted any of them or checked to see if their comments had been taken up and incorporated into policy recommendations or budget items. Instead, residents were much more likely to look at what they could see in the neighborhood as a sign of whether the municipality had listened. Was there a place where young people could go in the afternoons after school ended? Did more of their friends have jobs? Frequently, residents looked to the built environment for signs of governmental listening, or more often, the lack of it. For example, despite years of discussions between neighbors, housing activist organizations, and the municipality, a block of municipally owned apartments still stood empty as of late 2022, after residents had been forced to move elsewhere in 2014 when the municipality tried to spread public housing more evenly across the city. During the same period, the new Munch Museum, which is also owned by the municipality, and which the government had only agreed to move from Tøyen to the wealthier new neighborhood on the waterfront in exchange for the Area Boost, has been constructed and opened, with an annual operating budget several times larger than the entire Area Boost. For many of the residents I got to know, these material effects were much more important evidence of who the city was listening to than any policy document.

THE LOCAL ADVISORY BOARD: LEGITIMATION AND RESISTANCE

Before the drafted reports and documents could be implemented, they needed to pass through one final step of participatory democracy: discussion and approval by the local advisory board. Here, how listening worked is more complicated, as these meetings were not just an opportunity for the city to listen to residents, but more of a dialogic relationship, where a small group of residents were expected to listen in return to municipal employees. Board meetings also became a site where residents tried to resist the municipality's view of participatory politics and propose alternative forms of democratic listening.

The advisory board was created several years into the Area Boost, with the purpose of ensuring that residents were being included in the development of the Boost's programs. More concretely, the board's job was to decide what the city district manager should be reporting to the municipal government. The board was made up of four resident representatives, Arild, Nina, Samira, and Yusuuf, who were evenly divided by gender, ethnic background (Norwegian or Somali), and neighborhood (half from Tøyen and half from neighboring Grønland, which was included in the Area Boost beginning in 2018). Most had experience with boards and formal meetings, and they were all relatively highly educated compared to the neighborhood average, two skills that were vital because their role as representatives required them to be able to read and understand the policy documents under discussion. Pål, the city district manager, chaired the board, assisted by Sofie, the director of the Area Boost.Footnote ⁵ There was also one representative from a local school and another from the police. The board met about bi-monthly in a conference room in the municipality's offices, where they sat around a large table. Meetings were organized in much the same way as the monthly district council meetings for elected politicians, where participants followed a previously set agenda, with each point of business (sak) given a catalogue number and all relevant documents archived as PDFs on the municipality's website. Agenda topics for the advisory board ranged from reviewing the Area Boost program plan for the next year, to discussing partnerships between the city and locally based NGOs, to planning participatory projects around renovating public spaces. Advisory board meetings were organized in this way in large part so that their decisions could easily move through the pre-existing bureaucratic infrastructure to the district council, although the board's decisions did not go directly to the governing political body. Instead, the board's job was to make recommendations to Pål, who then made his own recommendations to the council.

Advisory board members were expected to review all of the documents that were going to be discussed in advance and come to the meeting ready to present their comments. Each agenda item typically involved anywhere from one to five documents. The first was the official item, about one to two pages long, which laid out the issue and ended with a final paragraph that began, ‘The local board recommends the district manager make the following decision(s)’ (Lokalstyret anbefaler bydelsdirektøren å fåtte følgende vedtak), followed by a series of sentences that were all passive constructions, taking away any sort of agentive role. For example, the agenda item for the program plan included two decisions.

1. (i) Programplan for områdeløft i Bydel Gamle Oslo fremmes til bydelsutvalget i Gamle Oslo og legges til grunn for søknad om 30,3 mill. kr fra Oslo indre øst-satsingen - Delprogram nærmiljø.

   ‘Program plan for area boost in Gamle Oslo district is moved to the district council in Gamle Oslo and forms the basis of the application for 30.3 million kroner from Oslo inner east-investment – Subprogram local environment.’

2. (ii) Medvirkningsprosessen til programplanen har vært tilfredsstillende.

   ‘The participation process for the program plan has been satisfactory.’

Unlike in the public meetings, where staff took citizen input and translated it into nominal phrases, on the advisory board these formulaic decisions were written before the meeting had happened and representatives had spoken. Consensus had been reached, at least officially, before an interaction occurred. In the meetings I observed, while representatives made suggestions to attached documents, the main decisions, these passive constructions, did not change. These meetings were thus not exactly a site for the creation of authoritative discourse (Morton Reference Morton2014) as much as they were a site for the Goffmanian frontstage (Reference Goffman1959) affirmation of discourse that had emerged through backstage conversations between municipal employees. Although these frontstage meetings were open to public observers, the backstage conversations were not.

In this context, what listening even means becomes complicated. The regular attendees at these board meetings had strict roles and modes of participation. Pål would go through each agenda item, opening the floor for comments from the representatives. When there was need for clarification, Sofie would jump in with further explanation but otherwise said very little, at least not verbally. Sofie explained later that she actually ‘said a lot’ in the meetings in the form of the written documents and decisions the board reviewed. In Goffmanian terms (Reference Goffman1979), Sofie and her staff were the author of the decisions made by the board, while the local representatives were the principal, a role that they took on through listening (reading) and responding to Sofie's written contributions during board meetings. Then, Pål was supposed to listen to those recommendations and animate them by sharing them with the elected city district council.

Pål tried to keep meetings focused on the documents at hand. He was a career bureaucrat, with much more experience in formal policy meetings with civil servants than he had engaging directly with residents, and he tried to structure meetings in the way that he found most efficient. However, the resident representatives were not entirely satisfied with this format. They thought the strict participant roles, where no one could say anything that did not fit the agenda items or relate to the documents under discussion, were too restrictive. Residents felt that this municipal model was not listening, but just a way to legitimize policy decisions that had already been made, and that too much got lost in the desire to translate their interactions into formulaic, written phrases. They also felt like it could not adequately capture the diversity in experiences of people living in the neighborhood. Many board members, including the residents, police, and school representatives, met outside the meeting location early, or stood around chatting long after the official meetings had ended. I heard them say to each other that they enjoyed learning more about other perspectives on the neighborhood, and several told me that they helped them to better represent the neighborhood in their official duties on the board.

Residents frequently expressed their dissatisfaction during meetings themselves. The following is an interaction between Nina and Pål towards the end of one of the meetings I observed. Nina may have been one of the more vocal critics during meetings, to the point that she somewhat sheepishly described herself to me as the ‘troublemaker’, yet her suggestion here is representative of how all of the resident representatives thought about meetings, as far as I could understand. From my conversations with Nina outside of these meetings, it also seemed that she understood that her position as a well-educated, white Norwegian woman allowed her critiques to be heard in ways that Somali-Norwegian residents’ voices might not be.

1. (1) Footnote ⁶

   

Nina begins by saying that having ‘short and open discussion’ would help the meetings because it would allow board members to talk not only about the documents they are meant to be consulting, but also about their own personal experiences. Doing so would allow them to learn from each other, which she sees as an untapped potential of the board, and to bring a kind of immediacy to the meetings (‘what's happening NOW’), which Nina does not see in the documents they discuss.

Pål replies in (2) below.

1. (2)

   

Pål's idea of ‘sharing experiences’ is not about bringing in the current situation in the neighborhood, instead focusing on the agenda items at hand. This is to avoid the genre of interaction that he brought up frequently at these meetings, the ‘general discussion group’, or ‘complaint body’, which he believed was a waste of time because it never accomplished anything.

Nina has let Pål speak, but now she interrupts him to come back to her initial point.

1. (3)

   

Nina suggests (turn 69) that because Tøyen-Grønland has such a diverse population, that these traditional ways of thinking about how to address problems will miss some of the nuances. Pål responds (turn 70) by using this as a teaching moment about how official board meetings function, using the second-person plural to address everyone, not just Nina, and tell them that ‘we’, as a collective board, must think more strategically. This distinction between strategic board and ‘discussion group’ or ‘complaint body’ encapsulates what Pål repeatedly stressed about civic participation in policymaking, both during meetings, and when I first spoke to him about why I wanted to observe board meetings. He told me that it was important to remember that the Norwegian word commonly used to talk about this kind of participation, medvirkning, meaning cooperation, is made of up two words, med ‘with’ and virkning ‘consequence, result’. Compound words with a preposition and verb or nominalized verb are very common in Norwegian, and although the meaning of the compound tends to be more idiomatic, it is a common metasemantic analysis to break the word into its two parts. Pål worried that most people focus on the first word and its idea of inclusion, but he likes to focus on the second part, because ‘if there is no result, there's no point including people’ (Hvis det ikke er noe virkning så er det ikke noe poeng i å ha folk med). A discussion club-style format might be more comfortable for the resident representatives, but, at least for Pål, that would not produce a result.

Pål makes a few brief comments about thinking strategically that were difficult to make out in my audio recording. He then continues a few turns later, given in (4)

1. (4)

   

In turn 76, Pål continues his strategy of voicing the board and what it means to think in a strategic and focused way. Nina, meanwhile, takes up Pål's use of reported hypothetical speech to argue against him in turn 79, stating that it is important to make sure that strategic thinking matches the reality that the advisory board is supposed to be addressing. However, while Nina also uses reported speech, the hypothetical board she is voicing speaks differently from Pål's. Pål always uses first-person plural deictics to focus on what ‘we’ the advisory board needs to consider, and is future-oriented, toward the next meeting or future outcomes of board decisions. Nina, meanwhile, does not use the first-person, instead making a factual statement that the board's strategy ‘has headed in the wrong direction from what the real situation is’. Thinking collectively toward the future, for Nina, is not useful if the board's plans are not grounded in reality.

At this point, there is a brief struggle to hold the floor, mirroring Pål and Nina's attempts to control the terms of the meeting.

1. (5)

   

Nina at first allows Pål to speak (turn 89), but she then returns to the idea of the group's potential coming from their different experiences (turn 95). She thinks that a way of accessing this ‘real situation’ happens through residents’ sharing recent experiences with each other, not just through discussing the bureaucratic documents Sofie and her staff have prepared. As she says in turns 97 and 99 when she refers to the previous month's meeting, when everyone except Pål had stood outside and continued to talk for an hour after the official meeting had ended, there is a value in the kinds of ‘informal’ conversations the group has outside of the ‘formal’ meeting agenda. The kinds of topics they discuss there and what they learn from sharing experiences through conversations can then lead to the creation of new agenda items at future meetings. Formal agenda items should not just come from the municipal employees. Instead, Nina is more receiver-focused, where agenda items would come into being through the uptake of others’ speech. Nina's comments touch on what Fricker has called ‘hermeneutical injustice’, which occurs ‘when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’ (Reference Fricker2007:1). Not being able to be heard does not point to a problem with the speaker, but to a misunderstanding on the side of the listener. When the municipality sets the meeting agenda items, or the modes of interaction allowed during public meetings, anyone whose experiences or ways of expressing themselves do not fit within those constraints will not be heard and understood by the institution listening. For Nina, listening to residents on their own terms will allow Pål, and by extension, the municipality, to finally hear and respond to the multitude of different perspectives from the neighborhood.

This disagreement about the kinds of interaction and forms of listening that lead to effective policy decisions related to another disagreement between Pål and the resident board members about who it was they were representing. The residents generally thought that since their role was officially titled ‘resident representative’ (innbyggerrepresentant), that they were representing the entire community. All four took this representative role seriously, attending local events and soliciting feedback from their own networks about what they should bring up at these meetings. Pål, however, saw representatives as more of a Lockean, autonomous subject, where their job was to represent only their own perspectives and engage with the ‘facts’ of the issues under discussion. He and the Area Boost staff had selected the four board members for their diverse backgrounds, and so for him having them each speak from their positions would adequately represent local perspectives. Yet those perspectives were relevant only insofar as they pertained to the ‘facts’ of the documents under discussion. Nina, and other representatives, however, thought that the ‘full potential’ of the group involved talking about diverse experiences and getting to know and learn from one's neighbors.

FORMS OF LISTENING AS TYPES OF DEMOCRATIC ACTION

Pål and Nina's disagreement was part of a much wider discussion happening among Area Boost employees and engaged Tøyen residents around authority of democratic participation. Linda, for example, one of the Area Boost employees, would agree with Nina's ideas about meeting structure. She felt that the municipality's hierarchical way of trying to engage residents was the reason why residents felt they had not been listened to. At public meetings and in casual conversations around the community center, she would frequently bring up Arnstein's Ladder of Civic Participation, which distinguishes between ‘tokenistic’ participation and true ‘citizen control’ (Arnstein Reference Arnstein1969:26). Linda distinguished between what she saw as medvirkning ‘cooperation, assistance’ and more egalitarian samskaping ‘co-creation’. Medvirkning, which she equated with Arnstein's ‘Consultation’, is a top-down process where residents are asked for their input on projects that have been initiated ‘from above’, while samskaping, or ‘Partnership’ on Arnstein's scale, describes projects where the state and local residents come together as equals. This view of participation relies on an idea that neighborhood residents are more knowledgeable experts about the local situation than the government. Yet these local experts cannot act entirely on their own, but through a relationship built on consensus with the municipality.

Medvirkning is the more common term in participatory initiatives, used by the municipality, government ministries, and even corporations. As mentioned above, the local advisory board was a typical example of medvirkning. Samskaping, meanwhile, a recent calque of the English word ‘co-creation’ (Røiseland & Lo Reference Røiseland and Lo2019), implies a kind of newness. Pål, for example, did not know what the word meant when Nina brought it up at a board meeting. As Linda describes it, samskaping is not about getting local inhabitants to give feedback on municipal projects, but instead to get people to come together around a table ‘as equals’, and to work something out together. Linda stressed that co-creation requires creating trust between different kinds of people, something that does not just come out of creating meeting places where different kinds of people are in the same place at the same time, but instead creating kinds of events where people must come together around a table, talk, and learn from each other. This model relies on flattening hierarchies, where municipal employees and bureaucrats are there to facilitate the ideas coming from community members. While co-creation still relies on meetings as the ideal democratic structure, unlike the municipality's initiatives, it relies more on experience-based forms of expertise, where residents know what they need better than the people who are usually sanctioned experts. These two different forms of democratic action, participation and co-creation, require different forms of interaction and modes of listening.