The concept of field in participation

The concept of ‘field’ has a long tradition in the social sciences (Hilgers and Mangez Reference Hilgers and Mangez2015). It refers to the idea that phenomena are manifestations of the relationships that occur within a given field. Within this field, positions with varying resources exist, and it is these that structure the field through a hierarchy which grants different capabilities to the actors. However, as Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1988) stated, continuous struggles occur within the field that redefine its structure. The value of what is considered ‘capital’ in a field is determined by a doxa (common sense or tacit knowledge) shared by all members of the field (Martinez-García Reference Martínez-García2017: 7). Competition among actors occurs through the appropriation of what is valuable (capital) within a field. Viewing democratic innovations as a specific field (the institutional participatory field) means that the effectiveness of these mechanisms and the roles occupied by the different actors involved will be determined by the interplay of relationships and dynamics within this space.

Democratic innovations have proliferated worldwide over the past 50 years. The emergence of the IPF is often attributed to the 1970s crisis and the subsequent rise of new public management (Baiocchi and Ganuza Reference Baiocchi and Ganuza2017). However, the formation of a field is not a response to historical necessity; it is a process of power and the product of a long series of exclusions (Mangez and Liénard Reference Mangez, Liénard, Hilgers and Mangez2015: 183). An analysis in terms of the field involves three interrelated and necessary moments (Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1995: 70): firstly, the position of the field in relation to the field of power; secondly, the objective structure of the relationships between the positions occupied by the agents competing within the field in question; and thirdly, the habitus of the agents.

In Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, the field of power is not a ‘field’ like any other. Rather, it is a ‘meta-field’ or space of relations that regulates power struggles in all other social fields. The decisions and dynamics within the field of power have an impact on how the other fields function and are ranked. Bourdieu compares the construction of the state with the construction of the field of power, that is, the state capital that grants power over the different kinds of capital and over their reproduction (Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1995: 66, 76). The more autonomous a field is, the less sensitive it will be to the external principle of hierarchy imposed by the field of power (Hilgers and Mangez Reference Hilgers and Mangez2015: 10).

The substantial decline in political trust observed during the 1970s significantly undermined the authority of political elites (Pharr and Putnam Reference Pharr and Putnam2000). This erosion of influence was driven by two key factors: the contraction of available resources because of the economic crisis, and the widespread emergence of demands for agency among citizens and economic actors (Boltanski and Chiapello Reference Boltanski and Chiapello1999). In this context, the development of Institutional Participatory Frameworks (IPFs) can be interpreted as a strategic response by political elites, aimed at restoring legitimacy in the realm of administrative decision-making.

Since that period, the increasing call for citizen participation in the formulation of public policy – particularly across the Global North – has given rise to a distinct and institutionalised domain of political engagement. Nevertheless, the autonomy of this participatory field remains contingent upon the expanding influence and independence of economic capital (Hilgers and Mangez Reference Hilgers and Mangez2015: 10). Within the IPF, the central dynamic revolves around the acquisition and mobilisation of sufficient capital to exert meaningful influence over administrative processes. The nature, timing, and rationale of policy decisions are thus shaped by the broader configuration of the field of power.

The establishment of the IPF eased the administrative transition from a hierarchical authority, which did not require citizen involvement to legitimise its public policies, to a more relational authority that seeks legitimacy through participation (Stoker Reference Stoker2006). This conceptual shift in public management (Warren Reference Warren2009) drives democratic innovations, which shift the focus of participation towards citizens proposals (versus protest) that must later be transformed into public policies.

According to Holdo (Reference Holdo2024: 3), institutional participation creates a new space characterised by mutual recognition: ‘a new form of capital (…) that did not exist before,’ which structured the relationships among actors (participants, technicians, and political elites). These actors must now consider the actions and expectations of others. This framework broke with the traditional conception of public policy as the product of a ‘will’. Now, it can be seen as the product of the practices and representation of the agents involved in it (Dubois Reference Dubois, Hilgers and Mangez2015: 204). However, this mutual recognition introduced a conflict about how to position oneself internally with sufficient capital to influence public policy definitions.

The proper capital in the production of public policies is usually framed in two types of opposition: the ability of agents to speak for the general interest against those who defend particular interests and the ability to speak in a competent manner against those who speak without special abilities (Dubois Reference Dubois, Hilgers and Mangez2015: 208). In the IPF it translates into: (1) the representation of the community as a whole (who speaks for whom) and (2) the epistemic qualification of proposals and actors (who has the qualified voice to legitimately define policies).

Both forms of capital (representative and epistemic) create a field fraught with tensions between actors who seek to legitimately represent those called to participate and to validate those with sufficient epistemic authority to make decisions for everyone. As we will explore, many of the arguments for changing or defending participatory devices, as well as justifying participation or the degree of participatory power each actor holds at a specific time to influence policies, revolve around these two forms of capital, which structure the new field. Understanding who the actors with the most capital are will help us to understand the evolution of DIs and the habitus associated to them.

From the point of view of the actors, the field establish a hierarchy of positions from the beginning, which is influenced by the field of power. Political elites hold greater weight because of their elected status, which endows them with significant representative capital as key actors in the field of power. This means that sharing power in the IPF can be influenced by electoral dynamics or that elites will have greater influence on decisions. Social organisations and their members are situated below; they advocate for the recognition of their representative and epistemic capital, which comes from their prominence in the field of power as actors capable of mobilising resources to influence the decisions of the elites. Experts and civil servants are positioned below in the hierarchy, as they lack representational legitimacy but hold a crucial role in the field because they have epistemic knowledge. Finally, individual citizens, who are called upon to participate within the IPF, typically receive minimal recognition of either type of capital.

This initial scheme of positions will influence the new participatory field. Faced with the competition of parties or the pressure of social movements and economic agents in the field of power, IPF revolves around a language of proposals. This mean that the production of public policies has to be based on a universal criterion, which includes everyone (policies could be assumed by everyone), and be qualified (the policies are of sufficient quality for all). How these capitals are designated and the dynamics that allow public policies to be achieved on the basis of these capitals change over time, restructuring the participatory field and the position of the actors. Understanding institutional participation as a field helps when it comes to grasping the history of democratic innovations through the disputes that occur within it.

We are going to apply the concept in Spain. It is an ideal territory because of the significant implementation of participatory policies since the arrival of democracy (1978). Since then, there has been an extraordinary expansion of DIs. There are civil servants specialised in participation in many public administrations, a constant process of reflection between academics and representatives on participation, and a significant density of tools and participants. Spain provides a good illustration of the conflicts between different actors to achieve better representation or voice through one participatory procedure or another but at the same time shows us the limits of participation in the face of the field of power. To facilitate the exposition, we will analyse DIs following their chronological implementation, focusing only on the three that best illustrate the participatory field at each moment: first, since the end of the 1970s, the advisory councils (ACs); from 2000, the participatory budgets (PBs); and finally, since 2020, deliberative minipublics (DMPs).

Trajectories of democratic innovations in Spain: From advisory councils to deliberative minipublics

The beginning of DIs in Spain, and in general in the Global North, needed a reference that legitimised the new field of institutional participation. Before that, the references for participation were the electoral and the protest dynamics. The IPF would derive from a crisis in that field of power, which in Spain coincided with the fall of the dictatorship. This led to justifying the local sphere as an ideal space, mainly because of the epistemic advantages individuals derive from local and experiential knowledge: ‘citizens are capable of participating in the control of immediate spaces’ (Pateman Reference Pateman1976: 109). At the local level, information, knowledge, and the ability to propose alternatives are usually attributed to individuals (Held Reference Held1992: 313), what Sintomer (Reference Sintomer2008) called ‘knowledge of use’. This element of proximity has marked the objectives of the field since its origins, so it is not surprising that it is at the local level where we find more DIs (Font, Della Porta, and Sintomer Reference Font, Della Porta and Sintomer2014). The tendency to increase the capacity of the people to influence decision-making processes through DIs has been inversely proportional to this territorial scale.

The territorial confinement of the new IPF is not a functional necessity, but a result of the pressure from the field of power, which separates the actions in both fields so that they do not overlap. In Spain, political parties at the beginning directly restricted the IPF to a local and inconsequential level. While they promoted the rhetoric of citizen participation, they were extremely reluctant to introduce any kind of direct citizen participation in the Constitution and believed that key citizen participation to make political decisions had to be channelled through political parties.

Chronologically, in Spain, everything started by giving prominence in the new field to local civil society organisations (CSOs) at the end of the 1970s, echoing the importance that local CSOs had in the last years of the dictatorship. DIs progressively invited individuals (nonorganised) until, starting in 2020, deliberative minipublics (DMPs) were referred only to nonorganised people. How did DIs get from one place to another? To address the analysis we will analyse studies already carried out by other researchers.

Advisory councils and the centrality of associations in the institutional participatory field

Advisory councils (ACs) are ‘permanent institutions which bring together CSO representatives, public officials, and politicians to discuss public issues’ (Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín, and Alarcón Reference Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín and Alarcón2023: 1568). In 1978 Spain approved its Constitution by referendum. In 1979, the city of Córdoba, governed by the Partido Comunista de España, developed the first regulatory framework for participation at the local level (Citizen Participation Regulations [CPR]). These CPR implemented the advisory councils as a privileged channel between local administration and society. Whereas during the 1980s, most ACs were organised mainly in neighbourhoods and were focused on the provision of basic services (housing, facilities, schools, infrastructure, etc.), in the 1990s, ACs expanded sectorially to inform the policy-making process (education, youth, and other welfare policies) (Navarro Reference Navarro1997). The key piece of ACs was civil society organisations (CSOs), and they had a consultative political nature. Even today, ACs are the basis of participation in Spain in all scales of the territory.

ACs proliferated because parties and party leaders needed social support from civil society to respond to the change of logic in the administrations towards a governance more focused on citizens (Navarro Reference Navarro1999). CSOs were considered at the beginning the complementary element of the electoral mechanisms. That is why giving institutional space to the CSOs seemed the most natural thing to do regarding the capitals of the new field. But IPFs were about proposing, not protesting, which obviously completely changed the relationships among actors.

Many normative theories at that time proposed CSOs as prominent connectors and generators of social capital, they also represented the interests of citizens before the public powers (Hirst Reference Hirst1994). The importance of CSOs as such was later reflected in Spain in a law that regulated its functioning as a privileged ‘mediating agent’ between politics and society (Law 1/2000). As can be seen, CSOs had representative and epistemic capital to act alongside politicians and experts in the new participatory field. Individual citizens did not need to participate except through CSOs.

During the period 1987 – 91, more than 70% of the municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants had their CPR, following in the footsteps of the city of Córdoba (Font Reference Font2001). By the year 2000, 52% of municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants had a CPR (Federación Española de Municipios [FEMP] 2001). Already at the beginning of the 1990s, 70% of municipalities greater than 20,000 inhabitants had territorial ACs (Navarro Reference Navarro1997). Of the municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, 60% had established sectoral ACs in the year 2000 (FEMP 2001). In short, during the 1980s and 1990s, ACs mushroomed under all Spanish administrations, and decentralisation also facilitated their expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s (Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín, and Alarcón Reference Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín and Alarcón2023). The city of Barcelona has the maximum representation of this participatory device, with the largest volume of ACs in Spain (Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín, and Alarcón Reference Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín and Alarcón2023).Footnote ¹

The system created around ACs has endured over time. The cohabitation between leftist parties and CSOs at the beginning of democracy generated a space that was progressively closed to other interests and other people. For example, in the current regulatory frameworks for citizen participation in Spain, created during the 1980s, neighbourhood associations were overrepresented in the institutional bodies, to the detriment of sectoral associations, further removed from the interests of the progressive political parties that had once promoted the Citizen Participation Regulations. The configuration of the participatory spaces themselves was conditioned by the public powers, something that Brugue, Font, and Goma (Reference Brugue, Font, Goma and Font2001) confirmed in the formation of the advisory councils in Barcelona, in which the CSOs best adapted to collaboration with administrations in the provision of public services were favoured. Navarro (Reference Navarro1999) spoke of a structural participatory bias in the field.

The participatory bias, based on the affinity of CSO members with the parties in the municipal government, gradually led to a cartelisation of the associative movement. As a result, local CSOs in general, and especially neighbourhood organisations, developed a strong dependence on public institutions for their survival. These CSOs relied on the administrations to obtain private resources (subsidies) necessary for their survival, but they also needed administrative public resources (as public investments) to carry out activities (public goods). In turn, political representatives maintained public relations with CSOs, which could either support the representatives or organise protest actions against them with varying degrees of media and public resonance. This created a significant interaction of mutual dependence, as Holdo (Reference Holdo2024) pointed out. CSOs depended on the political elites to receive subsidies and public goods, while public representatives relied on CSOs to some extent to avoid or mitigate critical actions that could foster a hostile environment in electoral dynamics. The field, thus established, left out the new social movements, which proposed to build other spaces of participation and autonomy to respond to the power of the state and the market (Offe Reference Offe1988).

As the years progressed, criticism of this model emerged mainly driven by civil servants and scholars (Alguacil Reference Alguacil2003). One key problem was its lack of representative capital. Membership was limited to leaders of traditional CSOs, organisations that concentrated their operations among a few members, which discouraged broader participation (Navarro Reference Navarro1999). Some scholars began also to doubt ‘the capacity of the groups that are part of this associative fabric to represent the voice of all citizens, a problem that takes on special relevance within the framework of a participation model that has left aside the non-organized’ (Font Reference Font2001: 5). Criticism of the lack of representativeness was coupled with criticism of the functioning of the ACs. Their connections with public decision-making processes were increasingly classified as weak and obscure (Sarasa and Guiu Reference Sarasa, Guiu and Font2001). Internal dynamics and agendas were often established vertically by governments, reducing CSOs’ autonomy (Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín, and Alarcón Reference Fernández-Martínez, García-Espín and Alarcón2023) and, therefore, also the autonomy of the new field.

In 2000, a group of civil servants who worked in municipal administrations managing their local IPFs formed a network (Kaleidos) to promote studies and proposals aimed at improving participation in municipalities. In one of their first works, they warned of the cartelisation of the traditional associative networks: ‘these have become institutionalized and look more towards the administration than towards involving citizens in their activities and proposals’ (Alguacil Reference Alguacil2003: 76). They pointed out problems related to the lack of representative capital, as lack of generational change, but also lack of epistemic capital as lack of communication with other realities and cultures present in the city, which reduced their epistemic capacity to make decisions for the entire population.

Despite criticism, ACs continue to be the backbone of the participatory map in all territorial administrations, even if they were considered by Arnstein to be the last step of her famous ladder – at the level of the manipulable. Its consultative nature, however, safeguarded the new field of institutional participation from conflicts of legitimacy against the field of power. Nevertheless, the criticism that appeared towards the local CSOs gradually diminished the capacity that they were supposed to have at the beginning of democracy in Spain. At the end of the 1990s, as the report of the Kaleidos network showed, it was not questioned that traditional CSOs and ACs no longer represented the whole of society, nor did they provide sufficient epistemic value. Rather, as we will see now, their collusion has been highlighted in a closed space, far from society, which was a problem for the political elites. CSOs had lost part of their capital. This opened up a new participatory trend in thinking about the renewal of the IPF.

Participatory budgets and the opening of the participatory field to lay citizens

Despite the prominence given to the CSOs, political disaffection continued to affect the field of power (Montero, Gunther, and Torcal Reference Montero, Gunther and Torcal1998), and the new social movements took on a new role as an alter-globalisation movement. They underlined the importance of participatory budget (PBs) as a renewed form of governance. It was no coincidence that the first World Social Forum in 2001 was held in the cradle of the participatory budget – Porto Alegre – under the slogan of the alter-globalisation movement: ‘another world is possible’.

In 1999, a group of left-wing political officials from the city of Córdoba, where the first AC in Spain had taken place, visited Porto Alegre, which had invented PBs 10 years earlier. Leading the Córdoba delegation was Mª José Moruno, recently elected councillor for the participation area of the city council as an independent politician. The fascination with the participatory budget of the Brazilian city marked the beginning of a new cycle in Spain within the IPF. It was distinct from the framework developed over the previous 20 years around ACs: ‘Upon learning about the experience of Porto Alegre, many of us immediately understood that we were facing a powerful methodological resource for the participation of the people in the government of their cities’ (Moruno Reference Moruno, Ganuza and Álvarez de Sotomayor2003: 9).

The introduction of participatory budgets (PBs) coincided with increasing criticism of previous participatory mechanisms because of their lack of representative and epistemic capacity (Navarro Reference Navarro1999; Font Reference Font2001; Alguacil Reference Alguacil2003). As the mayor of Córdoba said three years after the implementation of PBs in the city: ‘the application and development of Participatory Budgets constitute the real perspective of another way of doing politics’ (Aguilar Reference Aguilar2004: 59). The cartelisation of municipal CSOs, the pervasive distrust of politicians, and the emergence of a social movement led by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and associations open to renewing the forms of collective action to better fight neoliberalisation cornered the traditional forms of participation.

Two elements distinguished participatory budgets (PBs) from the AC model. Firstly, PBs aimed to include all citizens through the organisation of open assemblies in the city. It was the first attempt to address the IPF taking into consideration the entire population, without intermediary actors. This required new structures such as those demanded by the new social movements (open assemblies). Secondly, its development allowed citizens to directly decide on a portion of the municipal budget, which meant challenging the dynamics of the field of power, since the logic of administrative decisions still resided there. Lay citizens could decide by themselves. This meant transferring to citizens the epistemic capacity that rested with traditional associations in ACs: Lay citizens, now, for politicians, had ‘the knowledge of the terrain’ and ‘the perception of daily problems’ (Ganuza and Nez Reference Ganuza and Nez2012: 86). Therefore, one of the main elements that would justify the implementation of PBs would be expanding participation beyond the associative movement, creating a new device ‘outside the negotiation of interests characteristic of the previous participatory process’, as the councillor in charge of PBs said in Córdoba (Ganuza and Nez Reference Ganuza and Nez2012: 86).

All political parties, including the conservative faction, acknowledged the emergence of a broader social transformation (Ganuza Reference Ganuza2011: 393). While a reconfiguration of power relations was deemed necessary, the focus of reform centred on the structure of Institutional Participatory Frameworks (IPFs), rather than on the underlying field of power itself. As articulated by the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), ‘we are witnessing the development of the demand for a participatory democracy that aims to involve the entire society in the daily construction of public life and provide political decisions with greater legitimacy, with experiences such as Participatory Budgets’ (PSOE 2004: 53).

PBs thus slowly expanded throughout the Spanish territory from 2001, when the first experiences began in Córdoba, Andalucia, until 2010. As with ACs, they began to be a device closely linked to progressive parties (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012a). And as happened with the CPRs, participation in the open PB assemblies showed a significant participatory bias. Ideologically, there was a greater presence of sympathisers of the party that promoted PBs (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012b). The participatory bias equally colonised the participatory field since those who participated were also the most prepared people and those with the highest socioeconomic status (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012a). However, at the end of that first decade, almost a fifth of the existing experiences were already promoted by the conservative party, thanks to the construction of its own model, less intensive in participation (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012a). The quality of the procedures (how much participants can decide; whether they debate or just are consulted, etc), as recent research on PBs shows, is still greatly influenced by the ideology of the rulers (Becerril, Ganuza, and Rico Reference Becerril, Ganuza and Rico2024).

During these years of expansion, PBs generated many tensions within the IPF. In the city of Córdoba, the traditional social movement boycotted the participatory device as soon as it was launched, as happened in many other cities in the world precisely claiming its capital in the institutional participatory field (Ganuza, Nez, and Morales Reference Ganuza, Nez and Morales2014). CSOs criticised, first, the lack of experience and knowledge of the nonorganised. For them, PBs also involved a deterioration of epistemic capital, because citizens did not know, compared to the experience and knowledge accumulated by CSOs over the years (Ganuza, Nez, and Morales Reference Ganuza, Nez and Morales2014). But they also highlighted the lack of representation of unorganised people. They claimed a definition of the general interest that had CSOs as its centre, as the representative of the neighbourhood association of the city of Córdoba said in 2007: ‘They had forgotten that the basis of participation was the associations, because they have the work of structuring society, because society is very unstructured by individual interests. Citizen participation is the delegation of a part of the power to the groups’ (Ganuza, Nez, and Morales Reference Ganuza, Nez and Morales2014: 2284). The city of Córdoba ended up abandoning PBs in 2007 under a progressive government.

The number of participants in PBs, which for many of the elites was the main muscle of the participatory experience (its representative capital), showed a wide range, between 1% and 5% of the electoral census, being greater the smaller the municipality was (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012a). Without being massive participation, the annual cycles of PBs managed to attract an appreciable number of people, much more than traditional CSOs and ACs, but the participation was biased.

The expansion of participatory budgets (PB) up to 2010 did not entail the replacement of the traditional advisory council (AC) model. This coexistence generated tensions within the Institutional Participatory Framework (IPF), as cities often hosted two parallel mechanisms pursuing similar objectives – one involving civil society organisations (CSOs), and the other engaging lay citizens directly. By the end of the first decade, growing criticism from opposition parties, established CSOs, and academic researchers began to challenge the inclusiveness and the epistemic robustness of PB initiatives. In response, actors within the field of power sought to contain these critiques by narrowing the scope of administrative openness. Decision-making was increasingly confined to minor infrastructure expenditures, representing on average no more than 1% of municipal budgets in Spain (Ganuza and Francés Reference Ganuza and Francés2012a). This strategic reduction mitigated tensions with the field of power and deflected criticism regarding participants’ limited capital. However, it simultaneously rendered PBs politically marginal, especially when contrasted with the transformative rhetoric that had originally accompanied its emergence – embodied in slogans such as ‘another world is possible’.

The influence that the field of power has had on PBs has been very significant. In 2011, with the economic crisis, the electoral dynamics expelled many left-wing parties from municipal governments, and the number of PB experiences decreased drastically. New national financial rules that significantly cut public spending for local administrations, and the arrival of the conservative party in many municipalities that made PBs discouraged their development. Only starting in 2015, with another electoral turn in favour of the left this time, did ‘new municipalism’ arrive. Led by young leaders without political experience, raised under the 15M protests, they wanted to renew politics with a strong push for digital PBs (Mérida Reference Mérida2022). Hand in hand with the rhetoric of the indignant movement, PBs would expand again, but through digital platforms and always confined to a corner of public policy production (Francés, Barros, Falck et al. Reference Francés, Barros, Falck, Pérez-Gañán, Enríquez, Ortega and Martínez2024). Although this new wave of PBs visibly reduced in-person participation, it increased the number of participants. Current studies on the functioning of these experiences highlight the simplification of participatory procedures, the exclusivity of digital participation, and the reduction of the capacity to influence the results of public policies. However, they have expanded significantly in Spain thanks to the simplicity of the procedure in a digital environment (Martínez-Sánchez Reference Martínez-Sánchez2023). The criticisms of scholars and CSOs in regard to this new version of PBs are very reminiscent of those that the associations made to the device at the beginning of the 21st century. Digital dynamics prevent an effective debate and corner the voice (and centrality) of the associations, limiting the influence to a superfluous spending from the point of view of city governance (Mérida Reference Mérida2022; Mota-Consejero and Janoschka Reference Mota-Consejero and Janoschka2023).

As happened with ACs, despite its difficulties, contradictions, and little impact, the PB has established itself as a general participatory device, now promoted by large and small municipalities. But the supposed renewal of politics and relations within the participatory field with which its promoters introduced the device in the early 2000s has been diluted over time. Important decisions continue to be dominated by actors in the field of power, such as economic agents and political elites.

Deliberative minipublics (DMPs) and the revival of ACs

From ACs to PBs, we have seen how political elites timidly opened the administration to the decision of the people, introducing nonorganised people despite the conflicts generated by their questioned epistemic capacity and representative legitimacy. The displacement of the PB to a minor debate on small infrastructures further fuelled the conflict with the associations within the participatory field since that was the traditional space of influence of the traditional CSOs. However, it managed to neutralise possible conflicts of legitimacy between elites and participation by isolating DIs to a corner of the political space. Many years later, in 2021, deliberative mechanisms arrived in Spain, driven by the European deliberative wave (OECD, 2020), trying to respond to the conflicts and paradox in the IPF: on the one hand, the participatory bias and, therefore, the representative capacity of the previous DIs and, on the other, the questioned epistemic capacity of nonorganised citizens.

In Spain, deliberative mechanisms were sporadically implemented during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s (Font and Blanco Reference Font and Blanco2007; Ganuza, Francés, Lafuente et al. Reference Ganuza, Francés, Lafuente and Garrido2012). However, it was not until 2021 that deliberation gained significant traction, marked by the launch of the first state-level Citizens’ Assembly on the climate crisis. The introduction of deliberative minipublics (DMPs) represents a substantial advancement within the Institutional Participatory Framework (IPF). On one hand, DMPs enable politicians to initiate substantive debates on issues with profound implications for citizens’ lives, thereby shifting the IPF’s focus beyond local and low-impact matters. On the other hand, the procedural innovations introduced by DMPs – such as the random selection of participants and the use of structured deliberative dynamics – redefine the normative objectives of the participatory field. The emphasis is no longer on eliciting citizens’ preferences based on experiential knowledge, but rather on inviting them to engage in reflective deliberation on public policies that transcend their immediate lived experience.

The arrival of DMPs posed a real challenge to the structure of the participatory field. The generality of its objectives (to discuss large issues that influence everyone) makes it possible to take the mechanisms to a larger scale (the entire city, region, or state). To date, 10 DMPs have been organised since 2021, 4 of them regional, 5 local, and 1 statewide.Footnote ² Half were about climate change or similar topics, and others about mental health or young people. The Som Energia cooperative also organised a DMP among its members in 2024 about its strategic lines. But this leap generates new conflicts over the capitals of the IPF. Certainly, the lottery procedure (which involves a random selection of citizens and then the construction of a representative sociodemographic sample of citizens from those drawn) makes it possible to justify the representativeness of the participants, beyond problems in the execution of that representative sample insofar as it implies self-selection in the sociodemographic sample (Spada and Peixoto Reference Spada and Peixoto2025).

For many politicians, the lottery resolves many of the biases of which DIs have been repeatedly accused from the beginning. Their informal comments backstage in the middle of a DMP in the city of Barcelona about young people in the year 2021 underlined it was the first time they had really seen the diversity of young people in Barcelona in a participatory process (del Campo and Ganuza, Reference del Campo and Ganuza2025). This representativeness is an extraordinary complement to its electoral representativeness. The fiction generated by the lottery can lead them to think that they can talk to society as a whole.

However, the loss of value of the ‘knowledge of use’ in DMPs significantly conditions the epistemic dimension. It is true that it is precisely this loss that makes it possible to justify people’s participation in areas in which no one thought it was legitimate to do so, not only beyond the local level, but also on complex issues as strategic policies. These were until now only the responsibility of the actors in the field of power. Providing participants with the necessary epistemic capacity to be able to adequately debate general problems therefore becomes a crucial objective, which directs most of the available resources towards this end.

From the perspective of political representatives, deliberative minipublics (DMPs) represent a step forward in terms of public representativeness. However, they also raise concerns regarding the epistemic authority of elected officials. Within a DMP, the objective is to foster consensus – a deliberative space where ideological differences are reconciled and outcomes reflect a mediation between diverse citizen interests. In doing so, DMPs challenge the epistemic boundaries of traditional public decision-making processes, which are often not grounded in collective debate and reflection. This shift has the potential to expose and question the opaque dynamics that characterise the field of power, particularly those mechanisms that operate without transparency or public scrutiny.

Regarding this challenge, the connection between DMP recommendations and public policies is so far very weak, if not almost nonexistent. For instance, the Spanish national DMP on climate occurred weeks after the government approved the Ecological Transition Law, which was the subject of the organised DMP. While some governments have produced detailed reports on the feasibility of implementing recommendations from DMPs, it remains generally challenging to do so. Political representatives often criticise the difficulty of translating DMP results into concrete policies. At present, DMPs appear more to be spaces for broad reflection on general issues, rather than effective decision-making platforms, just as the advisory councils are. Again, the relationship with the field of power delimits the scope of the IPF.

Deliberative minipublics (DMPs) also bring to the fore longstanding tensions with associations competing for the legitimacy required to influence public decision-making. However, this conflict now involves new social movements, particularly environmental ones. In a recent study involving the most representative environmental organisations in Spain – those participating in the State Advisory Council on the Environment – explicit concerns were raised regarding the involvement of lay citizens in complex, nonlocal issues (del Campo and Ganuza Reference del Campo and Ganuza2025).

Criticism centres first on the lottery-based selection and its claim to representativeness and second on the epistemic competence of participants. Regarding the former, doubts persist about the ability to construct a truly representative sample, given that participation ultimately depends on individuals’ willingness to take part. More significantly, concerns have been voiced about the knowledge base of lay citizens. The frequently repeated assertion that ‘they don’t know’ reflects a contrast with the expertise held by environmental organisations, which includes familiarity with detailed legislation and the technical language used in policy diagnosis and formulation.

Although the learning capacity of lay participants is acknowledged, the process is seen as highly susceptible to manipulation, given their reliance on curated information. This perception leads many to conclude that DMPs are ill-suited to address complex issues at the national level. Instead, the local scale, where citizens are believed to possess ‘knowledge of use’, is viewed as more appropriate. In this context, new social movements – much as did traditional ones in earlier critiques of participatory budgeting – tend to reaffirm the role of advisory councils as the legitimate space for informed participation.