This chapter further clarifies what communicative capacity looks like, as well as what enables and inhibits public professionals and citizens in exercising it, by explaining how they engage with the situation in which they meet. The comparison of the cases shows that the situation of public encounters is a complex, ambiguous, and changing work in progress. It consists of a great number of persons, institutions, policies and problems, the meaning and significance of which constantly change. Therefore, public professionals and citizens spend a lot of time talking about how to refine rules, structures and plans, while being unaware of how they perform habitual patterns of communication into being through this process. Although it is undeniably preferable to improve the institutional design of the situation, this is unlikely to offer anything more than a temporary stabilisation of the work in progress. As Mark, a Community Planning officer in Glasgow, indicates in the opening quote, participatory practice is “just an ongoing piece of work … that doesn't stop”. Public professionals and citizens often fail to discuss what has changed productively, what appears to be affecting what, and what might be the most sensible way of going forward. More problematically, their encounters are likely to be characterised by antagonism, deadlock and persistent problems because they lack the capacity to communicate about who can and should say and do what, when, and how.

By starting from scratch with new participatory institutions, public professionals and residents in Glasgow were divided between proponents and critics of the reform. As a result, they spend most time contesting the proper form and function of their participatory structures instead of talking about how to resolve local problems. In Amsterdam, the situation grants space to public professionals and residents to get to grips with the nitty-gritty of local problems. While this flexibility is greatly appreciated, it also generates a desire for more clarity, certainty, and stability about who is supposed to do what, when, and how. Public professionals and residents in Bologna have been groundbreaking by establishing, for the first time, participatory institutions that set strict limits to the conditions under which they meet.