Pratiche di collaborazione per i beni comuni a Palermo: una nuova classe di professionisti?

Abstract

The crisis of representative democracy and the failures of policies unable to address citizens needs has led in the last years to rethink the models of governance, in search of more efficient and participative solutions, able to address costant changes in the welfare and market system. Citizen participation begun to be practiced as antidote to the flaws of traditional policy models, so becoming a fundamental element of every recent govern approach: from participative democracy to deliberative democracy, to the recent approach of collaborative governance for commons. This last field is spreading consistently in Italy, so influencing the most recent practices of urban policies according to criteria of citizen involvement. This trend is fostered by the theoretical elaboration of some scholars that propose the collaborative approach as a form of govern able to implement a new way of interaction between institutions and the society and innovative practices of management of commons. Instead the traditional approach of  “citizen participation” is going to be replaced by a new one focused on the “collaboration between administration and citizens”. It is a theoretical shift supported by the spread of new ways of participation to urban policies, having the common purpose of guaranteeing more efficacy in their results. This change is followed with a wide argumentative repertoire composed by words as “collaboration”, “creativity”, “innovation” able to witness this shift and to propose a different configuration of the relationship between citizens and institutions. This phenomenon proceeds with the development of new professional skills useful in accompanying these processes. As a matter of fact, he spread of practices of collaborative governance seems to be supported by a whole of actors belonging to the third sector and in particular in the field of culture and innovation. These ones are always more committed in sustaining new modes of managing the commons by deploying their competence and expertise reached in the framework of very different kind of experiences ranging from volunteering, consulting, academic research, etc. These group of actors are sometime defined (and define themselves) as “knowledge workers”, so referring to a professional profile characterized by high flexibility and uncertainty, and a blurred separation between time of life and time of work (Busacca 2015). By drawing on the city of Palermo as a field of observation for these dynamics of change the present paper proposes some reflections on this phenomenon. As a matter of fact, Palermo represents a privileged laboratory of observation with regard to these issues both for the proliferation of participative experiences, both for the history of govern of the last thirty years, marked by a constant research of a turn from the past of stagnation. In the last four years, in correspondence of the settlement of the new administration of left-center wing, different participative experiences have taken place that varies a lot for modes and actors involved, as for the different frame of participation that inspire them. An insight on the different forms of participation at work and on the actors driving them allows to observe some general phenomena as the evolving and transformation of the concept of participation, the strengthening of new forms of governance and the establishment of a new class of professionals of the third sector, specialized on issues ranging from participation, to collaborative governance and social and cultural innovation.