Citizen action: participation and making claims

Abstract

This chapter explores citizen action in the context of the state-citizen relationship, focused on how citizens make material and political claims through both formal institutional and informal everyday channels. Employing the analytical framework of invited and invented participation (Andrea Cornwall, John Gaventa), the chapter uses case studies from India and South Africa to critically explore whether participatory forms of urban governance can empower citizens and transform cities to become more just and inclusionary spaces without (re)creating forms of inequality and marginalisation. The case studies comprise Delhi’s state-initiated Bhagiadri scheme, to which middle-class homeowners and municipal officials were invited to develop consensual solutions to city problems, to the dynamic and inventive ways in which low-income beneficiaries of state-subsidised housing in Cape Town adapt their welfare product to better suit their needs. In both empirical examples, the role of the state in (de)legitimising citizens, actions and issues is common. At the same time, the chapter reveals the ways in which citizen action can bypass participatory spaces to create alternative spaces of radical disruption. These alternative (invented) spaces of citizen action can be both loud and performative (e.g. violent and peaceful protests), as well as more quiet and everyday (e.g. changes to the built environment), and yet both challenge the authority of the state (and other institutions) in sometimes very effective ways.