Abstract

In the wake of neoliberal retrenchment, many local governments have established offices of community engagement and charged them with establishing new participatory governance structures—citizens’ committees, councils, panels, forums, advisory boards—that are meant to foster collaboration between the state and civil society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the structural limitations and hidden potential of these participatory governance structures, which are also known as public consultative mechanisms. Although these entities may be predicated on empowerment and democratization, they are often designed to restrict non-state actors to pro-forma (non)participation. To secure attendance levels sufficient to legitimize their claims to engagement, state-appointed community resource officers (CROs) must attract potential members to participatory governance structures with public ritual performances of “community.” This paper is based on data gathered from a multi-year longitudinal study of a state-sponsored participatory governance structure that employed qualitative research methods, including participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and artifact analysis. While these secular rituals may be structured to preclude meaningful participation, the citizen-activists who attend should not be mistaken for unwitting dupes in some state-directed scheme to attract external grants. The data presented here suggest that by strategically leveraging their presumed embodiment of the organic community with whom the state has ostensibly pledged to collaborate, participants subvert the rules and structure of state-sponsored ritual performances of community, generating new opportunities to challenge authority, voice demands, and express solidarity. Consequently, this paper argues that even performative public consultation mechanisms can potentially enable local governments to become more responsive to the needs of their subjects, though not in the manner celebrated by proponents of participatory grassroots development.