Westin, Martin and Mutter, Amelia and Calderon, Camilo and Hellquist, Alexander
(2021).
"Let us be led by the residents": Swedish dialogue experts' stories about power, justification and ambivalence.
Nordic Journal of Urban Studies. 1
, 113-130
[Research article]
![]() |
PDF
210kB |
Abstract
This paper focuses on the practices of an emerging group of practitioners in Swedish urban governance: dialogue experts. As dialogical ideals have been mainstreamed in planning policies, civil servants and governance consultants have been increasingly commissioned to engage in dialogue with citizens within public deliberation, planning consultations or citizens budgeting. Even though these practitioners influence the whys, whats and hows of urban development, their practices remain curiously under-explored in Nordic urban studies. Dialogue experts experience the practical dilemma of being experts in a practice that has developed as a reaction to expert-rule and top-down power. We inquire into this dilemma together with a group of dialogue experts who work within an urban development scheme in the district of Gottsunda in Uppsala, Sweden. We ask: how do dialogue experts make sense of their use of power in dialogues with citizens? We explore whether analysing dialogue practice through the concepts of power and justification might explain the practical dilemmas confronted by dialogue experts. By engaging in joint inquiry with the practitioners in a series of focus groups, we learn that the practitioners are inclined to critique power relations that exclude marginalised voices from urban planning but find it more difficult to justify their own use of power in pursuit of a more inclusive governance system. The dialogue experts employ two types of justification for their use of power: an advocative justification, which revolves around aspirations to change the planning system to include marginalised voices, and a more conventional bureaucratic justification, by which they merely execute the will of elected politicians and follow established planning procedures. Even so, the practitioners remain ambivalent about their use of power. Hence, we demonstrate how power theory and joint inquiry between practitioners and researchers can shed new light on the practical dilemmas in dialogue practice.
Authors/Creators: | Westin, Martin and Mutter, Amelia and Calderon, Camilo and Hellquist, Alexander | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Title: | "Let us be led by the residents": Swedish dialogue experts' stories about power, justification and ambivalence | ||||
Series Name/Journal: | Nordic Journal of Urban Studies | ||||
Year of publishing : | 2021 | ||||
Volume: | 1 | ||||
Page range: | 113-130 | ||||
Number of Pages: | 18 | ||||
Language: | English | ||||
Publication Type: | Research article | ||||
Article category: | Scientific peer reviewed | ||||
Version: | Published version | ||||
Copyright: | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 | ||||
Full Text Status: | Public | ||||
Subjects: | (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 5 Social Sciences > 506 Political Science > Public Administration Studies (A) Swedish standard research categories 2011 > 5 Social Sciences > 507 Social and Economic Geography > Human Geography | ||||
Keywords: | dialogue practitioners, justification, power, urban governance, urban planning, planners | ||||
URN:NBN: | urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-114936 | ||||
Permanent URL: | http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:slu:epsilon-p-114936 | ||||
Additional ID: |
| ||||
ID Code: | 26364 | ||||
Faculty: | NJ - Fakulteten för naturresurser och jordbruksvetenskap | ||||
Department: | (NL, NJ) > Dept. of Urban and Rural Development (LTJ, LTV) > Dept. of Urban and Rural Development | ||||
Deposited By: | SLUpub Connector | ||||
Deposited On: | 21 Dec 2021 10:25 | ||||
Metadata Last Modified: | 21 Dec 2021 10:31 |
Repository Staff Only: item control page