Context 155 - July 2018

26 C O N T E X T 1 5 5 : J U L Y 2 0 1 8 participation does not necessarily involve democ- ratisation in the way it is usually understood. Ricardo Blaug has suggested that there are two different kinds of democratisation: incumbent and critical. While incumbent democratisation involves increasing participation within estab- lished processes, reinforcing the legitimacy of institutions, critical democracy denotes unsanc- tioned forms of participation that challenge existing power structures.The idea of incumbent democracy highlights that power can be retained through increasing participation by controlling the forms participation takes – and that this control may be exerted unintentionally. It is a slippery distinction, but one I experi- enced first hand when I realised that, despite my critical intentions, my own participatory project had ended up being about changing my partner groups to work in the ways I thought they should, instead of helping them meet their own goals. I wanted to share power over decision-making within the partnership, but the way I designed the project undermined realising this ideal in practice. Our initial interactions reinforced preconceived notions about expertise and kept us from identifying that the project was not providing what my partners wanted until it had become difficult to change it. Critical perspectives on participation are not unique to democratic theory. Sherry Arnstein’s often cited ‘ladder of participation’, from the early days of the participatory planning move- ment in North America, identified that while participation can be empowering, it can just as readily be tokenistic and manipulative. This danger has also been identified by researchers in development studies, exemplified by the edited volume Participation: the new tyranny? One of the chapters critiques the idea of empowerment, shifting the focus from ‘how much’ to ‘what’ participants are empowered to do. Like Blaug’s incumbent democracy, it identifies the danger that we, as professionals, decide others must be empowered and impose our ideas of what they should become, thereby denying participants agency over their own empowerment. In her contribution to a recent volume on The Ethics of Cultural Heritage , Emma Waterton articulates the need for professionals involved in community engagement practices ‘to think seri- ously about the risks of becoming exploitative’ (2015). In a UK context, where social scientists are identifying the inevitability of volunteers being manoeuvred to replace aspects of profes- sional public service provision during auster- ity, and the Museums Association has reported observing this shift in its annual Museums Survey, the risk of exploiting volunteers must not be downplayed. The geographer Marit Rosol, who has studied public participation in managing urban green spaces in Berlin, highlights that the ‘outsourc- ing of traditional state functions to civil soci- ety organisations’ does not necessarily involve increasing citizens’ participatory rights (Rosol, 2016). She goes on to note that locals resent ‘their prescribed role as stop-gap’ and are not prepared to deliver previously professional ser- vices without pay. Acclaimed author Naomi Klein has coined the term ‘changeless change’: ‘the kind of innovation that simultaneously upends current practices and studiously protects exiting wealth and power inequalities’ (Olma, 2016). In my research, I use this idea of changeless change to ask what participatory heritage initiatives actually change. This question is especially significant in a society that is increasingly enamoured by innovation. What I am finding in my research is that increas- ing public participation does not contribute to democratising heritage in a critical sense unless it moves beyond working in new ways to include sharing power over, not merely within, participa- tory projects. This must involve changing how we think about heritage and define legitimate heritage expertise. Divorced from such recon- ceptualisation, participatory initiatives are prone to devalue professional labour and exploit volun- teers by asking participants to work without pay. Established definitions of heritage and conser- vation entrench the idea that voluntary efforts 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Citizen Control Citizen Control Tokenism Nonparticipation Delegation Partnership Placation Consultation Informing Therapy Manipulation Arnstein’s Ladder (1969) Degrees of Citizen Participation