This paper is on the intent to include the young poor into democratic practices, in a context where basic needs are not fulfilled. It therefore discusses education, citizenship and social justice and illustrates – based on empirical data – the tensions between the demands for a participatory youth placed on the educational communities and the social contexts within which the education process takes place.
There is an impressive global spread of participation as concept and practice in the field of democracy and innumerable intents to create more (Kelty 2017). Its omnipresence and common desirability have led both scholars and politicians to speak of participation as an “imperative of our time” (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2016, 23), which reaches out towards new spheres and subjects. So does the socialist government of the Argentine city Rosario, which has a long participatory tradition. In 2012 it announced to “go for more” by newly offering the inclusion of poor young people into the Presupuesto Participativo Joven (PPJ), the Youth Participatory Budgeting. The PPJ invites participants to gather and experience a citizenship-building process by critically analyzing their realities and by building solution-oriented projects.
The program offers “true” participation dissociated from neoliberal and authoritative features as experienced in the past decades. The young poor, who have escaped from the traditional dispositive of control and order (Foucault 1995), constitute the very focus of the socialist government and its program of social inclusion and political innovation. I use the PPJ as a case study to analyze the discourses and practices of the program, which I understand as a new ‘technology’ of government and which will be analyzed within the Foucauldian concepts of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault 1982), ‘conduct’ and ‘counter- conduct’ (ibid. 2007a).
Rosario exposes two core features: On one hand, it is characterized by an entrepreneurial, technical and conflict-evading spirit discussed as ‘post-politics’ or ‘post-democracy’. The two terms refer to a depoliticized and consensual way of governing, with its tendency to keep disagreement and conflict out of space. It is criticized as “the art of suppressing the political” in the name of democracy and civility (Rancière 1998), as the “emptying of the political sphere in favour of technical discussion” (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2016, 49), “avoiding new visions” (ibid.), “eliminating dissidence” (ibid.), leading to “the next banality of politics” (ibid.). In this literature, institutionalized participation is treated as the contemporary norm, whose consensual characteristic has led to the “end of politics” (Rancière 1999, 75), by neutralizing and diffusing meaningful criticism (Mouffe 2005, Žižek 1999a, Rancière 1998, 1999). I will situate my data within this discussion illustrating the depoliticizing process as well as its effects. By doing so I will discuss the potential of so-called post-political participatory spaces to empower young poor people and to deepen democracy.
On the other hand, the city is member of “Educating Cities”, a global project which assumes that the city itself is educational; it recognizes its pedagogical potential and claims participation to be a right of all citizens. Its principles postulate that the educational city should exercise and develop these functions in parallel with the traditional institutions, focusing on the formation and development of all its citizens, with a special focus on children and young people (Fattore and Bernardi 2014). Based on these characteristics I will subsequently focus on the collaboration with the (in)formal educational institutions, on which the program depends for its successful realization. I will show how the implementation process generated discontent and refusal among the workers in the educational sectors and will discuss the potential as well as the limits of this highly meaningful political criticism.