ABSTRACT
Citizen participation has become one of the most important topics on the institutional agenda in many European countries and in a number of different public action areas, particularly at a local level. The interest that the theme arouses is on a par with its vagueness. Whilst there is a certain consensus over understanding participation as the citizen’s involvement in public decisionmaking, the concept is polysemic and it tends to result in a variegated spectrum of procedures. Moreover, it is affected by a large body of normative theory, in which two distinct perspectives emerge: the theories of participatory democracy, which stress the direct involvement of citizens in public affairs, and the theories of deliberative democracy, which emphasize mainly the virtue of dialogical and reflective processes (Papadopoulos and Warin, 2007). On local welfare agendas, participation is normally associated with strategies
for promoting the active role of the beneficiaries and/or social inclusion. In this sense it is an integral part of the reorganizations of social policies that have taken place over the last few decades, and a vital key to gaining an understanding of the agency theories they incorporate and convey. As a result, participation brings together a very diverse range of modes for focusing on the role of recipients: as users who contribute to providing a service, either individually and/or as family members; as inhabitants mobilized for the regeneration of a decaying neighbourhood; as stakeholders; as members of third-sector organizations or communities involved in local solidarity networks; and as citizens with rights who belong to a political community (Newman and Tonkens, 2011). The present chapter brings into focus some issues regarding the relationship
between voice and participation. The starting point, as I have mentioned elsewhere (Bifulco, 2013), is Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda (2004). The gist of the plot is as follows: before going to a funeral, four friends gather around a restaurant table and show off their storytelling skills by narrating the tale of a woman – the same woman seen from two different angles, two Melindas in fact. But while one version is tragic, the other is comic. In the first, Melinda encounters grief and despair, while in the second she ends up moderately happy. Thus, the outcome of Melinda and Melinda can indeed be an effective way to indicate the complications arising when analysing certain social phenomena that clearly display both negative and positive features.
