Centner, Ryan 
ORCID: 0000-0002-3295-3186
(2012)
Techniques of absence in participatory budgeting: space, difference and governmentality across Buenos Aires.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 31 (2).
pp. 142-159.
ISSN 0261-3050
Abstract
Techniques of absence describe some of the potentially anti-deliberative practices that haunt recently widespread participation-based governance schemes. Techniques of absence remove certain kinds of people – on a spatialised basis – from crucial ‘democratic’ conversations. To illustrate these, I use ethnographic accounts from the implementation of a citywide participatory budgeting programme in three neighbourhoods across Buenos Aires, Argentina, modelled after the vaunted budgeting process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989. I position absencing as part of an emergent urban governmentality related to participation. This allows for an analysis of the Buenos Aires participatory budget across very different areas of the city: Puerto Madero, Abasto, and La Boca. Discussion centres on dynamics of participation and non-participation observed during extensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. The research aimed to establish intense co-presence through participant-observation, yet instead yielded an ethnography of absences, entailing analysis of how, why and with what consequences there was lacking participation in this participatory experiment. The phenomenon of absencing points to an emergent governmentality that enables ironically pernicious, territorialised regulation of difference, which must be countered to fulfil the promise of such widespread experiments.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(IS... |
| Additional Information: | © 2012 The Author. Bulletin of Latin American Research © 2012 Society for Latin American Studies |
| Divisions: | Geography & Environment |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JA Political science (General) |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2013 13:44 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 00:14 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/51111 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
