Planning and the communal state: interpreting community participation in Caracas

The paper adopts an interpretive institutionalist framework [Hay (2011), “Interpreting Interpretivism Interpreting Interpretations: The New Hermeneutics of Public Administration.” Martin (2015), “‘Ahora tienen que escucharnos’ [now they have to listen to us]: Actors’ Understandings and Meanings of Planning Practices in Venezuela’s ‘Participatory Democracy.” PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, to unpack participants’ involvement in communal councils (CCs) and a commune, two Venezuelan reforms seeking to incorporate citizens into planning processes. The paper focuses on how participants in La Silsa, an informal neighbourhood in Caracas, understood and enacted upon community planning opportunities provided by these new councils. Municipal and national government staff and finance heavily supported La Silsa’s emerging commune and CCs. Despite the national government’s rhetoric of ‘constructing a new socialist, communal state’, the article identifies several challenges need to be overcome to successfully shift from existing representative institutional/governmental arrangements towards more participatory repertoires. The article’s findings mirror those of other empirical studies of Latin America’s democratic innovations: citizen participation strengthens representative governmental arrangements, rather than replace them with normative alternatives.