Ajuntament de Barcelona. Economia Cooperativa, Social y Solidaria y Consum, 2017

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The Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona, is the result of a municipal initiative. Its aim is to offer a transformative socio-economic vision of the urban reality. It includes an action programme and aims to contribute towards reducing social and territorial inequalities, while promoting an economy at the service of people and of social justice.

The Impetus Plan comprises a diagnosis, the development process and the set of actions desired to be carried out in the city over the coming years. It is structured into the following parts:

•  The social and solidarity economy in Barcelona: analyses the reality of the transformative socio-economic fabric of the city and its roll-out across the territory
•  The Planning Process: explains the process involved in drafting the Plan and related co-production and co-responsibility dynamics.
•  Contents of the Plan: describes the general and specific objectives, lines of work, measures and actions to be implemented.
•  Development of the Plan: indicates the different agents involved in the Plan’s execution and spaces for joint and participatory work.
•  Budget, Monitoring and Evaluation: details the budgetary allocations, as well as the impact assessment criteria used.
•  Annex. Towards a New Socio-Economic Policy: offers an overview of the plural economy and of the proposal for the city’s socio-economic transformation.

Excerpts:

As explained below, this Impetus Plan is the product of dialogue between the SSE sector and the City Council, which gave rise to a shared diagnosis. The report The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona developed a compilation of needs that are summarised in the following challenges tag cloud.

These challenges, detected by the SSE fabric itself, show those aspects that require input in order to consolidate and strengthen the social and solidarity economy movement. This Impetus Plan contains measures and actions related with these challenges, which often require internal work by the sector itself. In this sense, co-production and co-responsibility in achieving them are essential.

To highlight those that enjoy the greatest consensus, efforts need to be channelled towards improving the coordination of the sector in a global sense. This will make it possible to create a greater shared identity; increase communication outreach to disseminate the principles and values of the SSE among citizens; make spaces available to the SSE so that it can become the backbone of neighbourhoods and districts; improve inter-cooperation to strengthen social market construction; place emphasis on disseminating and training in democratic and participative governance as an eminently transformative element; and influence socially responsible public procurement, based on eco-social values, as a fundamental strategy.

Tag cloud of challenges, Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

Commons collaborative economy sector

Meetings were held, along with the sharing of spaces for diagnosis, with BarCola, the collaborative economy hub that groups together 18 organisations. In March 2016, the city hosted the Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People (“Procomuns”) event whose sessions featured participation by over four hundred people and led to a declaration of 120 measures for public policies on commons collaborative economy matters, which were then put forward in the Municipal Action Plan (PAM).

The Planning Process for the Impetus Plan for the SSE in Barcelona

Statistics on the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

According to the study The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona (2016), the city is home to 4,718 socio-economic initiatives that, according to their legal structures, form part of the social and solidarity economy.

Some of the most significant data are:

—— 2,400 third social sector organisations —— 1,197 worker-owned enterprises —— 861 cooperatives —— 260 community-economic initiatives

In total, they account for 53,000 people employed, over 100,000 volunteers, over 500,000 consumer cooperative members and approximately 113,000 mutualists.

SSE initiatives exist in all sectors of economic activity: from energy through culture to the food sector.

Barcelona is home to 861 cooperatives of all types, representing 20% of all the cooperatives in Catalonia. The large majority are worker cooperatives: these account for 77% of the total (numbering 667, of which 36 are social initiative cooperatives).
Furthermore, the city is home to 31 consumer and user cooperatives, which operate in a very wide range of activity fields: food, paper, energy, health, etc.
Since 1993, the city’s main housing cooperatives have built 2,093 homes in Barcelona, and today a new model is emerging known as housing cooperatives with assignment of use rights.
In the education area there are 19 education cooperatives, of which 80% are worker cooperatives, 10% consumer cooperatives and 10% mixed.

They concentrate around 2,500 members, over 5,600 students and they employ over 750 people.

There are also 13 free schools running plus various child-rearing and shared education initiatives for ages between 0 and 3 years.

Worker-owned enterprises enjoy a significant presence in the city: they represent 25.4 % of Barcelona’s SSE enterprise fabric, although a challenge in this sector’s articulation is detected. All local development projects must count on the strength of the third social sector because, with 2,400 organisations in the city, it represents over 50% of SSE initiatives: 48 of them correspond to special work centres and 20 are work integration social enterprises (WISE).

The seven ethical finance organisations operating in Catalonia are all based in Barcelona. Furthermore, in the insurance sector, the EthSI (Ethical and Solidarity Based Insurance) seal exists to certify insurance products, brokers and agents in line with SSE criteria. In Spain there are seven certified companies, four of them based in Barcelona. Community economies have emerged in the city as self-managed and innovative projects in the creation of new forms geared towards resolving people’s needs. In this respect, especially worthy of highlight are 23 citizen-managed facilities, 59 agro-ecological consumer groups, 13 exchange markets, 21 time banks and 20 community market gardens.

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Summary

“The discourse and practice of participatory governance experienced a boom in European cities in the aftermath of the new millennium, coinciding with a period of economic boom. This project thoroughly examines the role of participatory urban governance in times of crisis and austerity: Has participation strengthened? Has it weakened? Does it remain unchanged? Has it been reformulated?

In principle, the empirical evidence points to four contradictory directions: (1) the continuity of some pre-existing formal structures of participation; (2) residualisation and the disappearance of some others; (3) the emergence of new practices; and (4) the development of new meanings and new roles for participation. But do all these trends have the same weight or are there some that clearly dominate over the other? Are there significant variations from place to place? What are the explanatory factors for such variations? When we speak of participatory governance we are concerned not only with what happens to citizen participation mechanisms promoted from the “top” by the public institutions, but also we wonder what new participation dynamics emerge from the “bottom”

Overall, how are relationships between government and citizens evolving? Can we talk about new models, new paradigms? What political assessment should be made of them? This project addresses these issues through a comparative analysis of various British cities (Cardiff, Leicester) and of the Spanish state (Madrid, Barcelona, Lleida and San Sebastián).”

The Evolution of Participatory Governance in Barcelona After the 2008 Crisis

Excerpted from here:

“The case of Barcelona is a good example of the participation boom that took place in Catalonia and Spain – and in other parts of the world – in the beginning of the new millennium. However, Barcelona’s participative tradition can be traced back to the late 1980s, when some of the current mechanisms of citizen participation were set up. Citizen participation mechanisms, in fact, form part of a wider model of collaborative governance, in which local government maintains a leading role, but cooperates with different types of actors (public, private and communitarian) to reach collective goals such as urban regeneration, economic development and social and environmental progress. Collaborative governance has crystallized in the city as a tradition, spanning different mandates and resisting the effects of governmental change in 2011.

Consequently, continuity (rather than retrenchment, enhancement or innovation) is the dominant trend of collaborative (and participative) governance in the city of Barcelona in recent years. As anticipated by the theoretical framework of the TRANSGOB project, collaborative structures deployed over many years (two decades in the case of Barcelona) can become deeply institutionalised practices difficult to modify or transform, even in the current period of crisis and fiscal retrenchment. Collaboration has become a “policy paradigm”, that is to say, a cognitive framework that defines legitimate courses of action for politicians and state managers (Hall, 1993; cited in Fuller, 2010: 279). Moreover, the fact that the current government has not dismantled the existing participative structures – inherited from the former centre-left governments – might be related to the fact that the anticipated costs of eliminating them ‘could simply outweigh the benefits’ (Davies and Blanco, 2014).

The new conservative government of Barcelona certainly launched a modification of the current ‘Rules of Citizen Participation’ passed in 2003. Such modification was interpreted by some actors as a lost opportunity for a comprehensive and radical transformation of participatory structures in the city, something that some would have expected to occur given the intensity of social and political transformations under the crisis. The government’s discourses on citizen participation put the emphasis on (supposedly) innovative notions such as ‘open government’, ‘social innovation’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘e-democracy’, although such discourses have not had significant impacts on the structures of citizen engagement. In contrast to this situation of institutional paralysis, the crisis has framed the emergence of new social movements in the city such as the 15M assemblies, the PAH and new social groups which reclaim the community use and self-management of misused urban areas.

Such movements adopt new styles of mobilisation – more horizontal, more decentralised, more inter-connected via social networks and the internet. They are also reflective of a ‘pragmatic turn’ in collective action, which means that they tend to focus on specific problems (such as housing evictions and misused urban spaces) to which they try to create specific answers through direct action, complementing or compensating for state and market deficiencies. In a way, they could be considered as examples of what Davies (2014) has called the ‘every-day makers’, although they show an uneven capacity to challenge the status quo: movements like the PAH, for example, challenge private property and confront central actors in the capitalist system like the banks; whereas groups that reclaim the self-management of misused urban spaces contribute to temporary solutions to the shortcomings of the market and state, despite being critical of the neoliberal city.

The case of Barcelona illustrates an increasing mismatch between formal mechanisms and rules of participative democracy, and emerging practices and discourses on citizen engagement. Such mismatch provokes an increasing delegitimisation of existing (formal) channels of citizen involvement in local governance. However, the new social movements demand a new, more transparent, more democratic local politics, with more opportunities for direct participation such as popular legislative initiatives, community management of public goods and referendums. The debate on participative democracy is far from being over. It rather adopts new terms, and expresses ambitions formulated by new socio-political actors. The new government of Barcelona en Comú inherits the participative dynamics of the city. It expresses the emergence of novel concepts such as social innovation, coproduction and the urban commons that emphasize the need of developing more horizontal relationships between the local institutions and the citizens. It is also a reflection of the development of practices of grass-roots mobilisation, claiming a new way of doing politics in the city. The new government aims to give continuity to the participative and collaborative tradition of the city, although it is working on a fresh model of participative governance based on the strengthening of existing structures of citizen participation like the neighbourhood councils, the enhancement of direct democracy mechanisms like citizen initiatives and referendums, the community management of public spaces and facilities and the promotion of participation for underrepresented social groups such as the migrants, the youth and the homeless. To what extent such political intentions will be translated into tangible changes in the formal structures of participation in the city remains to be seen in the future.”

The full Report Series of TRANSGOB can be found here (English & Spanish).

Photo by Asian Development Bank

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