Abstract
Participatory Action Research (PAR) combines local experimentation, empirical research and action learning to co-produce solutions to complex problems. PAR projects tend to bring to the frontstage the collaborative process and promises of social change. Yet evidence for real change is sparse, and possible explanations are kept backstage: friction, conflict and power asymmetries. In our projects, we repeatedly encountered conflicts that could not be constructively addressed; we coined these Participation Shenanigans. They presented as high-drama, low-substance micropolitics such as emotional outbursts, ad hominem arguments and silent exclusions. Because they defy participatory logic, we unconsciously smoothed them over or ignored them. Drawing on Foucault’s philosophy of power and his notion of the dispositif, we analyzed three cases from PAR projects in Dutch urban neighborhoods. We used an abductive approach and Participation Shenanigans as a sensitizing concept to trace micropolitical conflict and power dynamics. Neighborhood Gossip, Schoolyard Politics and Property Drama show how legitimate concerns are classified as gossip, how critique of systemic asymmetry is empathically redirected to interpersonal drama, and how institutional norms are installed in physical locations determining who may speak and who is ignored or excluded. We demonstrate how Participation Shenanigans signal the working of a participation dispositif in which citizens’ concerns and critiques are defused, redirected and absorbed within public governance practices and made inactionable for local governments. The dispositif sorts “good” participatory residents from troublemakers, sets norms about who can participate and how, and bends participation to legitimize public governance. Participation Shenanigans, then, mark places where this dispositif destabilizes and harmony and dialogue falter. Rather than ignoring or smoothing them over, PAR researchers should engage with them as resistance and counter-conduct and meddle in micropolitics to support action; writing about our own shenanigans was our way of taking responsibility for our role in silencing and exclusion.
Keywords
Introduction
It often proved difficult to find a stable location for our Participatory Action Research (PAR) sessions in the neighborhood of participating citizen researchers. When we finally moved to The Property, a municipal building leased to Ramesh (local entrepreneur) who hosted both private events and community projects, citizen researcher Malik stopped attending. We assumed he was busy. Weeks later, another citizen researcher offhandedly remarked that Malik “is not allowed in unless he talks to Ramesh. But he doesn’t feel like it,” and the conversation moved on. We later learned that one of Malik’s community events had been cancelled for a private booking. The two had argued loudly, and the next day Malik’s access card no longer worked. Staff said he could return once he had “resolved the situation” with Ramesh. At the time, it seemed like a misunderstanding that would resolve itself, so we continued our sessions without Malik.
The case described above is just one of the many conflicts we encountered in our multiple PAR projects. PAR responds to the limitations of traditional intervention research in addressing complex, dynamic societal problems by focusing on locally co-produced solutions to locally experienced problems (Jacobs, 2010; Millar et al., 2024; Woelders & Abma, 2019). It is a methodological approach that combines local experimentation, empirical research and action learning. Rooted in democratic philosophy and social justice movements, PAR acknowledges the complexity and situatedness of social problems and the importance of lived experience and lay-expertise in developing real solutions to real problems (Dedding et al., 2020). Project goals and methods are flexibly adapted to local contexts through iterative cycles of action and reflection involving local residents and community leaders, professionals, and researchers (Baum et al., 2006; Hawkins, 2015; van der Vlegel-Brouwer et al., 2023). Aiming to bring about social change, PAR empowers target populations through inclusive dialogue, cross-sector collaboration, shared decision making, co-creation and collective action (Cordeiro & Soares, 2018; Cornish et al., 2023; Koch & Kralik, 2006), including in domains such as healthcare labour regulation, health-system infrastructure, and workforce well-being (Al-Akashee et al., 2024; Kassymova & Nurgaliyeva, 2024; Niesya & Sayeed, 2024). It is often regarded as the silver bullet to break the status quo characterized by a strong power asymmetry between system actors and local residents, and the dominance of scientific knowledge over lay-expertise.
Even though PAR projects often co-produce tangible knowledge products such as toolkits, visual materials and advisory reports, observable changes in professional practice or policy uptake remain rare within the timeframe of most studies (Tribaldos et al., 2020). A major factor limiting real-world impact are power dynamics that, especially when time and budget run out, cause institutional demands and procedures to take precedence over the conditions required for meaningful citizen participation (Dedding et al., 2020; Millar et al., 2024; Strumińska-Kutra & Scholl, 2022; van der Vlegel-Brouwer et al., 2023). Yet instead of understanding power dynamics as intrinsic to PAR, they are often framed as the result of pre-existing structural asymmetries and injustices relating to race, class or educational level (Cahill, 2007; Hawkins, 2015; Teixeira et al., 2021). In an asymmetrical field, conflicting interests around representation, legitimacy, ownership and decision-making may take the form of micropolitical behavior: inflating one’s own concerns and ignoring, trivializing, criticizing or rejecting those of others, or, in some cases, contesting the participatory process itself (Ginzburg et al., 2022; Muntinga et al., 2024; Pali, 2019). PAR researchers typically frame these dynamics as methodological shortcomings and that with stronger facilitation, clearer roles and expectations, reasonable boundaries and constant reflexivity conflicts can be turned into opportunities for growth and mutual learning (Cahill, 2007; Hawkins, 2015; Muntinga et al., 2024). Yet without critical analysis of structural asymmetries and how they shape power dynamics within the research process, these ambitions risk legitimizing the status quo or deepening the distance between marginalized communities and formal institutions (Haarmans et al., 2022; Millar et al., 2024; Roura, 2021; Shahram, 2023; Strumińska-Kutra & Scholl, 2022; Verloo, 2023).
Participation Shenanigans
Micropolitics come in various forms, some of which came across as high drama, such as emotional outbursts or vocal ad hominem arguments, with low substance in the sense that there were no clear conflicts of interest or values. The term came into being when, after a day of dealing with friction and conflict, we sat down and sighed to each other that “we are so over these participation shenanigans.” Ruminating on the term, we realized how prevalent they were, how often we had ignored or forgotten about them, and the extent of their effects on our processes. When Malik could no longer participate and we did not intervene, we later realized that our inaction contributed to his exclusion. Similar moments occurred in other cases: once we began tracing what had happened, it became clear that we had underestimated the hidden asymmetries that exhaust, silence and exclude local residents and our complicity in it. These insights brought moral distress, as we often felt ill-equipped to act conscientiously in a field shaped by conflicts of interest and opposing loyalties. This motivated us to use participation shenanigans as a sensitizing concept, following Blumer (1954), to explore conflict and power dynamics in PAR processes.
Shenanigans were numerous across all our projects and may take innumerable forms. Examples are: an intern repeatedly calling the researcher because a senior colleague left him to oversee group activities by himself; a whole spy drama ensued after an unknowing passerby, completely unaware of her transgression, looked through a door window during our meeting; a call from a citizen researcher moments before a session, that was planned months in advance, that “if she is coming I’m not” whilst refusing to elaborate the reasons; a local professional complaining that her colleague acts only out of self-interest at the expense of local residents. They present as petty, as personal issues that should be resolved with the individuals to whom they pertain, not the PAR researcher. Attending to them basically boils down to ‘relationship therapy’, coaching clashing individuals to work together, meddling in the affairs of others, intervening in the private lives of residents and the teams of colleagues of professional organizations. Participation shenanigans, therefore, defy participatory logic: they pull conflict to the realm of therapy instead of participatory democracy.
Yet, despite their variance, they are similar in their significant impacts on the PAR process. In Malik’s case, we were initially unaware of the reason why he stopped attending and surprised by the offhanded style by which it was explained; it seemed that ‘this was the way things go over here.’ We chose not to act on the situation because we already planned to relocate to a new center within a few weeks, where Malik would be able to rejoin. We also did not want to sacrifice project time to resolve their shenanigans, so we took no action and let it pass. As a result of Ramesh’s actions and our deliberate inaction, a situation was created in which a citizen researcher could not participate in Participatory Action Research. These shenanigans exclude participants, block conversations from happening or moving on and distract attention from co-produced project goals. Since they were neither the focus of our project nor our affair to meddle in, we ignored them, smoothed them over or listened to them without acting in the hope they would disappear by themselves, unconsciously letting their effects drag on in our projects.
In sum, both our PAR projects and the PAR literature in general, tend to bring to the frontstage the collaborative process of PAR, the crucial insights and co-designed knowledge products it yielded, and the promises of collective action and social change. Friction and conflict are allowed to perform on the frontstage only if it can be deliberated and turned into opportunities for growth and mutual learning. Yet, conflicts that cannot be constructively addressed, the participation shenanigans, are kept backstage and so are the power dynamics that come with them.
Foucauldian Perspective
Because of the micropolitical nature of the participation shenanigans, Foucault’s philosophy of power as a network of power relations emerged as a fitting theoretical lens. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault (1982) defines power relations as those in which one person “acts upon the actions of others: (…) on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future” (p. 789). To exert power is to influence the actions of another by shaping, directing, or limiting them. Power is always resisted by opening up new ways of acting, aiming to influence the actions of the one exerting power. The dynamic of power and resistance produce new and often unforeseen ways of conduct that extend or redefine what is possible and, thereby, the way in which people understand themselves and others. Moreover, it creates a system of rules and norms that shape what counts as true, what counts as normal, and what counts as healthy and good. Power, according to Foucault, is productive: it produces subjects, knowledge, and norms determining what is known, what can be known and how one could and should conduct oneself. Power shapes who can speak and be heard, what can be said and understood and what is desired or rejected.
Networks of power relations are constantly in flux, relations change as a network adapts to changing situations and, if the problem is urgent, may form dispositifs (sometimes loosely translated as apparatus). Foucault develops the dispositif as the system of relations between elements of “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said [that which can be articulated through discourse] as much as the unsaid [that takes material and visible form in practices, spaces, and mechanisms]” (Foucault & Gordon, 1980, pp. 194–196). Second, the dispositif is dynamic: the relations between its heterogeneous elements shift whenever the position or function of any element changes. Third, dispositifs arise in response to urgent needs; they serve a strategic function, such as gaining control over rising crime rates or managing a pandemic. In sum, dispositifs change, absorb, exclude and rearrange elements as both internal and external effects force them to adapt and retain their strategic functions.
Dispositifs asymmetrically structure the field of possible actions (Foucault, 2007). They enable and normalize certain forms of conduct as constructive, reasonable and fair. At the same time they delegitimize, disqualify or pathologize other forms of conduct as unconstructive, irrational or disordered. The workings of a dispositif become visible through its effects: through the micropolitics of exclusion, silencing, ignoring and redirection and through counter-conduct in for example the forms of opposition, strategic compliance with silent defiance, coalition forming or sabotage. From this perspective, we take participation shenanigans as a starting point to trace the micropolitics of day-to-day participatory practice. To analyze this, we draw on Foucault’s relational conception of power and his notion of the dispositif as an analytic lens for tracing how power circulates through the everyday practices that shape participatory research. We aimed to answer the main research question: What do Participation Shenanigans help us trace about the workings of micropolitics in participatory action processes, and what are the implications for the practice of Participatory Action Research?
Methods
This article builds on our experience with three PAR projects in marginalized urban neighborhoods in large and medium-sized cities of the Netherlands. The Dutch policy context is characterized by decentralization, a strong welfare infrastructure, and consensus-oriented governance known as the polder-model. Many municipalities maintain “neighborhood agendas,” in which national and municipal frameworks are translated into local priorities based on neighborhood data, resident participation, and local knowledge. They are regularly evaluated with diverse groups of stakeholders and updated according to new insights. Residents and neighborhood professionals can apply for budget for local activities and to develop and implement resident initiatives that contribute to the neighborhood agenda’s goals and priorities. Recognizing the potential of local action and experimentation, national and local governments increasingly fund PAR projects to support the development, implementation and long-term continuity of local initiatives. As a result, in many urban neighborhoods there are long-standing collaborations between residents, civil servants and local health and social welfare professionals. Many residents in marginalized neighborhoods have histories of negative interactions with, and a strong mistrust of, institutions, officials and professionals (van Lammeren et al., 2025). Often, these personal histories intertwined with local collaborations, leading to increased, sometimes paralyzing, mistrust and micropolitical conflicts.
Our PAR projects focused on different resident groups, but all aimed to facilitate citizen participation in local policy making. In tandem with residents, we tailored the level and process of participation to their needs, preferences and capabilities. Residents were, at minimum, involved as stakeholders participating in collaborative action and decision making and, at maximum, as citizen researchers who conducted qualitative methods to co-produce locally situated knowledge and supported solutions with support of or in collaboration with the academic team. Depending on sensitivity of topics and privacy concerns, meetings and conversations were either documented as field notes and field reports, or recorded and transcribed verbatim. Regular observation reports and field work reports were produced by the researchers and reflected upon with citizen researchers and the academic team. Because we treated the shenanigans as not ours to resolve and as obstacles in the way of results, we either completely left them out of our records or reduced them to short factual incidents like “Malik called again, resolved for now.”
We then adopted an abductive approach: analytic work that alternates between the puzzling and unexpected events in the present and earlier empirical material to re-explore, reconceptualize and reframe what is seen in the data (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012; van Hulst & Visser, 2025). It combines defamiliarization, allowing ourselves to stay with moments of confusion and friction that disrupted our existing frames or perspectives (Earl Rinehart, 2021), with familiarization and methodological bricolage, deep and recursive analysis of empirical material and bringing together situated knowledges, theoretical concepts, and empirical fragments to construct new meanings (Earl Rinehart, 2021; Timmermans & Tavory, 2012).
We approached Participation Shenanigans through three steps. First, in a series of reflection sessions in September 2024, we iteratively alternated between rereading transcripts, logbooks, reports and communication updates, reading mail and phone message histories and reflecting from memory, we compiled lists of conflicts and which of them were participation shenanigans. Second, we traced these events across field notes, transcripts, and messages, focusing on those documented in multiple sources and involving situations we had personally witnessed. This enabled us to draw lines between recorded events and situations that we, before, had labelled shenanigans. They were no longer isolated incidents, but signs of ongoing dynamics revolving around ownership, responsibility, fairness and influence. Third, we coded them using situation-based labels, and analyzed them through a Foucauldian lens: tracking how micro-power dynamics played out over time. From this, we constructed three cases that follow recurring mechanisms: Neighborhood Gossip, Schoolyard Politics, and Property Drama.
Ethical Considerations
The power dynamics and asymmetries we traced involve highly personal situations and interactions. It is not a complaint to the municipality, its civil servants and the many officials and professionals working in the neighborhoods dedicating their lives to public service. We perform this analysis mainly as a reflection of PAR as a praxis: to explore how ignoring participation shenanigans may obstruct participatory ideals, or make PAR researchers complicit in upholding the status quo. In order to guarantee full anonymity and non-traceability, the cases we present are based on real situations and their underlying dynamics, but we changed recognizable characteristics. We changed the context and the names, ideas and histories of local initiatives. We preserved the asymmetry and power dynamics between residents and other stakeholders, but we changed their positions, functions and roles in addition to their gender, ethnic backgrounds and names. The quotes were directly based on empirical data, but traceable elements were changed and they were stylized in order to ensure anonymity while maintaining the asymmetries and power dynamics we analyzed. Each situation in the results corresponds to a real situation in one of our projects, each pseudonym corresponds to one participant, and each quote corresponds to a real excerpt from our empirical data. The focus is the relation between participation shenanigans and structural underlying power dynamics.
Results
In this section we will describe three ‘episodes’ of participation shenanigans. Each episode begins with a brief contextual sketch, followed by a closer look at the unfolding dynamics. We trace events, both retrospectively and prospectively, in order to disclose the hidden micro-power dynamics.
Neighborhood Gossip Shenanigans
The situation revolves around a community initiative called Neighborhood Rhythms, developed by one of the citizen researchers and a group of active residents. Neighborhood Rhythms was a place for young and old, to listen to music, dance, have fun, relax and meet each other in a stress-free environment. It combined two municipal priorities of social cohesion and physical exercise through dance. Central to Neighborhood Rhythms was a strong need for a safe and open space to escape from the burdens, demands and obligations of day-to-day life in situations of marginalization and precarity.
Turning an idea into a running neighborhood initiative takes a lot of work but also professional support. It needed a budget to hire dance instructors, a location with a large open space and insulation, a sound system; but it also needs to adhere to rules and regulations and meet safety standards. Even though many residents mistrust officials and are hesitant to involve them, the group decided to first involve Mary, a community leader, who had successfully started, scaled up and formalized her initiative called Our Health. Later, they involved Rashid, a civil servant, who helped develop Our Health and many other resident initiatives. The group trusted both Mary and Rashid and made the conscious decision to involve them in their process.
The shenanigans started when a citizen researcher, Lee, sent us the following message: “I am panicking! They are talking about our Neighborhood Rhythms initiative. Can we call?” Apparently, Lee had overheard a conversation between a group of people including Mary and Rashid. Mary supposedly advocated that Neighborhood Rhythms should become a part of her Our Health initiative, while Rashid seemed to back up her idea because he reportedly doubted that the researchers, both citizens and academics, could bear the responsibility for a promising initiative like this. Since Neighborhood Rhythms was precious to Lee and the group, they developed protectionist attitudes that finally caused the process to come to a full stop.
This is the situation that we see as high-drama low-substance: Lee’s panicked message about overhearing a conversation causing a whole PAR process to stop. During our sessions we discussed how the ‘formal system’ colonizes and then co-opts community initiatives causing mismatches with the local context and residents’ needs. From the start, citizen researchers appeared really concerned that Neighborhood Rhythms would be co-opted by the system, that it “would be taken away from [them] again” and lose yet another valuable initiative. This issue had been repeatedly discussed and was seen as a central problem by Lee and Mary: Mary: You know the Welfare Hub? It started as neighbors helping new residents get basic needs met. We just need something simple, quick and responsive. It’s being “formalized” now, and it’s turning into another bureaucratic nightmare. Lee: The idea was to invest in accessible, community-based support early on. Things like emergency groceries or school supplies, you know? To prevent bigger problems down the line, but now they say there is no money. Mary: There is money, but since the system took over, it is redirected. We no longer work with them, too complicated, too many demands. All the resources are divided amongst companies and professionals, who also pull all the strings, while residents are left scrambling to start something really necessary. Facilitator: So you’re saying the space between residents and the formal service system is where the meaningful work happens, and that space needs protection? Mary: Exactly. That’s where grassroots work like the Welfare Hub can thrive. But once it gets pulled into the system, it loses the very essence that made it work in the first place. You have to start from scratch again and again. Lee: Our Health is going the same way. It began with Mary and a few neighbors doing cooking classes and walking groups, things people actually wanted. Now we’re not “unique” enough and we need to merge with similar initiatives to meet outcome demands. But they don’t get it; it’s the people and the trusting relations that matter, not the walking or cooking itself.
At the end of this session, we collectively agreed that it would be important to involve a representative from the municipality. We invited Rashid to explore the problem of system co-optation together and use his experience to develop strategies to prevent it. Mary, who very vocally discussed this issue in the previous meeting, unexpectedly voiced an opposing perspective on system colonization in the presence of Rashid: Mary: “Right now? Well, honestly, we’re finally getting the opportunity, yes, really thankful at the moment. The municipality really helps and supports my weekly evening program Our Health. It gets lonely people out of the house, cook together, build a connection, and it’s healthy. We’re building a community, helping people with loneliness and health.” Moderator: “Last time we talked about how grassroots initiatives get swallowed by the system. How do you see that now?” Mary: “Yes, yes, yes, I like it. Yes, uh, I find it a difficult question because I don’t really experience it myself, but I know that for others, it is an issue. Yes.”
While Mary’s unexpected ‘pleasing’ attitude surprised us, Lee later explained that “she knows exactly where the money for her initiative is coming from.” This reframes Mary’s behavior as a conscious and strategic maneuver. This also created a problem for our project: Mary’s maneuver prevented system co-optation and colonization from being discussed, which was the reason to invite Rashid. Now focusing on the initiative itself, Rashid had suggested hiring an official project manager to write a business plan and support the development of their idea into an initiative complete with funding, location, equipment and staff.
After we calmed down Lee, we continued working on Neighborhood Rhythms, deliberating with various stakeholders how we could set it up and solidify it for the long term. Rashid proposed to provide the citizen researchers, as formal commissioners of the initiative, with the budget to hire the project manager. Increased attention and enthusiasm from professionals and civil servants seemed only to increase mistrust. For example, hiring an “outsider” as project manager was refused, even with full control over the hiring process, because “we—still—don’t know what they’ll do to it or whether they will take it away from us.” To prevent mistrust from spreading, we broadly communicated we suspended working on Neighborhood Rhythms and, instead, focused on mistrust itself. Next, for closure, we decided to have an open conversation with Rashid, who in the end concluded that “it was good to touch base every now and then, else you get neighborhood gossip.”
Waiting for the commotion to calm down, Neighborhood Rhythms kept echoing in the neighborhood, the municipality and the university. Weeks later, following a completely unrelated conversation with a senior municipal officer, our professor walked by and told us, out of the blue, that “Neighborhood Rhythms should be embedded in the local Culture Impulse program, else it won’t fly,” de facto confirming residents’ concerns.
Schoolyard Politics Shenanigans
This situation revolves around Marta, engaged as a resident researcher since the beginning of our project. She is very active in the neighborhood, does a lot of volunteer work, and has set up an initiative The Game Room: twice a week she and other volunteers play board games with kids and youths to spend time together offline and to develop social skills through play, competition and collaboration. Marta worked as pedagogical school aid, and uses her experience to play games specifically designed to foster conversation about difficult topics or address problematic behavior. In some cases, after incidents or on request of parents or teachers, she collaborates with professionals who use gamified methods to address serious problems such as depression, abuse or criminality.
Marta has often described herself as someone who “calls things by their name”: her own euphemism for, as she once put it, “calling out people’s bullshit.” She immediately senses ulterior motives, speaks directly and openly, and is unafraid to challenge openly what she perceives as spin or half-truths. Her critique, however true and justified, can nonetheless come across as confrontational or disruptive to the people she works with, including volunteers, professionals and officials, and managers. Nevertheless, to our project, she brings sharp analyses of the neighborhood’s underlying problems, power asymmetries, has strong relationships with residents, and consistently helps engage others in the work.
The municipality hired Simone, a behavioral therapist and specialized youth worker, for setting up a new youth hub combining leisure activities, peer contact and professional care in one place in collaboration with local initiatives. In that capacity, we have worked with her on multiple actions and interventions in different PAR projects, and expect to keep collaborating in the future. Lately, Marta had been receiving many requests from parents to have Simone present at Game Room activities because parents worry about their kids. Marta had reservations about fully integrating The Game Room in Simone’s youth hub but worked with Simone in good faith towards a mutually beneficial arrangement.
At one point, Marta messaged us: “I called things by their name again. Now Simone kicked me out of the coordinator chat and private [social media] groups.” During a phone call, Marta explained that after their conversation, Simone had just said goodbye, but then silently removed Marta from various private social media groups, including those used by coordinators of local initiatives. Marta seemed clearly hurt because she felt that Simone used her position to exclude Marta and stubbornly held on to her own. At the same time, we may need Simone for some of our PAR actions, and this conflict threatens to destabilize that collaboration. Having worked with both individuals, these schoolyard politics were hard to explain because we both know them to be open-minded and constructive.
Later that morning, Marta joined a research meeting with Daan, a civil servant, about an upcoming event where we would share our results with representatives from the municipality. Daan is empathetic to residents and their situations, and is commonly accepted and trusted. Even though it was not the focus of the meeting, Daan urged Marta to explain what had happened: Marta: I’ve suggested this collaboration three times now; I wanted to help. Parents brought it up themselves; they want something that combines play for the kids with real conversations for them. And somehow, every time, Simone says she’ll check the schedule or get back to me… and then nothing. Daan: Maybe it’s just a matter of time? Things can take a while to coordinate. Marta: Sure, I tried multiple times, nothing. Except now I hear from my neighbor that it’s happening anyway. Same idea, different people. I wasn’t asked. I wasn’t even told. So what does that say? I created The Game Room, I show up twice a week, I know those kids personally. But when I bring an idea that actually comes from people here, it gets ignored until someone else presents it more… softly? Daan: Oh, that sounds nasty, I can imagine you’re angry, I would be too. But I know Simone, and I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that. Something else must be going on; she’s just trying to keep things running smoothly. I think we, together, should go and talk to her. Marta: Smooth for whom? The people who never push back? Who never point out what’s missing? I’m not difficult. I’m clear. And that’s uncomfortable, I get it. But this isn’t about bad vibes or personalities. It’s about the people here, whose voice gets heard, and whose doesn’t. Daan: You’re saying that she is purposefully ignoring only your requests? Marta: I’m going to say this directly. I’ve now tried to talk to her more than four times, friendly, but directly. Meanwhile, others seem to get things arranged without even trying. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Again. And then I find out I am no longer in the private groups, I don’t receive any more updates, no more email chains. She kicked me out like I’m the problem. That’s a powerplay. Daan: I hear that. I just think maybe we should sit down and talk it through together. Marta: No, Daan, these things shouldn’t happen, that’s the thing. I’m not trying to fix a friendship. I’m pointing out a problem that should not have happened in the first place. If residents can first be kicked out, and then have to fix the relation themselves, that’s unfair and unsafe; this way we cannot say anything anymore.
Even though Daan responds with empathy and a conciliatory tone, he does not engage with Marta’s systemic critique. Marta challenges the protected and unaccountable position Simone holds in relation to residents, enabling her to unilaterally exclude residents from private groups and chats. Her insistence that “these things just shouldn’t happen” is a plea for a shift in responsibility from individual residents back onto the institutional systems that enable such exclusion in the first place. Daan, however, reframes Marta’s critique as a relational misunderstanding. He expresses confidence in Simone’s intentions and urges dialogue, as if mediation would address Marta’s feelings of unsafety and unfairness. In doing so, he reframes Marta’s account from a critique of power asymmetries into a problem of interpersonal relations and communication.
Weeks later, Marta told us she had not heard from Daan again and felt disillusioned: he had, after all, insisted that she try to resolve things with Simone. When we later asked Daan, he remarked that he had “left the initiative with Marta… sometimes you just have to leave things be and see what sticks. Sometimes it all just blows over.”
Property Drama Shenanigans
Even before the shenanigans between Malik and Ramesh, The Property has been the center of frictions and conflicts. Residents saw great potential because it is a large space in a central location. Repeatedly, however, residents stressed that their initiatives had to make place for the “pet projects of professionals or the municipality.” Malik’s situation, therefore, fits into a long history of tensions between residents and their initiatives on one side, and municipal priorities and professional programs on the other. Malik’s initiative focused on the elderly dealing with marginalization and loneliness, a recurring social activity involving cards, conversation, and informal care among older residents. Because of its low-threshold and demand-free atmosphere, it had become a central meeting space for local elderly who were ineligible or not interested in formal programming. Therefore, Malik was persistent about keeping it predictable: always at the same time at the same place so that residents would not unexpectedly arrive at closed doors because the activity had been moved. This had been the cause of his heated argument with Ramesh, who silently disabled his access badge and informed staff members that Malik’s access would only be reinstated after Malik sat down with him and apologized. The conversation never happened, but for some reason unknown to us, Malik’s badge was reactivated after a couple of weeks and he was allowed back in the Property.
When we resumed our sessions at the Property with the complete citizen researcher group, tensions arose immediately. To keep negative attention away from Malik, we asked another citizen researcher doing volunteer work at the Property, Sara, to make the reservations for a room for our meeting. Upon our arrival, the newly instated location manager, Gary, stressed that our reservation was not in the system. That this time, as an exception, he would let us in if we made sure future bookings were made according to new protocol and through the appropriate channels. After we sat down as a group, he repeatedly interrupted our meeting, to remind us about new procedures, house rules pertaining to cleanliness, location of cleaning supplies and the new protocol. Shortly after our session we received a call from Deirdre, a civil servant, urging us on Gary’s behalf not to have Sara handle bookings anymore because “Sara tends to create confusion.” The next day, Sara shared a message from Gary: “I just cleaned up your mess from yesterday. Please don’t leave this for others.” It concerned a couple of cups we left in the sink because the dishwasher was still running. Later that week, Sara forwarded multiple messages from Gary about house rules, complaints about tidiness and cleanliness, and appeals for Deirdre to talk to the perpetrators. To relieve Malik and Sara from further issues, upon our request we were added to the chat groups and systems, so that we could take over communication and other formalities relating to the Property. Almost immediately, a new message dropped in the Property chat: Creating a warm and inclusive space, for everyone. That said, I don’t let in people I don’t recognize. It’s not personal. It’s just vigilance. These elderly are vulnerable. As I learned when I was young: respect your elders! We know this complex neighborhood. We know what can happen. I spoke with Deirdre about it today. We’re on the same page. Safety First! It’s important to stay open, but also vigilant. We’re all here for the same reason, to build something positive, to make impact. That means following the guidelines: Respecting shared spaces. Gratitude goes a long way. We do this together! And yes, smells linger. So let’s be mindful of each other.
This was the first time that we no longer perceived messages like this as merely annoying and irritating demands from a new community center coordinator aiming to set the rules. Normally we would sigh, massage our temples, and make sure every last dish is washed. Because of the reference “respect your elders,” we now tried to understand the dynamics by analyzing the frictions and conflicts surrounding the Property centering around Malik. We realized that Gary’s messages are similar to Ramesh’s demands in the sense that they establish organizational rules that, then, asymmetrically legitimize and benefit professional work over local initiatives. Malik and Sara explained this clearly in a later session: Malik: Everything was set up. The regulars had just arrived—tea was steeping, someone brought lemon cake, we’d laid out the cards. It was calm, warm. Then Ramesh came in and told us the session was cancelled. No warning. He said he had rented the space out for a private event and that we’d “have to be flexible.” Sara: Did he give a reason? Malik: He said, “They’re paying for it. You’re not.” Just like that. I reminded him we had an agreement, resident initiatives had reserved time, and we’d coordinated this weeks ago. He shrugged and said something like, “That’s not binding.” Moderator: What happened then? Malik: I pushed back. Politely. I said this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened and that people had already arrived. He said, “It’s not personal, but you have to understand priorities.” Then he called Deirdre and next thing I knew, three officials stood around me. Deirdre told me I was being “uncooperative” and that I should “step aside calmly.” When I hesitated, Ramesh started yelling and waving, and the elderly heard that. I got angry, I wanted to protect them, so I started yelling back. Next day, my access card was not working anymore, and some girl at the desk tells me I cannot enter unless I talk to Ramesh and apologize. Sara: That’s how it works. They love grassroots energy until it threatens their control. Malik built a space where older people felt welcome; two times a week there were dozens of people, then you’re a threat and they have to put you in your place again. Malik: The thing is, we had built something real. People showed up not just for the cards, but for each other. They brought food, shared worries, helped each other with letters, hospital appointments. It wasn’t just fun, it mattered. But I was told it wasn’t “professional” enough. Someone from the municipality said the vibe was “too casual, and that we should also do something useful.” Next thing you know, we’re told that the group should do something back, be useful; they wanted to pilot their Old Moves with our elderly. Well, they didn’t want that, obviously! Sara: That’s always how it goes. First they applaud you. Then they decide it needs “professional coordination.” Suddenly, someone with a degree is hired, the posters change, residents can only come if they fill out their questionnaires, and the people who built it are no longer invited. Lay expertise is welcome until it starts looking like actual knowledge. Malik: And then it becomes a pilot. A project. With forms, targets and outcomes. But the older people don’t want outcomes. They want each other. They want pie and warmth and a reason to leave the house. That’s not in any subsidy form. Sara: They call what you did “unprofessional.” But what they mean is “uncontrollable.” That it wasn’t designed by them, funded by them, or supervised by them. And that’s the real problem. Malik: The municipality had even promised support, cookies, hot drinks, occasional fruit. We wrote it all down. But we never got anything. Still, we were shown off in their PowerPoints and “best practice” pitches. The only time they showed up in person was to tell us we had to “participate” in another pilot.
The discussion between Sara and Malik shows how professionalism, usefulness and, implicitly, compliance are demanded asymmetrically. Paid work is legitimized through the language of professionalism, while community-based care is instrumentalized and disciplined through the language of usefulness. Ramesh and Deirdre can demand that Malik be flexible and to make way for others, but Malik is in no position to make demands in return because his initiative depends on their goodwill. Malik is in Ramesh’s debt from the start, and not complying with Ramesh’s rules finally caused his initiative to end. From this perspective, Gary’s messages are a continuation of the same mechanism. It shows how norms, about professionalism, flexibility and usefulness are set asymmetrically, and how they produce who ‘good’ residents are and how they should behave. When residents’ initiatives serve municipal participation goals, they are publicly praised for their importance; but once the novelty fades, priorities change, or it becomes inconvenient for paid professionals, it is expected to make itself useful again, to contribute, to give back.
Discussion
In this paper, we used “Participation Shenanigans,” defined as high drama/low substance conflict, as a sensitizing concept to trace and explore micropolitics in our PAR projects. “Neighborhood gossip” demonstrated how classifying residents’ concerns as gossip made them illegible for governmental intervention. “Schoolyard politics” demonstrated how systemic critique of asymmetry becomes absorbed by a display of genuine empathy, and then redirected to interpersonal drama pushing it outside of the government’s scope of action. “Property drama” showed how institutional norms about ‘good participatory citizenship’ are installed through physical locations, separating constructive participatory subjects from oppositional ones, determining who is allowed to speak and who is ignored, silenced or even physically excluded from participating. Using a Foucauldian perspective of micropolitics, we demonstrated how participation shenanigans emerge in situations where citizens’ needs, concerns and critiques were defused, declawed, redirected and absorbed within current practice and policy of public governance.
Over the past two decades, Dutch and European (local) governments have promoted participatory governance and deliberative democracy as strategies to rebuild legitimacy, increase transparency, and address concerns about declining public trust (Kumagai & Iorio, 2020; OECD, 2024). These forms of citizen participation in public governance aim to reverse top-down governance, by starting from citizens’ life world and their lived experiences to inform policy making from agenda setting to evaluation. Yet, despite growing efforts, frequency and breadth of topics where citizens participate, meaningful change and real social impact have lagged behind (Smith-Carrier & Van Tuyl, 2024). Many studies have demonstrated that bureaucratic and institutional hesitancy and concerns limit the extent to which citizen participation influences public governance and informs policy making (Arnold et al., 2022; de Braal et al., 2025; Islam et al., 2023; Koskimaa et al., 2023). Our study demonstrates the micropolitics of how residents can be excluded from participating and how their concerns are delegitimized and made inactionable for local governments. Through these micropolitics, a language is created that normalizes when participation is useful and when “the real” professionals should take over.
To understand why this paradox persists, we draw upon Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, and how our research reveals its way of working in PAR. The Participation Dispositif combines heterogeneous elements such as: resident initiatives, buildings, social media groups, discourse of professionalism, participatory theory, methods of direct democracy, the practice of consultation and the policy of participatory budgeting. This participation dispositif regulates who can or is allowed to speak, how they should speak, when and under what conditions they can speak, and according to what norms and through which procedures their voices can be recognized and acted upon, or not (Foucault & Gordon, 1980, pp. 194–196). The participation dispositif also produces knowledge: a shared perspective of “the constructive resident” and of participation as a harmonious path to broad consensus. It also produces subjects: the constructive, bridge-building citizen, the disruptive troublemaker, the competent and empathetic civil servant. In other words, the participation dispositif sorts who can bring what to the frontstage and how one should conduct oneself to be given the opportunity to perform on it, and who has to leave via the backstage without being able to speak altogether.
The notion of a participation dispositif is relevant, because it makes visible how completely different contexts, efforts and processes, almost different in every way, still produce the same result: limited impact of PAR on policy making and public governance. Different processes can be part of this same participation dispositif: procedural, managerial and institutional forces overtaking participation processes Dingenen & Bergmans, 2022; Dingenen, 2024; Hawkins, 2015; Littman et al., 2023); pressures on PAR researchers to make them compromise on the participatory, democratic and deliberative principles of PAR (Bennett & Brunner, 2022; Littman et al., 2023); methodological choices that unintendedly restrain participation because recruitment strategies fail to reach and engage citizens throughout the project (for example: Vlassak et al., 2024); ethical considerations limiting locations where citizens can participate, or which topics can or cannot be explored (for example: Valdez et al., 2024). In the end, these may not be separate explanations for the limited impact of PAR projects, but elements of the same participation dispositif that disarms participation and bends it to legitimize public governance as it is now.
However, if the participation dispositif works through harmony, consensus and open and constructive dialogue, then maybe the shenanigans point us to new forms of resistance to power, new forms of action and new forms of knowledge. In Foucault’s philosophy, power is never singularly oppressive; it is also productive and constructive, it is simultaneously exerted and resisted, producing new forms of knowledge, new language and norms and new forms of conduct (Foucault & Gordon, 1980). The participation shenanigans, then, can be seen as the places where the dispositif destabilizes, where harmony and constructive and open dialogue falters. Rather than ignoring them or smoothing them over, PAR researchers should engage with them as resistance and counter-conduct, take political action by leveraging their academic status and institutional position to facilitate meaningful conflict that challenges power (Pali, 2019), and open up new ways of conduct where citizens’ engagement does influence civil servants’ and government officials’ conduct. If PAR researchers are truly aiming for meaningful and sustainable changes that matter to residents, the shenanigans are the sites to take the position of political actors, to spark conflict and resistance, meddle in micropolitics to co-produce collective political action.
This article was born from our own discomfort with our own decisions, and the lack of competence we experienced reflecting on good conduct in power asymmetries and micropolitics. In this sense, our work is part of what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) call ethics-in-practice: the effort to make situated judgments under pressure rather than to follow fixed rules. In writing this article, we had to weigh our own discomfort with our position and decisions, the use of highly personal data much of which was gathered through informal interactions, with the possible harm PAR projects could cause residents in vulnerable positions. Following Walker (2007) and Banks (2016), we understand ethics as relational work, as trying to act responsibly within unequal relations while knowing that no position is innocent nor, for that matter, guilty. Ultimately, we concluded that silence, not sharing our experiences with other PAR and associated researchers, could reproduce the very injustices we sought to address. Writing about these moments is therefore an ethical act in itself: a way of taking responsibility for our role in the power dynamics that produces silencing and exclusion, and of transforming that recognition into counter-conduct through disclosure and reflection.
Footnotes
Ethical Considerations
The study protocols were reviewed by the Medical ethical committee of the Leiden University Medical Centre (commissie Medische ethiek), whichgave the studies a statement of no objections. Reference number 23-3102.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This publication is part of the project ‘countering syndemics’ with project number 21776 of the research programme health inequalities which is financed by the Dutch Research council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The qualitative datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the highly personal and potentially identifying nature of the material and the terms of participant consent. In order to protect participants’ confidentiality, the underlying data cannot be shared beyond the anonymized excerpts included in this article.