LIST OF WORKSHOPS

Social movements often mobilise to produce or prevent policy change. The question of their power is ever more relevant in today’s divided societies. With political contention on the rise, fresh forms of activism have emerged around the defining issues of our time, such as climate change, immigration, race, social welfare, and LGBTQ+ rights. These highly politicised policy domains, moreover, stretch across multiple geographical scales and government levels, urging both activists and policymakers to navigate opportunities and constraints in complex, fragmented, and uneven institutional landscapes. The aim of this workshop is to understand when, why, and how activism can shape policymaking processes in multi-level institutional settings. This question has animated extensive research in the fields of public policy analysis, social movement studies, and political geography, giving rise to a vibrant yet siloed debate. Bringing together experts and insights from these different scholarships, the workshop will make a path-breaking contribution to the study of public policy in times of political polarisation and institutional rescaling.

Scholarship on multi-level governance and federalism offers important insights on the policy consequences of activism. Over the past decades, the devolution of policymaking powers to assorted sites of authority has led to a greater involvement of grassroots organisations in the production of public goods, sometimes transforming institutions into “laboratories of democracies” (e.g. Pierre and Peters 2020; Alcantara and Nelles 2014; Kleider and Toubeau 2022). Besides these collaborative forms of governance, however, rescaling trends have also bred contentious dynamics, offering notable opportunities for protestors who seek to change policies from below. These actors have more chances to access policy venues that are hospitable to their demands when authority is dispersed across multiple government tiers (e.g. Caiani and Graziano 2018; Sapotichne and Jones 2012; Pralle 2003). Venue-shopping is indeed the typical tactical option adopted by policy losers, disadvantaged groups, or outsiders (Fischer et al. 2015). Another consequence of government decentralisation is that policymakers operating at different spatial scales may have diverse, sometimes contrasting agendas, in a way that is conducive to multi-level policy conflicts (e.g. Verhoeven 2021; Wolf 2021; Scholten 2013). Collectively, this scholarship thus highlights how a panoply of actors in- and outside of government interact with one another—in collaborative or confrontational ways—to shape policymaking processes (Berglund et al. 2022; Méndez 2020).

Social movement scholars have also grappled with the question of activists’ political power (Bosi, Giugni, and Uba 2016). They emphasise that grassroots demands are more likely to make political headway when sympathetic office holders work as access points to the institutional space (e.g. della Porta 2022; Soule and King 2006). Policymakers, in turn, might be incentivised to be responsive because activists can provide crucial material, cognitive, and human resources to enact public policies (de Graauw 2016), while possibly energising government’s agenda from the bottom up (Bazurli 2019; Holdo 2016; Hutter, Kriesi, and Lorenzini 2019). Put differently, social movements can affect policymaking by altering elites’ calculation, i.e. seeking to be perceived as potentially facilitating or disruptive for institutional goals (Amenta, Andrews, and Caren 2019). Their victories, however, are hardly set in stone. For instance, protestors might succeed to set the public debate on urgent problems the electorate cares about, but their demands are often watered down as the policy process proceeds (Jasper et al. 2022). Every social movement that hopes to leave some institutional traces must grapple with uneasy dilemmas that expose the fragility of its own political power (e.g. Lipsky 1970). In all, despite their important contribution, scholars of social movements often see mobilisation as constrained within jurisdictional containers, thus failing to recognise how policymaking unfolds across geographical and institutional scales.

The question of scale is instead crucial for geographers and urban scholars interested in contentious politics and governance dynamics. This strand of research highlights that cities are strategic sites for the mobilisation of marginalised groups (e.g. Nicholls, Gnes, and Vermeulen 2021; Lacomba 2021; Briata, Colomb, and Mayer 2020). The peculiar qualities of urban spaces—notably, the availability of dense relational networks extended over an array of geographical scales—allow them to create bonds of solidarity, forge alliances, and ultimately turn into vocal political subjects (Nicholls 2016). In this way urban social movements can upscale their mobilisation and access political arenas at the regional, national, or supra-national level, possibly producing policy outcomes far beyond the immediate local contexts in which activism originated. Moreover, scholarship on urban governance and municipalism emphasises how institutional rescaling offers opportunities to experiment with radical innovations, tackle inequalities, and revamp democracy (e.g. Ruth, Russel, and Thompson 2023; Bianchi 2022; McGuirk et al. 2022). Decentralisation allows marginalised residents to benefit from new, more proximate access points to the institutional space—sometimes driving inspirational innovations that spread worldwide, as in the case of participatory budgeting in Latin American cities (e.g. Halvorsen 2019). Yet this scholarship also warns that local policymaking is not necessarily coordinated (e.g. Borraz and Le Galès 2010) nor conducive to inclusive social change (e.g. Varsanyi 2010; Purcell 2006).

Building on these efforts, the workshop will lay the groundwork for a fresh theorisation of activism’s impacts on policymaking in multi-level jurisdictional contexts. We will explore the opportunities and constraints that authority dispersal across multiple policy venues offer to those mobilising from the periphery of power relations. The role of institutional allies will also be analysed, and notably their ambivalent role in empowering social movements while possibly twisting them to their own ends. We will also shine a light on the spatial dimension of governance, assessing how the urban scale can be harnessed by activists to produce far-reaching policy changes, and what dilemmas they face along the way. Bridging insights from complementary yet so-far disconnected theoretical perspectives, the workshop will push the boundaries of the scholarly debate on policymaking and activism.

References

Alcantara, C., & Nelles, J. (2014). Indigenous Peoples and the State in Settler Societies: Toward a More Robust Definition of Multilevel Governance. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 44(1), 183-204.

Amenta, E., Andrews, K. T., & Caren, N. (2019). The Political Institutions, Processes, and Outcomes Movements Seek to Influence. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, edited by Snow, D. A., Soule, S. A., Kriesi, H., & McCammon, H. J. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bazurli, R. (2019). Local Governments and Social Movements in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Milan and Barcelona as ‘Cities of Welcome’. South European Society and Politics, 24(3), 343-370.

Berglund, O., Dunlop, C. A., Koebele, E. A., & Weible, C. M. (2022). Transformational Change through Public Policy. Policy & Politics, 50(3), 302-322.

Borraz, O., & Le Galès, P. (2010). Urban Governance in Europe: The Government of What?. Pôle Sud, (1), 137-151.

Bosi, L., Giugni, M., & Uba, K. (Eds.). (2016). The Consequences of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bianchi, I. (2022). The Local State’s Repertoires of Governance Strategies for the Urban Commons: Nuancing Current Perspectives. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(8), 1784-1800.

Briata, P., Colomb, C., & Mayer, M. (2020). Bridging Across Difference in Contemporary (Urban) Social Movements: Territory as a Catalyst. Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(4), 451-460.

Caiani, M., & Graziano, P. (2018). Europeanisation and Social Movements: The Case of the Stop TTIP Campaign. European Journal of Political Research, 57(4), 1031-1055.

de Graauw, E. (2016). Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

della Porta, D. 2022. “Political Opportunity/Political Opportunity Structure.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Social and Political Movements (2nd Edition), edited by David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Doug McAdam, and Bert Klandermans. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Fischer, M., Ingold, K., Sciarini, P., & Varone, F. (2016). Dealing with Bad Guys: Actor-and Process-Level Determinants of the “Devil Shift” in Policy Making. Journal of Public Policy, 36(2), 309-334.

Halvorsen, S. (2019). The Political Opportunities of Urban Decentralisation: Mobilising Local Governance in Buenos Aires. Political Geography, 74, 102038.

Holdo, M. (2016). Reasons of Power: Explaining Non‐Cooptation in Participatory Budgeting. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(2), 378-394.

Hutter, S., Kriesi, H. & Lorenzini, J. (2019) ‘Social Movements in Interaction with Political Parties’, In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, H. Kriesi & H (Eds.),  pp. 322-337. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jasper, J. M., Elliott-Negri, L., Jabola-Carolus, I., Kagan, M., Mahlbacher, J., Weisskircher, M., & Zhelnina, A. (2022). Gains and Losses: How Protestors Win and Lose. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kleider, H., & Toubeau, S. (2022). Public Policy in Multi-level Systems: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Regional-Level Policy. Regional & Federal Studies, 32(3), 277-305.

Lacomba, C. (2021). Bridging City Environments: A Contextual Approach to the Mobilisation of Immigrant Groups. Urban Studies, 58(9), 1940-1956.

Lipsky, M. (1970). Protest in City Politics: Rent Strikes, Housing, and the Power of the Poor. Rand McNally.

McGuirk, P., Baker, T., Sisson, A., Dowling, R., & Maalsen, S. (2022). Innovating Urban Governance: A Research Agenda. Progress in Human Geography, 46(6), 1391-1412.

Méndez, M. (2020). Climate Change from the Streets: How Conflict and Collaboration Strengthen the Environmental Justice Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Nicholls, W. (2016). Politicizing Undocumented Immigrants One Corner at a Time: How Day Laborers became a Politically Contentious Group. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(2), 299-320.

Nicholls, W., Gnes, D., & Vermeulen, F. (2021). Local Path Dependency and Scale Shift in Social Movements: The Case of the US Immigrant Rights Movement. Geographical Review, 111(2), 269-286.

Pierre, J., & Peters, B. G. (2020). Governance, Politics and the State. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Pralle, S. B. (2003). Venue Shopping, Political Strategy, and Policy Change: The Internationalization of Canadian Forest Advocacy. Journal of Public Policy, 23(3), 233-260.

Purcell, M. (2006). Urban Democracy and the Local Trap. Urban Studies, 43(11), 1921-1941.

Roth, L., Russell, B., & Thompson, M. (2023). Politicising Proximity: Radical Municipalism as a Strategy in Crisis. Urban Studies, OnlineFirst.

Sapotichne, J., & Jones, B. D. (2012). Setting City Agendas: Power and Policy Change, In The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics, K. Mossberger, S. E. Clarke & P. John (Eds.), pp. 442-467. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Scholten, P. W. (2013). Agenda Dynamics and the Multi-Level Governance of Intractable Policy Controversies: The Case of Migrant Integration Policies in the Netherlands. Policy Sciences, 46(3), 217-236.

Soule, S. A., & King, B. G. (2006). The Stages of the Policy Process and the Equal Rights Amendment, 1972–1982. American Journal of Sociology, 111(6), 1871-1909.

Varsanyi, M.W. (2010). Taking Local Control: Immigration Policy Activism in US Cities and States. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Verhoeven, I. (2021). Contentious Governance around Climate Change Measures in the Netherlands. Environmental Politics, 30(3), 376-398.

Wolf, E. E. A. (2021). Dismissing the “Vocal Minority”: How Policy Conflict Escalates when Policymakers Label Resisting Citizens. Policy Studies Journal, 49(2), 640-663.

This workshop aims to offer a fresh theorisation of activism’s impacts on policymaking in multi-level jurisdictional contexts. Its ambition is to attract, and promote meaningful dialogue among, policy scholars with diverse:

• Disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, history)
• Epistemological perspectives (e.g. interpretative, post-positivist)
• Scientific aspirations (e.g. empirical, theoretical, methodological)
• Methodological approaches (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, network analysis)
• Research design (e.g. comparative, single-case)
• Geographical provenance and focus (Global North and South)
• Sectorial interests (e.g. environment, immigration, urban, welfare, etc)

The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics that this workshop seeks to address:

§  Multi-level governance, federalism, and authority dispersal: How do different institutional settings influence activists’ chances to shape policymaking? What is the role of different government systems (federal, unitary, other) in affecting activists’ success and failure? What are the opportunities and constraints that authority dispersal across multiple policy venues offer to those mobilising from the periphery of power relations? How does activists’ influence vary across different policy sectors?

§  Social movements’ organisation, strategies, and outer environment: How do activists navigate opportunities, constrains, and dilemmas in different jurisdictional landscapes? What is the role of institutional allies in empowering and/or co-opting social movements? How sustainable is activists’ influence over time and how does it vary across different stages of the policy process? Are social movements seeking policy change more/less influential than those seeking to maintain the status quo?

§  Cities, space, and scale: How can activists harness the urban scale to produce policy change, locally and beyond? What is the role of geographical settings in shaping activists’ influence? How can coalitions involving activists and local officials prevent or redress unwanted policies adopted by regional, national, or supra-national authorities? What are the possibilities and limitations of municipalism for the pursuit of transformative policy change?

Bridging insights from complementary yet so-far disconnected theoretical perspectives, the workshop will push the boundaries of the scholarly debate on policymaking and activism.

Social movements often mobilise to produce or prevent policy change. The question of their power is ever more relevant in today’s divided societies. With political contention on the rise, fresh forms of activism have emerged around the defining issues of our time, such as climate change, immigration, race, social welfare, and LGBTQ+ rights. These highly politicised policy domains, moreover, stretch across multiple geographical scales and government levels, urging both activists and policymakers to navigate opportunities and constraints in complex, fragmented, and uneven institutional landscapes.

The aim of this workshop is to understand when, why, and how activism can shape policymaking processes in multi-level institutional settings. This question has animated extensive research in the fields of public policy analysis, social movement studies, and political geography, giving rise to a vibrant yet siloed debate. First, scholarship on multi-level governance and federalism highlights that the devolution of policymaking powers to assorted sites of authority has led to a greater involvement of grassroots organisations in the production of public goods, offering them notable opportunities to change policies from below. Second, social movement scholars stress that grassroots demands are more likely to make political headway when sympathetic office holders work as access points to the institutional space, but often conceptualise mobilisations as unfolding within jurisdictional containers. Third, geographers and urban scholars emphasise that cities are strategic sites for the mobilisation of marginalised groups, allowing them to produce policy outcomes far beyond the immediate local contexts in which activism originated.

Bringing together experts and insights from these different scholarships, the workshop will make a path-breaking contribution to the study of public policy in times of political polarisation and institutional rescaling.

Dr Raffaele Bazurli

Raffaele Bazurli is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), where he is carrying out the project “Sanctuary Policies for Irregular Migrants in European Cities.” He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science and Sociology from Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence (2020). Prior to joining QMUL, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo (2021) and at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2020-22).

Raffaele’s research agenda focuses on multi-level governance, migrant integration, cities, and social movements. He is especially interested in understanding how local officials and grassroots activists jointly shape governance in multi-level institutional settings, possibly breeding policy conflicts and subverting unwanted national policies. He explores these issues by looking at the rights of immigrants and marginalised residents, using mixed methodologies, and with a focus on Europe and Latin America. Ultimately, he aims to pose broader questions on cities as key, innovative players in global governance, whose policy experiments may pave the way to a just, democratic, and sustainable future.

Raffaele’s research appears in political science, sociology, and geography journals, including the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies; South European Society and Politics; the International Political Science Review; the Urban Affairs Review; Territory, Politics, Governance; Citizenship Studies; PS: Political Science and Politics; Politiche Sociali / Social Policies; and in various edited volumes. He is currently working on a single-authored book project, titled Insurgent Reformists: Migration Governance and Activism in Milan and Barcelona. Beyond academia, he has been involved in public engagement initiatives such as Barrio Saldías (QMUL, 2022-23), an impact project aimed at infrastructural upgrading in a Buenos Aires’ informal neighbourhood, in partnership with Argentine and British museums. More information: https://raffaelebazurli.com/

Professor Walter J. Nicholls

Walter J. Nicholls is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His main areas of research are urban governance, the geography of social movements, and undocumented immigrant activism in the United States and Europe. He has also performed research on squatters in Berlin and Athens, precariously housed African American communities in Detroit, and LGBTQ activism in Los Angeles.

His work is deeply interdisciplinary and draws on urban planning, sociology, and geography. He has published 56 peer-reviewed articles in journals like the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others. Additionally, he has published three books on the above interests. These include The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (2013, Stanford University Press), Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the United States, France , and the Netherlands, 1970-2015 (co-authored with Professor Justus Uitermark) (2016, Wiley-Blackwell), and The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship (2019, Stanford University Press).