Public encounters, face‐to‐face contact between public professionals and citizens, was first identified as a key issue in public administration 80 years ago, but never developed into a subject area of its own. Although receiving attention in research on street‐level bureaucrats' contact with customers, clients, and citizens, the concept of public encounters is hardly used. However, it has great potential to overcome current limitations in understanding how public encounters can enhance the quality of services, decisions, and outcomes. This article traces the historical development of research on public encounters and sets a future agenda for developing it into a subject area of its own. The main argument is that, so far, the encounter, or ‘in‐between’, has not been captured as a distinct phenomenon. A framework is developed to examine this in‐between in terms of the everyday communicative practices and processes through which public professionals and citizens encounter each other.

Peer reviewed versionCyswllt i'r cyhoeddiad / Link to publication Dyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA): Bartels, K. (2017). The double bind of social innovation: Relational dynamics of change and resistance in neighbourhood governance. Urban Studies, 54(16), 3789-3805. AbstractWhile current discourse promotes social innovation as a normative good, in practice it is highly contested by institutionalised ways of thinking, acting and organising. Concurrently stimulating and resisting innovation creates a 'double bind' of conflicting communicative signals that weaken capacities for joint sense making and sustainable change. I develop a meta-theoretical framework that explains what is involved in these relational dynamics of change and resistance, how these can be assessed and improved, and why the double bind both necessitates and inhibits substantive change. Analysing relational dynamics in a case of neighbourhood governance in Amsterdam, I argue that social innovators should be prepared to constructively confront rationalistic evaluation, defensiveness, and experiential detachment while institutional actors should welcome fundamental relational transformations of hierarchical and competitive dynamics institutionalised in urban governance.

Participatory arrangements have become a popular way of addressing modern challenges of urban governance but in practice face several constraints and can trigger deep tensions. Facilitative leadership can play a crucial role in enabling collaboration among local stakeholders despite plural and often conflictual interests. Surprisingly, this style of leadership has received limited attention within debates linking urban governance and participatory democracy. We summarize the main insights of the literature on facilitative leadership and empirically develop them in the context of participatory urban governance by comparing recent participatory processes in two Italian cities. Whereas in one city facilitative leadership gradually emerged and successfully transformed a deep conflict into consensual proposals, in the other city, participatory planning further exacerbated pre‐existing antagonism, and local democratic culture was only later slowly reinvigorated through bottom‐up initiative. These diverging pathways explain how facilitative leadership is: (1) important for making things happen; (2) best understood as situated practices; (3) an emergent property of the practices and interactions of a number of local actors and (4) a democratic capacity for dealing with continuous challenges. Key to this style of leadership is understanding participatory urban governance as an ongoing democratic process.

Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document.When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policyWhile the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

No abstract