Bridging promises and (Dis)illusions: deliberative democracy in an evolutionary perspective

The participatory, and especially deliberative, turn is a major political phenomenon of last decades. Deliberative democracy has spread quickly, regardless of differences in institutional layouts and traditions. An equally fast-evolving debate has addressed its virtues and problems, gradually shifting from theory to practice and from a focus on deliberative arenas to a concern for their policy and institutional context, the latter being implicitly or explicitly referred to the emergence of new governance styles. More recently a different critical literature has emerged, which adopts a governmentality perspective to argue about the inclusion of participatory democracy in neoliberal forms of regulation. The chapter illustrates major points of contention between these two literatures and considers some attempts at merging them, with related problems. Finally, it addresses the potentials of evolutionary governance theory as a framework for bridging diverse approaches to the promises and perils of participation.