Beyond the Room: When Does Participation Reaches Rulemaking?

Authorship:

By Dilek Sayedahmed, Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) & NYU Paris

Participatory research can bring people into the room, generate knowledge, and make complex systems newly visible. Yet participation can occur after consequential decisions have already been made. The problem has been defined. The resources have been allocated. The options have been bounded, the timelines fixed, and authority has been retained elsewhere.

A simple question therefore precedes any claim of co-design: are we willing to let participation change what we do? A second follows it: what can participants actually change because they participated? The space between those two questions is where impact lives, or fails to arrive.

Our Geneva Forum contribution draws on a multi-year participatory systems mapping process in Canada’s social innovation and social finance ecosystem. More than one hundred and sixty participants across six convenings collectively mapped resource flows, institutional bottlenecks, competing understandings of investment readiness, and uneven distributions of information and authority. The process produced substantial knowledge, collective sensemaking, and new ways of seeing the system. It also exposed a limit. Knowledge could travel while authority over funding parameters, evaluative criteria, accountability arrangements, and institutional rules remain more concentrated. Participation changed the seeing before it changed the deciding. The convenings produced shared understanding without sharing the rulemaking.

To investigate that transition, our Canadian experience is placed in comparative dialogue with four community-rooted governance arrangements in which participation has reached beyond knowledge production into rulemaking itself. People’s Purse, a participatory budgeting process led by people with lived experience of homelessness, has allocated over half a million dollars across thirty-three community-led projects over six rounds. The Five Rs of Rematriation, an Indigenous investment philosophy, relocates autho