Abstract
Despite the Healthy Cities’ commitment to community participation, it is often unclear what the conditions for effective community participation are, and what role the community plays or should play in building Healthy Cities. In this chapter, we propose to outline a way of addressing the puzzle of community participation in Healthy Cities from the perspective of public policy studies and urban studies. Our premise is that the Healthy Cities projects are little different from other urban development strategies: despite their focus on health, well-being and social justice, the Healthy Cities are one among other policy strategies that are subject to the urban governance rules of the game. ‘Policy coalitions’ provide a way to understand how several actors—public officials, private actors and the community—work together towards governing cities and making public policies. As potential participants in such policy coalitions, the communities may ally with public or private actors to defend a particular vision for the Healthy Cities, or in support of a concurrent project, or it may be excluded from policy coalitions. Based on these findings, the final part of the chapter dwells on three issues that Healthy Cities should pay attention to: the formal instruments of community participation; the processes of actor inclusion and exclusion in the Healthy City coalition; and what the other policy coalitions might be. Departing from a formal definition of the Healthy City coalition as the partnership opens the way to considering tensions and oppositions among the actors involved and with non-partnership members.
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Notes
- 1.
Lipp et al. (2013, p. S38) ascribed this electoral-oriented meaning to the term coalition in their paper on the evaluation of partnerships in Phase IV of the European Healthy Cities Network. A consequence of our adopting a broader definition of the policy coalition is that we include the partnerships of Lipp et al.’s study as but an instance of formal policy coalitions.
- 2.
Sociological and historical institutionalisms (Hall and Taylor 1996), in particular, are in line with urban studies’ reframing of their concern for urban government in terms of formal and informal interactions between the full range of actors involved, both public and private. Sociological institutionalism brings ideas back into the understanding of institutions in that it considers that institutions are not the result of rational developments only, but also reflect cultural preferences. In that sense, institutions influence not only the rational behaviour of actors (their interests), but also their moral and cognitive templates. Historical institutionalism explains individual behaviour as the result of both rational interest and cultural preferences. It also places emphasis on the permanence of institutions, explaining how past choices constrain future choices along a specific path.
- 3.
In line with this argument, a recent study has established that residents of US communities have different expectations of what constitutes effective community representation into health policy making arenas (Chung et al. 2012). From there, there is only a short step to considering that community representation reflects, at least partly, these diverse expectations.
- 4.
It is worth reminding that, as per our definition, we consider official Healthy City partnerships as formal instances of policy coalitions.
- 5.
The intensity of partnership work is classified in five types of collaboration: no contact, share information, agreement to collaborate, collaboration resulting in agreed plans/strategies, and implementation of collaborative plans, projects or programmes (Lipp et al. 2013, p. S41).
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CC thanks Caroline Patsias for her insightful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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Clavier, C., O’Neill, M. (2017). The Role of Policy Coalitions in Understanding Community Participation in Healthy Cities Projects. In: de Leeuw, E., Simos, J. (eds) Healthy Cities. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6694-3_14
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