This Paper focuses on an analysis of the potentialities and challenges for social-ecological transformation implied by movement-parties’ seizure of power of the local state, through a case-study research design on the Barcelona en Comú (BeC) movement-party. BeC emerged in June 2014 as “Guanyem Barcelona”, a new citizens’ platform for Barcelona municipal elections, displaying strong continuities with the Indignados movement. Later transformed in February of the following year into BeC through the support of other political formations and parties on the left side of the political spectrum, less than one year after its original constitution (May 2015) BeC won the city council elections, and Ada Colau, first one of the founders and then spokesperson of the Platform of mortgages’ victims (PAH) became the new mayor of Barcelona. The program of BeC was prepared participatorily in a complex structure of neighborhood assemblies and thematic commissions that started in autumn 2014. The critique of growth-oriented developmental models was present since Guanyem’s original constitution and several policies advanced in the program and implemented reflect such an awareness. Drawing from an ethnographic approach, this Paper aims to investigate the type of environmentalism animating BeC (as incarnated in the policies and discourses of BeC), and how this is entangled with participatory dynamics. More particularly, it will analyse how environmental knowledge is produced and channelled through the complex relationships between “the inside and the outside of institutions”, as embodied in the three-pronged articulation of city representatives, political party, and civil society/social movements, in a way that can eventually lead to ecological outcomes in the institutional field. Grounding the empirical research on broader critical state theories, the paper hence aims to shed light on the processes of institutionalisation of radical social-ecological change, which also involve the transformation of local state institutions towards a more participatory structure.
