Operational and substantive difficulties in the practices of democratic assemblage: the threat of uncoupling

This article aims to identify, understand and compare the processes and conditions for achieving democratic assemblage in collaborative governance processes that bring institutions into dialogue with irruptive movements and actors. To do this, we focus on two examples from the region of Bizkaia (Basque Country), one of success and the other of failure, to show that the logic of assemblage must be read considering the possibility of uncoupling or unhinge. Hence, we present a case of collaborative governance that begins with the occupation of an old arms factory and ends in an agreement whereby the representatives of the squatted social centre negotiate and agree with the local authorities the transformation of this community facility into an institutionally sponsored Factory of Culture. We will use this case, that of Astra-Gernika, as a reference framework of success, where assemblage crystallises in a harmonious way to produce democratic innovations on a local scale, favouring the transition from anarcho-communitarian logics (Bussu & Bua, 2020), to a process of public-communitarian governance that shows the possibility of broadening the scope of collaborative governance logics from the impulse of social movements. On the other hand, we propose a comparison of this experience with another that shows a very different logic of urban governance. We refer to the case of Bilbao, which is characterised by a low democratic composition and few forms of collaborative governance, especially when we talk about irruptive actors or dynamics. While in 2011 the city council of Gernika initiated a process of collaborative governance with the irruptive movements, in contrast, the city council of Bilbao requested the demolition of the squatted social centre Kukutza without giving any possibility of a collaborative agreement. After a 72-hour police intervention in a neighbourhood of Bilbao the squatted facility was demolished in September 2011 (Ahedo, 2011). We intend to show that in practice, the possibilities for collaboration and assemblage differ depending on the conditions that we think need to be delimited. Consequently, we are interested in analysing the elements of the political system that define the incentives faced by public institutions when it comes to recognising and legitimising irruptive civil society dynamics. Here, following the logic of ‘assembling assemblage’, we expose certain conditions related to structure and local agency that will show out the points that allow –or not– logics and actors, which are placed in dynamics of critical opposition and anarcho-communitarian democratic governance, to be compatible with dynamics of governance-driven democratisation (GDD) and democracy-driven governance (DDG). In this approach, opportunities are assembled in long-, medium- and short-range logics: (respectively) a) democratisation model and more or less exclusionary political culture; b) administration capacity and opportunities for counter-power articulation, c) Political Opportunity Structure and contextual opportunities for collaboration (Tilly, 2010; Tarrow, McAdam & Tilly, 2000; Jessop,2016). We conclude by pointing out that the ‘neo-statist’ dynamics rooted in local government structures, together with conditions related to inherited strategic selectivities and specific agential conjunctures, hinder, and even destroy, the options for a democratic assemblage that obeys bottom-up logics.