New Municipalist Contestation: The Case of Housing Policies in Barcelona

This paper explores how progressive local governments challenge national state policies and navigate their regulatory limits in a paradigmatic context of conflictual multilevel governance. We analyse this phenomenon through the case of the new municipalist government of Barcelona, led by Barcelona en Comú (2015-2023), a platform composed of left-wing parties and activists. Specifically, we examine how this government managed to overcome its regulatory constraints in the housing sector by forging alliances with grassroots movements and the pro-independence regional government. Together, they used a combination of civil disobedience, protest, lobbying and negotiation to challenge neoliberal national housing policies and advocate for the approval of rent control regulation. This approach by the local government of Barcelona illustrates what we call 'new municipalist contestation'. Our analysis is informed by Tilly and Tarrow's concept of contentious politics, as well as the perspectives of post-Gramscian state theorists and multilevel governance studies. Drawing on this literature, we view the state as a non-unified and inherently conflictive political organisation in which power is distributed and contested across multiple scales and actors within and beyond the state. Our working hypothesis is that this disunity within the state and the fragmentation of power across multiple scales creates a space for new municipalist contestation to thrive and advance its goals. Our findings support this hypothesis. They show that the local scale, through the development of new municipalist contestation, can become a significant node of disunity within the state apparatus. However, for such actions to be effective, disunity at the local level must be accompanied by a broader context and a chain of disunity that extends beyond the local dimension. Based on critical discourse analysis and data collected from various sources, including policy reports, press releases, newspaper articles, and video materials gathered between 2017 and 2023, we demonstrate how new municipalist contestation in Barcelona played a leading role in advancing rent control as a policy priority and, more broadly, in socializing normative claims prioritizing the right to housing over the right to profit from residential private property. This is most evident in the passage of Law 11/2020 in Catalonia, which allowed for rent control in high-demand areas but was eventually struck down in a controversial ruling by the Spanish Constitutional Court, and in the passage of Spain’s first Housing Law in 2023, which provides a legal basis for rent control at the national level. However, these achievements cannot be fully understood without considering the broader context and chain of disunity beyond the local dimension. These include: (1) a prolonged crisis of housing affordability at the European level, which has been particularly acute in Spain and in cities such as Barcelona; (2) a fragmented coalition government at the national level that depended on both progressive and nationalist movements (3) a regional coalition government rooted in the movement for Catalan independence. The paper concludes by reflecting on the limitations of new municipalist contestation and the potential for replicating such strategies to achieve policy change at the national level in other European contexts.