The Day After Participation: Accountability, Embeddedness and What It Takes to Follow Through
- The INSPIRE Consortium
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
Sonia Bussu, João Amorim, Dena Arya, Roberto Falanga, Catherine Forde, Vanessa Liston, Gabriella Kiss, Alice Koubová, Daniel Oross, Anna Przybylska, Mariana Rosa.
Across the seven INSPIRE pilots, participatory democracy did not end with performances, exhibitions or a list of policy proposals. It moved into a more demanding - and often less visible to the main public - phase, what many partners came to call the day after.
This was the point at which participation either deepened through sustained relationships or began to thin into tokenism.
Looking across youth employment in the UK, disability rights in Portugal, migrant women’s organising in Ireland, housing justice in Hungary, refugee participation in Poland, labour market inclusion for older women in Bulgaria, and work with young men around polarisation and extremism in the Czech Republic, a shared set of questions emerged about accountability, embeddedness and institutional responsibility over time.
From pilot processes to what followed
All seven pilots combined creative, experiential and relational methods. Legislative Theatre, photovoice, sociodrama, visual art, performance lectures, co designed assemblies and participatory research enabled people who are often marginalised in policymaking to act as political subjects.
In the UK, young people aged 14 to 17 co-created an unscripted legislative theatre piece on youth employment and negotiated policy proposals directly with employers and policymakers. In Portugal, people with disabilities worked with artists to develop proposals on mobility, housing, employment and independent living at municipal and national scales. In Ireland, migrant women translated drawings of lived experiences and needs into a county-level policy proposal.
© Alípio Padilha
In Hungary, residents with housing needs used photovoice and sociodrama to document failures in building security that technical systems had missed and connected these findings to participatory budgeting mechanisms. In Poland, Ukrainian war refugees co-created safe spaces for expression and reflection using games and play. In Bulgaria, women aged 50 to 64 used storytelling and artistic methods to highlight structural barriers to labour market participation.
In the Czech Republic, a performance lecture with young men opened community discussion on masculinity, polarisation and extremism in the community of Budweis city, later adapted for materials to prompt dialogue in schools and sports clubs.
While different in topic, participants and context, all seven participatory initiatives were deliberately designed as an ongoing process rather than a closed and ad-hoc intervention. Therefore, all created expectations about what would happen next. Participants were not interested in symbolic inclusion. They wanted evidence that their time, knowledge and vulnerability had not been extracted and left behind.
Accountability as an ongoing relationship
Across the pilots, accountability emerged less as a formal response and more as relational labour. Trust was not generated through endorsements or policy language alone, but through repeated practices of care, presence and follow through. In the UK process on youth employment, accountability was enacted through youth-led interviews, follow-up meetings and continued dialogue with institutions, employers and community partners well beyond the Legislative Theatre events. In Portugal, building a dense network of institutional and civil society actors from the outset meant that responsibility did not rest only with one organisation when the project phase ended.
Participants across contexts understood that not all proposals could be implemented quickly and some required deeper structural and cultural change. We found that what can undermine trust is not constraint but withdrawal, unannounced delays, or an absence of feedback.
Accountability requires visible, iterative communication that explains how participatory knowledge is being interpreted, prioritised or deferred.
Communicating uncertainty without eroding trust
Several pilots encountered significant uncertainty after the formal process ended. In the UK, a proposal for accrediting youth friendly employers lost institutional backing when internal champions moved on. Rather than collapsing entirely, responsibility shifted sideways. A local college and employers piloted voluntary principles, with public institutions stepping back into observer roles. The outcome was more fragile than the original ambition, but young people remained engaged because the shift was explained and negotiated with them.
In Poland, uncertainty around changing regulations and the closure of refugee centres was brought into the participatory space rather than hidden from it. In Ireland and Hungary, timelines linked to budgets and formal policy cycles were openly discussed with participants. Where uncertainty was communicated relationally, it became a shared problem rather than a breach of trust. Silence, by contrast, was consistently interpreted as disregard.
Why feedback loops matter
Across the seven pilots, weak feedback mechanisms were a source of frustration. Participants wanted to know what happened to their input after events ended.
Feedback loops mattered not as mere evaluation tools, but as signals of care and shared responsibility.
A youth-led evaluation of employment opportunities and career support supported by Birmingham City Council, public dissemination of proposals in Portugal and Ireland, and continued community level meetings in Hungary and Bulgaria all functioned as ways to keep accountability visible over time.
Where feedback was routinised and collective, responsibility endured. Where ownership was personalised or tied to individual champions, commitments dissipated once those individuals moved on or their priorities shifted.
When lived experience becomes authoritative
Creative methods temporarily disrupted rigid understanding of roles and hierarchies. Legislative Theatre enabled lived experience to function as political knowledge in participatory spaces. Visual art and performance made invisible harms, as well as needs, experiences and paths forward, tangible to policymakers. Yet these gains were often fragile. After events ended, there was always a danger that experiential knowledge would be filtered out as illustrative rather than evidential, particularly within risk-averse organisational cultures.
© Bucuria Maria Polodeanu @reelmasterproduction
In INSPIRE, lived experience became authoritative only where institutional partners changed how knowledge was processed. This required routines that could receive, store and work with experiential knowledge as evidence, not as anecdote. Across the pilots, connector roles were crucial. Researchers, artists, practitioners and civil society actors carried the work of translation, memory and trust repair. This labour is constitutive of participation, yet too often risks remaining weakly recognised and under-resourced.
Holding responsibility collectively over time
Impact persisted where responsibility was distributed across roles, departments and actors. In Birmingham, youth proposals were linked to multiple policy processes and supported through multiple institutional and community networks. In Lisbon, early investment in broad alliances allowed proposals to circulate beyond the performance. In Ireland, ownership by the Intercultural Women’s Network ensured continuity beyond the learning and exploration phase with the research team. In Hungary and Bulgaria, grounding proposals in local infrastructures and civic organisations created pathways for continuation even under conditions of uncertainty.
Across these different contexts, participation became durable where institutions developed capacities for care, listening, learning, memory and shared stewardship, showing that embeddedness emerges as a relational achievement.
Rather than a mere technical phase of implementation, the day after participation is where democracy is either practised as an ongoing relationship or reduced to a symbolic moment. INSPIRE demonstrated that creative participation can momentarily unsettle established power relations and open new space within institutional settings. The longer-term significance of these openings, however, rests on whether institutions continue to listen, reciprocate, and hold themselves accountable over time.
Comments