Participatory mechanisms, ecological governance and empowerment around sustainable mobility

Author: Tarik Bouriachi, Äerdschëff asbl

Abstract

Based on two participatory mechanisms used in the Luxembourg context of the ecological transition—forum theatre and an expert-citizen forum dedicated to sustainable mobility—this article offers an anthropological analysis of contemporary forms of citizen action. Adopting a situated research approach, it examines how these mechanisms shape social imaginaries, redistribute the regimes of knowledge legitimacy, and reconfigure the circulation of power. Far from an instrumental reading of participation, the article demonstrates that these spaces constitute political technologies that influence the governance of possibilities, making certain forms of action conceivable, practicable, and collectively legitimate.

Introduction

Participatory Mechanisms and the Governance of Possibilities

Political anthropology has historically been built around the analysis of institutionalised forms of power, their rituals, symbols, and modes of legitimation. However, contemporary transformations in public action have shifted the focus toward more diffuse, less visible, but no less structuring modalities of power. In these configurations, power is no longer primarily exercised through injunction or direct coercion, but rather through the production of frameworks for action, legitimate narratives, and subjectivities aligned with pre-existing normative horizons.

Ecological crises provide a prime opportunity to observe these transformations. They are accompanied by a proliferation of participatory mechanisms designed to “mobilise,” “raise awareness,” or “involve” citizens, while largely leaving unchanged the material and economic structures that produce these crises. The persistent gap between the density of scientific diagnoses and the weakness of actual transformations cannot therefore be interpreted as a simple lack of rationality or individual will. It points to a central question in political anthropology: how are the capacities for collective action created, distributed, and limited?

This article proposes to address this question through a comparative analysis of two distinct but interconnected participatory mechanisms: forum theatre and an expert-citizen forum dedicated to sustainable mobility. Far from being considered mere methodological tools or fully developed forms of participatory democracy, these mechanisms are understood here as political technologies in the broadest sense. They arrange bodies, discourses, emotions, and procedures, producing specific effects of power, subjectivation, and the ordering of the possible.

The central hypothesis is that these mechanisms do not primarily operate by transmitting information or seeking consensus, but by working on the very conditions of what is thinkable and feasible. They operate on social imaginaries, defining what can be said, tested, or contested, and redistributing—always partially and conflictually—the regimes of legitimacy of knowledge. In this sense, they constitute privileged observatories of contemporary forms of ecological governmentality.

The analysis is based on a situated research approach, assuming direct involvement in the mechanisms studied. This position does not aim to produce an illusory neutrality, but rather to make visible the tensions, asymmetries, and ambivalences that permeate these participatory spaces. It allows us to grasp, from the inside, how expert knowledge, citizen knowledge, and experiential knowledge are articulated, and how the boundaries between legitimate and disqualified action are negotiated.

Forum Theatre as a Device for Subjectivation

Originating from the Theatre of the Oppressed developed by Augusto Boal, forum theatre is often presented as a tool for emancipation through participation. Such an interpretation, however, tends to obscure its profoundly political dimension. By suspending the separation between stage and audience, between actors and spectators, forum theatre establishes a liminal space where social roles can be shifted, without ever being entirely abolished.

In this framework, the stage action does not simply represent situations of domination or deadlock. It reenacts them, tests them, and reconfigures them. Bodies, silences, hesitations, and emotions become agents of knowledge. The knowledge that emerges is neither prior to nor external to the action; it arises from the confrontation between unequally distributed trajectories, positions, and constraints.

My relationship to this method was shaped by my encounter with the practices of Burkinabè community theatre, particularly through the work of Prosper Kompaoré. This experience brought about a shift…