The art of governing through participation: Views from a citizen panel in Louvain-la-Neuve

Today, the rapidly spreading deliberative processes are of an ambiguous nature, given their twofold status as governmental tools and citizen-led oppositional spaces. Taking this ambiguity into account, this article examines a recent Belgian deliberative process in order to enrich the study of the technologies of power used by a new art of governing through citizen participation. In doing so, it provides a thorough description of a key feature of this art of governing: the existence of a problematic, and more or less conscious, relationship to conflict, combining its explicit acknowledgment and its practical repression—a relationship rooted in a normative blurriness surrounding the aims of deliberations.