Urban Revitalisation and Participatory Governance: Methodology for a Discursive Policy Analysis

This paper examines how discursive mechanisms of governance provide the means for the maintenance of power of elite groups in a democratic society. Through a discourse-empirical analysis of urban revitalisation in Newark, New Jersey, I argue that elites discursively structure deliberative spaces to marginalise alternatives to their developmental orientation. Using the conceptual-analytical framework of Fischer's logic of policy deliberation (1995) and Hoppe, Pranger, and Besseling's (1990) belief systems approach I show how policy outcomes are contingent upon the dynamic interaction between dominant and competing discourses. In Newark, an elite discourse not only structured the space for formulating policy strategies for economic and social development, but also superficially integrated oppositional elements of competing discourses in order to weaken and marginalise their distinctive core values and meanings.