How social movements engage with public deliberation: A multifaceted approach

Abstract

This thesis empirically examines how a social movement as a plural, multifaceted body, engages with an ample range of spaces for deliberation. The study centers on the social movement's practices and aspirations when engaging with a variety of spaces for public expression and involvement in decision-making, ranging from Municipal Councils, to Technical Advisory Commissions, to Community Agricultural Festivals. It examines the questions how do social movements engage with public deliberation?, and what are the implications of this engagement for the theory and practice of deliberative democracy?. The empirical research in this thesis is based on an interpretive study of the Costa Rican Movement Against Genetically Modified Organisms (or Movement Against Transgenics MaT) and its practices of engagement with deliberative spaces at the national and local levels between 1999 and 2015. The research project examines this case as an information-rich, revelatory and extreme case of social movement engagement with formal local government decision-making on complex and divisive issues. This thesis proposes three contributions to bridge the study of social movements and public deliberation. First, it takes a broad situated approach to studying how social movements make sense of their practices of engagement with public deliberation, without a restricting it to a pre-conceived role. Second, my analysis expressly recognizes that the activists within the movement do not have a unified perspective about the movement's engagement with public deliberation, or a singular approach for how to relate to outsiders and antagonists. Hence, I have introduced an analytical framework that supports the classification of the specific orientations for this movement according to their features and practices. Finally, the third contribution showcases the diverse ways through which social movements engage with public deliberation. The movement's diversity manifests in a set of loosely converging orientations, each of which assembles a set of compatible aspirations and practices in pursuit of the broader movement goals, namely: 1) partisan resistance, 2) trans-partisan inquiry; and 3) generative empowerment. Grounded on these findings, this work provides concrete insights about how the plurality of orientations can be deployed by deliberative democracy scholars to examine the questions of recognition and inclusion of marginalized perspectives, and the diverse modes of protest and expression. I conclude by recommending possible policy measures that could draw on these findings to enrich the assessment of the country's democratic landscape, gain further insights from activist research, and foster greater leadership in deliberative engagement by key actors in biotechnology and biosafety governance.