Political Ecologies of Participation: Reflecting on the Long-term Impact of Civic Projects

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This paper presents an unexpected story about the outcomes of a civic project. CSCW and HCI scholarships have argued for a long-term perspective to assess civic projects and to understand how local communities appropriate – or maybe disregard – the material outcomes of such interventions. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to interpret the outcomes of such projects, and how to make sense of their social impact on the wider contexts they are bound to. This article draws on the notion of “political ecologies of participation“ to illustrate: \textit{i)} how outcomes of socially-engaged projects circulate through communities and can be appropriated independently of the research inquiries they stem from; \textit{ii)} how, through such process, impact is reconfigured as issues are added to shared concerns. The paper sets out by analyzing the entanglement of actors, meanings (e.g. values, narratives, opinions) and forms of participation that were configured throughout the transformation observed. Attention is then drawn to their political qualities, including their inherent openness and their capacity to produce change locally. The paper introduces four analytical sensitives illustrating how thinking with political ecologies of participation can help CSCW research to focus on the longer processes whereby impact can be configured.