Participation Justice in Generative Relational Being: Toward a Theory of Legitimate Participation in Relational Production and Reproduction

Theories of participation ask who should take part in collective decisions, by what procedures, and with what authority. This paper asks whether the question has been posed at the appropriate level. Decisions are episodes within a longer process by which relational structures are produced, sustained, transformed, and dissolved, and the paper considers the possibility that participation in that longer process is what carries the normative weight, with access to the episodes as one form it takes. The paper surveys what the existing literature appears to have settled: the taxonomies of participation from the ladder onward, the three-dimensional decomposition of participatory design, the differentiation of rule levels in commons governance, the principles of democratic inclusion and the boundary problem, and the trilemma that no participatory arrangement escapes. It concedes that much of what a relational theory would seek to establish about who participates, how, and at which stage appears to have been established already, and it attempts to locate the residue. Against that residue it sets a generative relational reading, on which standing to participate may derive from occupying a position within a relational structure whose reproduction is at stake, and on which the sufficiency of participation at any stage may be assessed by a single criterion: whether the arrangement preserves the capacity of the affected relations to generate a further determination. The criterion is offered as a proposal and is stated with its costs. It supplies no allocation formula, it leaves the trilemma unresolved, and it requires a judgement about generative capacity that the paper is unable to operationalize. The closing questions are held to be the more valuable half of what is offered.