The governance games of citizens and stakeholders’ engagement: longitudinal narratives

This paper focuses on a process of citizens and stakeholders’ engagement promoted by a local authority to co-design the city vision with multiple actors (politicians, public managers, consultants, citizens and other external stakeholders). The setting for this research is provided by a municipality in Sweden and our theoretical perspective is the decentred theory of governance. A multi-actor, longitudinal and qualitative analysis has been carried out by triangulating interviews with key stakeholders, non-participant observations, and documental analysis, and by collecting the empirical material at two points of time (2014–2018). Our findings present several narratives and show that four main governance games were played (political; reputational and professional; spectacle; and social games). We discuss how these games interplay may change the perception of actors about the process of citizens and stakeholders’ engagement.