Devising hybrid forums

The notion of hybrid forums has come to embody the promises and dangers of ‘technical democracy’; that ethico-political project that, according to Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), aims at the democratization of expertise through the sustained collaboration among technical experts and issue publics on shared matters of concern. In this paper I study the managerial deployment of hybrid forums as participatory devices after the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in the city of Constitución, Chile. By carefully describing the genealogy, organization and consequences of said forums, I reflect on three critical tensions underlying such collaborative processes. Firstly, taking into account the tension between the notion of hybrid forums as a concept and a device, I describe how these were devised by a Chilean consulting company as a tool for managing controversies. Secondly, dwelling on the tension between emergent and procedural dynamics of collaboration, I show the limitations these forums confronted for incorporating pre-existing controversies about the present and future of Constitución. Thirdly, I discuss how what counts as political voice was constrained by and contested in these forums, looking in detail at how local fishermen mobilized forms of political claim-making that run against the collaborative project of technical democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the most urgent challenge of hybrid forums is not just to democratically respond to existing uncertainties and matters of concern, but also to actually participate in the manufacturing of uncertainty.