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This article aims to understand the limits on the expansion of the public space that is occurring through democratic innovations, and to investigate strategies for overcoming these limits. With an approach rooted in standpoint epistemology, this article studies the participation experiences of sixteen women belonging to a feminist subaltern counterpublic in fifteen apparatuses in the Autonomous Region of the Basque Country. The study considers that this expansion of the public space has taken place with three limits, related to the de-legitimisation of the private, the undervaluation of relational aspects and the naturalization of a universal idea of participation. Opposing this, the article states that the practice of counterpublics facilitates greater inclusion in the designs of democratic innovations due to those parallel publics’ subaltern position in the public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the political, social, and environmental situations in the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia (Cataluña) and the Basque Country (País Vasco) in Spain. The authors analyze the relationship between socio-environmental conflict and the process of democratization as evidenced by these regions. They also examine the role of the citizen, with particular emphasis on their environmental impact. Several socio-environmental conflicts in Catalonia and the Basque Country from 2000-2007 are also explored.

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