Stratified inclusion: from technocratic management to networked governance in Spain’s religious diversity regime

Abstract

Spain’s regime of religious diversity is marked by a gap between formal commitments to pluralism and systemic exclusions produced through legal, normative, and spatial asymmetries. This article argues that technocratic “diversity management” depoliticizes diversity, marginalizes minority agency, and sustains “selective secularism”, whereby majority Catholicism is culturalized while minority expressions, especially those read as Muslim or associated with Muslim communities, are religionized. Linking paradigm conflict, normative hierarchies, and territorial fragmentation, the article conceptualizes this configuration as stratified inclusion: minorities are symbolically recognized yet largely excluded from shaping the norms that govern them. Drawing on case law, Spain’s legal architecture, and local governance practices, it identifies administrative discretion, culturalization, religionization, and spatial inequality as governance pathologies that undermine freedom of religion or belief, equality before the law, and related human rights. It advances “networked governance” as a multiscalar, co-productive corrective capable of embedding minority agency in institutional design and democratic pluralism.

Received: 20 May 2025; Accepted: 07 January 2026