73. The Double Doughnut of Democracy

The double doughnut of democracy is the idea that government should not engage directly with the public.  Instead public engagement happens through a ring of sharers such as councillors, community groups or the media.  While potentially more effective, this approach implies that government has to work in a different way. 

mmmmm doughnuts

This idea draws on three sources.

The first is a conversation we had about online democracy at govcampcymru. 

The second is a set of ideas developed by Catherine Howe that I heard about first at localgovcamp.  While Catherine is more interested in a citizen perspective here the implications for government are centre stage.

The third source is some conclusions form the academic literature.  Lawrence Pratchett in a paper for Parliamentary Affairs suggested that intermediate bodies such as the media and community groups might be the best route for public participation as local government is essentially a representative rather than participative institution.  Similarly, Marion Barnes, Janet Newman and Helen Sullivan in their research into public participation, suggested that participation initiatives might be more successful when semi autonomous from government and run by voluntary groups. 

The double doughnut of democracy is essentially a public engagement strategy for local government (or any government for that matter).

It is underpinned by the assumption that local government has neither the capacity or the capability to involve the public in the democratic process; it's just not very good at this kind of thing. Explaining why public participation is such a big challenge for local government is a big topic  - more here if you are interested.

Instead local government should work with the sharers - the people who can take the stuff of democracy, engage with the public and report it back into the process. 

The sharers (Catherine Howe calls them the civic creators), who are the middle ring of the double doughnut, include:

• Councillors
• Council officers
• Partner agencies
• Voluntary and community groups
• Citizen bloggers
• Journalists

Adopting the double doughnut means a number of things:

• Talking to the sharers about their needs and how you can meet them - they are the 'service users' for online democracy
• Publishing the stuff of democracy in a form that can be easily shared, online and off
• Taking steps to build the 'democracy community' - recognising and supporting the sharers
• Responding to the feedback 

This last point is of course a massive practical and cultural challenge - recognising that it needs to happen would be a good start.

71. Mini Mayors

Mini mayors are local councillors with added status and recognition.  More than simply the community’s representative on the Council they are the focus for community governance.  Many councillors already act informally as mini mayors – the idea here is that this role could be formalised and given legal weight.

Mini mayor wins award for services to community governance

I was at a Welsh Government seminar this week on Reforming Local Government.  One of the questions was around the role local councillors and how it might develop. A couple of issues came out of this:

• Many back bench councillors are disillusioned and feel they cannot make a difference.  Young councillors in particular have come into local government full of expectation but find that they are excluded from council wide decision making.
• Sub local governance, in other words the patchwork of community and town councils, community regeneration partnerships, voluntary groups, school governing bodies etc etc, is, democratically speaking, a mess.  There is nothing that formally links everything.
• Councillors are in a great position to tie all this together. They are already on many of these bodies, as school governors, on management committees of community centres and involved with voluntary groups.  Many councillors already wear two hats – they serve on local authorities and on their community and town councils.

As well as their traditional councillor role this means they would automatically:

• Have a seat on the community or town council (no need to be elected)
• Be a governor on all the schools in their patch
• Sit on the management committee or board of any community initiatives in their areas

This would ensure that the local councillor not only had influence in all of these bodies but was able to join things up locally.  The presence of an elected councillor on all of these bodies would also ensure added democratic legitimacy for them.  At the same time the mini mayor would be a stronger position to represent the views of the community to the Council and there would also be more scope for mini mayors to facilitate public engagement in their areas through area forums or similar initiatives.

When people vote for their councillor now, they are electing someone to represent them on the Council and various committees.  Would it make a difference to turnout if people knew that the councillor they were electing would also be automatically be involved in a number of other community bodies?  Would it improve the accountability of those bodies if the mini mayor for the area gave them all a public and accessible face?

Couple of issues.  The first is, to make this work, there would probably need to be only single councillor wards.  Second, and most important there would need to be enough councillors to ensure that mini mayors are not spread too thin.  One the plus side, supporting a network of mini mayors could be an important counter balance to the increasing remoteness of our increasingly large local councils.

UPDATE:  A reality check from Councillor Simon Cooke and plenty more food for thought in this post.  In it Simon says:

Much though I see merit in the mini-mayor idea, it is a reminder that the 2000 Local Government Act emasculated local councillors and created the situation where many ended up flapping around wondering what their role and purpose might be.... What we need to do is give those councillors the support, access and capacity to actually do that vital job of kicking down the doors of bureaucrats to ensure that the people's voice echoes round those offices as loudly as possible.

Photo: https://flic.kr/p/eYuxeZ

47. A Design Checklist for Participatory Initiatives

As I've mentioned before, my PhD research is concerned with local government and paticipatory initiatives.  'Participatory initiatives' meaning the citizens' panels, area forums, participatory budgeting projects etc etc that aim to give the public some influence in the local policy process.  

One of the conceptual issues I face is tying down the precise characteristics of these participatory initiatives as they are all so different and are inevitably implemented in different ways.

For a broad typology I draw on Graham Smith's excellent Power Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World - a report he produced for the Power Inquiry.  You can download it here.

Smith's typology looks like this:

• Electoral innovations- aim to increase electoral turnout. Examples include postal ballots, electronic voting, positive abstention, compulsory voting, reducing voting age, universal citizenship
• Consultative innovations – aim to inform decision-makers of citizens’ views.  Examples include public meetings, focus groups, planning for real, community visioning, standing forums, standing citizens’ panels.
• Deliberative innovations – aim to bring citizens together to deliberate on policy issues, the outcomes of which may influence decision-makers. Examples include citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative opinion polling, America Speaks, national issues forums, study circles, deliberation days.
• Co-governance innovations – aim to give citizens significant influence during the process of decision-making. Examples include Chicago community policing, youth councils, participatory appraisal, participatory budgeting, Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, British Columbia.
• Direct democracy innovations – aim to give citizens final decision-making power on key issues. Examples include New England town meetings, referendum, initiative, recall, citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition.
• E-democracy innovations – aim to use ICT to engage citizens in the decision making process. Examples include e-voting, e-consultation, e-representatives, online deliberative polling, e-petitions, e-referendum, Minnesota E-Democracy, BBCiCan, HeadsUp

In order to help with a more detailed categorisation I've been collecting a list of variables that you can see in the list below.  It is specifically set in a UK local government context but could be easily adapted for other contexts.

As well as its research use it might also be handy as a checklist for councils looking to set up a participatory initiative - a set of choices that can be made at the design stage. It's very much a work in progress - all comments welcome!

Design Variables for Local Government Participatory Inititiatives

1. Formal decisions are made on behalf of council [routinely, occasionally, never]
2. Preferences or recommendations are agreed [routinely, occasionally, never]
3. Preferences or recommendations are reported directly to council or cabinet [routinely, occasionally, never]
4. The role of local ward councillors [formal, informal, none]
5. The role of executive councillors [formal, informal, none]
6. How the membership is chosen [open, restricted (e.g. geographic area, age group), selection mechanism (e.g. nomination, election)]
7. Membership monitoring (e.g. to check representativeness) [formal, informal, none]
8. Training for the membership [formal, informal, none]
9. Set up by [community, council, Other body (e.g. voluntary group)]
10. Agenda setting. [council, membership, joint]
11. Expected level of public involvement [1-30, 30-60, 60+]
12. The method of engagement [face to face, remote, mixed]
13. Involvement of community groups or other outside bodies [formal, informal, none]
14. Council wide policy role [formal, informal, none]
15. Service improvement role [formal, informal, none]
16. Budgetary role [formal, informal, none]
17. Resources and support for the initiative [dedicated (e.g. specialist team), Integrated (e.g. built into to other roles), none]

Picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_drawing_board.JPG

45. Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

Today is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Jean Jacques Rousseau. To celebrate this most auspicious of days, here is my take on what Rousseau might say to anyone involved in community participation today. 

Rousseau is my favourite political philosopher and The Social Contract (250 years old this year) is my favourite political book. If you are interested you can read The Social Contract online here or enjoy a couple of Harvard lectures about Rousseau's discourse here and The Social Contract here.

Obviously I can’t do justice here to the work of the great man in a short post – I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to even given the time and space – but here is, I think, in a nutshell, the core of his political argument:

The Social Contract

Rousseau’s central contention is that, in the modern world, people can only enjoy freedom thought direct participation in politics. Furthermore, we are free only when we obey those laws that we have made ourselves. For Rousseau, the moment you let someone else decide the laws you live under, whether it be a monarch, dictator or elected representative, you become no better than a slave.

How then can you only obey your own laws and yet live in a community with others? The Social Contract presents Rousseau’s solution to the problem. It represents a voluntary political association where everyone participates in the making of laws for the community interest (also known as the general will). The key bit is that the laws apply generally, so that everyone is equally affected:

‘...as every individual gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all, it is no one’s interest to make conditions onerous for others’

Clearly, as Rousseau would also accept, the social contract is an ideal state which is unlikely to ever be seen in reality. However, it provides, I think, a fine political aspiration.

Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

So, what might Rousseau say about modern community participation? Here are five lessons that I think can be drawn from the Social Contract.

1. Get everyone in the community to sign up

The social contract only works because everyone has signed up to it, it cannot be imposed. Similarly community participation needs the consent of the whole community (or an overwhelming proportion of it), whatever that community might be. It might be raised hands at a meeting or a signature on a form; what’s important is that voluntary act of association. If this cannot be achieved then maybe the community participation approach needs to be changed, or maybe community participation isn’t appropriate at all.  

2. Only consider general principles

One thing Rousseau would definitely say is that community participation should only be concerned with general issues for the community, issues that affect everyone, if not exactly the same, then in a similar way. Particular issues, such as what happens in one street, or a planning application, will draw out particular interests and lead to conflict. Instead, general issues, such as the speed limit, the acceptable noise level or even the overall balance of spending in an area should be the focus. It is for the ‘government’, whether it be the local authority or another public body to interpret the general principles and put them into practice in particular cases. Once again, if the community as a group gets involved, it can only bring conflict.

3. Only ask about what’s best for the community

Like Rousseau’s general will, the community will expresses the interest of the community as a whole. The question to be asked is not ‘what is best for you?’ or 'what do you want?’ but ‘what is in the best interests of the whole community?’ For the community will is not the ‘average’ of all individual interests but the result of a careful consideration of what is best for all. The fact that everyone is affected more or less the same is important in this context.

4. Ask people to consider the issues as individuals

For Rousseau the general will has the best chance to emerge when citizens undertake their own careful consideration and are not bound by party allegiance or swayed by those with vested interests. So with the community will it is important that party politics, pressure groups or any other type of faction are kept at bay. Citizens should be provided with information and encouraged to debate but not to campaign.

5. Get everyone to participate

For the community will to emerge everyone, or nearly everyone, in the community need to be involved. Comprehensive participation also increases the likelihood that everyone will feel happy to be bound by community laws. Rousseau’s Social Contract was concerned with small city states where face to face participation was possible. There is no reason why communities could not be defined as small enough to make this happen. Alternatively, the use of social media and web technology could make the involvement of larger groups possible.


For me, Rousseau’s political philosophy can be used to underpin a distinctive approach to community participation, an approach that might be challenging in practice but a worthwhile aspiration nevertheless.

Picture credit (portrait): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

39. Moot Halls

I was reading some G.D.H. Cole recently, out of passing curiosity really, and I came across his idea of Moot Halls and I thought it was a great one to include on this blog.

G.D.H Cole was a left wing academic with a strong belief that you could change the world through education.  You can find his Wikipedia page here.

Cole’s Democracy

Cole’s democracy could perhaps be characterised as an aversion to big government and a preference for smaller associations, either at work or in the community.  For Cole local government in urban areas, because of its size, had become as distant from ordinary people as national government.  In the face of this, the problem for Cole was ’to find democratic ways of living for little men in big societies’. For him:

Democracy can work in the great states...only if each state is made up of a host of little democracies...

Three of his assumptions in particular are interesting for local democracy:

• That democracy requires that people know each other personally, as neighbours or comrades, for example, so that a genuine bond of sympathy and empathy exists
• The belief in natural associations, in other words those groups that form around work places, churches, neighbourhoods, hobbies etc, as the basis for a living democracy
• That we have to accept messiness in the democratic system – an almost anarchic willingness to build democracy on the 'natural' building blocks of associations and to be unconcerned about even or regular state structures

Moot Halls

Cole describes the idea of Moot Halls in his 1941 essay ’The Essentials of Democracy’:

I am suggesting that there ought to be for every street, or little group of streets, for every block of flats, and, of course, every village and hamlet a regularly recognised, neighbourhood group, with a right to discuss and resolve upon anything under the sun.  I am not merely suggesting that this should happen: I say it ought to be made to happen.  Every new group of streets we build ought to have its little Moot Hall for such assemblies of its people, ought to have its little centre for their communal affairs.

Wider than their democratic purpose, Cole suggested that Moot Halls should have other functions such as childcare centres, cafes, bakeries, and social clubs.    In this context Moot Halls sound similar to many of the centres opened through modern regeneration projects - although these don’t have the democratic function (perhaps they should).

Personally I love this idea and would like to see it considered as something that might be included in every new development; a kind of democratic planning gain. 

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary/3855917845/

 

34. Evaluate the Policy Outcomes from Public Participation

If I want to describe the force of an earthquake I can use the Richter scale, if I want to describe wind speed I can use the Beaufort scale but if I want to describe the impact of public participation on local government policy and decision making (and I do – it’s what my PhD is about) what can I use?

The answer is nothing as far as I know. 

The purpose of this post, therefore, is to share the crude scale I’m using to describe the value of the outcomes from participatory initiatives on policy and decision making.  It is very much a work in progress so please feel free to suggest improvements!

My Kind of Outcomes

Public participation initiatives, such as citizens’ panels, area forums, focus groups etc, will normally consider issues, relevant to policies or decisions being considered and will produce outcomes.  By outcomes I mean opinions or proposals that might be captured formally through minutes or reports, or informally by decision makers, perhaps councillors, being present and taking conclusions away with them.  These outcomes are the policy products of participatory initiatives.    

Evaluating Public Participation Isn’t Simple

While I am only really interested in those outcomes relevant to policy and decision making there are of course a wide range of other outcomes that can be evaluated, sometimes it seems, to the exclusion of the ones I’m interested in.   

I’m not going to get into the whole thing here.  If you want to see the whole picture then Tina Nabatchi has produced a very useful ‘Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation’ that you can download here.  It gives a very good feel for the challenge of evaluating public participation, as she says:

Public participation is an inherently complex and value-laden concept. There are no widely held criteria for judging the success and failure of citizen participation efforts. Some advocates focus on the intrinsic benefits of participation and believe that its instrumental outcomes are irrelevant. Others focus on its instrumental outcomes for citizens, communities, policy, and governance. Critics often doubt both sets of claims.

Nabatchi’s guide also highlights some of the specific challenges associated with evaluating the specific type of outcomes I’m interested in:

...there are difficulties in demonstrating causal links between participation and policy outcomes, in part due to the time lag between processes and policy or public action, as well as intervening events. There is also considerable ambiguity about what would constitute a substantial impact, which means that impact must be considered in relation to the initial goals of the participatory program. Finally, scholars and practitioners are still devising methods with which to better examine the links between public participation processes and public policy changes and action.

This then, is my attempt to try and address those challenges.

A Simple Evaluation Scale

For my scale I have borrowed from this paper by Paul Burton on measuring the benefits of public participation.  In particular two of the ‘strands’ he argues need to be considered when conceptualising participation.   

The first strand is the level or scope of the decision:  Burton describes the possible range like this:

At one end of the continuum are decisions that affect everyone in a particular constituency or jurisdiction, while at the other end are those affecting only a few.

I’ve adapted this a little bit and have divided decisions between those that are strategic, affecting the whole local authority area, and those that are local, affecting one community or population group.

The second strand is what Burton calls the participatory relationship, in other words:

the relationship between those people who choose to or are invited to participate and those who retain formal responsibility for making the decision in question. At one end of the spectrum formal responsibility for taking a decision is handed to all participants, for example in a referendum, while at the other end participants are allowed only the most cursory degree of involvement and in ways that have no meaningful impact on the decision taken. 

Again, to simplify, and to place this in a local government context, I’ve distinguished between those cases where the difference made is decisive and where the initiative has been informing. 

From a councillor perspective these two categories are the flip side of two classic representations of the councillor role.  For those councillors who see themselves as trustees, in other words, elected to follow their own judgements, the informing relationship is likely to fit more comfortably.  For those that sees their role as one of delegate, closely representing the views of the public, a more decisive influence might be more likely.

Putting the two strands together generates four types of value and looks like this:

I then translate this into a four part scale as follows:

1.  High Value (Strategically decisive)
Outcomes either substantially change the intended decision / policy or bring a clear direction where the way forward was in doubt.  We would expect this to happen in connection with council, cabinet or even strategic partnership meetings.

2.  Medium Value (Locally decisive; strategically informing)
A substantial change or a clear direction is affected at a local level through say an area committee. 
Alternatively the influence is council wide and the outcome has been clearly taken into account but as one of many considerations of which others were decisive.  

3.  Low Value (Locally informing)
The outcome has been clearly taken into account by local councillors or officers acting locally but it cannot be said to be decisive.

4.  No Value (Neither decisive nor informing)
Nothing has happened as a consequence of the outcome.

I appreciate that this scale is a crude one that plays fast and loose with many subtleties and is likely to be highly subjective in its application.  No doubt it could also be improved. Nevertheless I believe it at least goes someway to describing something which has (probably) never been properly described before. 

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/playingwithpsp/2280744328/

21. Collective Pledging

I was reading this piece today in the Guardian.  It's about a website called Groupon which offers discounts to subscribers on a wide range of products.  The Guardian piece summarises the way it works like this:

each morning, you open your email to discover one or two offers of steep discounts on restaurant food, or beauty treatments, or adventurous experiences: recent London deals, for example, included 54% off a kite-surfing course, tapas for two at £19 instead of £48, and six sessions of laser hair removal at a quarter of the regular price. Nominally, there's a catch – you get the deal only if it "tips", meaning that a sufficient number of people sign up – but today that almost always happens.

In other words discount deals are proposed by retailers but are only triggered if a specified number of consumers sign up for them - thereby, in theory, reducing the risk for the retailers and allowing them to manage their promotions more effectively.  The added value of the website is the extra reach that it gives to companies.  There is also an added social effect whereby people who have signed up for a deal may seek to encourage others they know to sign up so that it will 'tip'.  It's not all straightforward of course, read the article if you want to learn more about the downsides.

The interesting question for me is whether this kind of collective pledging could be applied to local politics with the local council acting as a kind of democratic groupon.  It might work like this:

• The Council would maintain an email list of interested citizens - all would be eligible but some may choose to opt out
• Proposals would be formulated by councillors as potential solutions to current policy problems
• Proposals would be sent to citizens as offers - these might be targeted to specific groups such as council tenants, businesses or people living in a particular community
• If the support of enough citizens was received the proposal would be enacted - citizens pledging to participate directly would enter into some kind of formal contract to help ensure continued involvement

Different types of proposal might include:

• Decisions that need a certain number to sign up to be validated
• New models of service delivery, such as community trusts, that require citizens to be formal stakeholders
• Voluntary community initiatives such as litter picks, walking school buses or elderly care schemes
• New services that require high levels of community support or that the council does not have the resources to enforce such as perhaps new parking or recycling schemes

Of course this could all happen without the technology but it is social media that makes this easy to organise and fun to use.  It also creates a social environment for collective pledging to take place.

So , there it is, all it needs now is a catchy brand name.  Anyone?  

9. People Swarms

People swarms is a phrase used by Alan Finlayson and James Martin in their contribution to the Localopolis pamphlet. They describe:

...a 21st Century participatory politics taking place in unpredictable forms as people "swarm" together to deal with a cause or problem and then dissipate or move on to the next one.

The idea seems both simple and strange. To really understand it you have to get to grips with the working assumptions that sit beneath it. These assumptions (which come from the poststructural end of social theory) include the following ideas: 

• The world of local governance is a very complex and shifting place
• 'Power' is not something that can be found in any particular place, instead it exists in the relationships between people and organisations (an idea very much associated with the work of Foucault)
• Sovereignty does not reside in any one place, and is not the property of any specific locality or identity

All of this means that we are working in a very weird environment. According to Finlayson and Martin: 

In reality local government is just one nodal point in a complex network of interrelating elements each of different intensities and moving at different speeds. Governance is not structured, it is not static and it has no fixed or orderly lines through which power is transmitted.

Also, governance is both 'local' and 'international' and people are interested in both. Modern communications make it possible for people to belong to communities at all levels. Add to this the idea that power can be found in many different places, and we have a very difficult challenge for 'local' government if it sees its role as one of control.

The natural conclusion from all of this is that local democracy needs to be as fluid as the world it exists in.

Finlayson and Martin also reflect on the role of the local authority worker in the world of people swarms:

As initiators or managers of unpredictable forms of political organisation and action we might call them "political entrepreneurs" or "community partners". Then again we could just call them "citizens".

I was reminded of this idea when reading this post from Carl Haggerty this week. He comes to a similar place although from an different angle.

 

Haggerty argues that technological change, financial pressures and a push for more citizen involvement will drive us in any case towards this fluid form of local governance. Local government itself will itself be more of a concept than a real institution. He says: 

So we could get to a situation ...where the only aspect of local government which is truly local is the actual service delivery and decision making. The organisation behind it all could well be a mix of local, regional, national and cloud based services all supporting an individual worker (who may not actually be employed by the council) to deliver a service to someone in a community.

Like Finlayson and Martin, Haggerty's vision has only one constant - the people at the heart of local governance. People that will be able to swarm around the policy issues that interest and inspire them.  People served by a fluid mix of local, national and international support systems.

1. Local Constitutions

This was one of the three ideas I put forward in my essay in the original SOLACE pamphlet (pdf).  I argued that, because politics and accountability at the local level are so messy (different arrangements for health, police, local government etc), there should be a single written constitution for each local area which sets out the rights and responsibilities of citizens and explains who all the local organisations are and how they are accountable. 

This is not a particularly new idea.  Aristotle, in his book the politics, described how the constitution was at the heart of the Greek city state (aka the polis) giving legitimacy and transparency to political business and, while the constitution is a 'kind of organisation of the state’s inhabitants', it is much more than that as it embodies the 'spirit of the people'.

Local constitutions would define the powers of the different parts of the political whole and provide a focus for public debate and participation. They would set out the rights of citizens and the limits of local lawmaking and be used as a focus for teaching citizenship in schools. Changes would need to be made through referenda and this would provide an opportunity for widespread public debate. In fact the development of local constitutions would be an excellent way to get people involved in local debates about how their politics should be. 

In the UK local areas are already required to community strategies which could be the starting point for developing local constitutions.