New Routes to Social Justice: Empowering Individuals and Innovative Forms of Collective Action
122
New Routes to Social Justice: Empowering Individuals and Innovative Forms of Collective Action
122Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786605016 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2017 |
| Pages: | 122 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.34(w) x 8.62(h) x 0.34(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
TOO LATE FOR THERAPY?
Or, what is to be done about the relationship between citizens and states
Geoff Mulgan
A lot is known about what makes relationships work. There needs to be trust and mutual respect, a willingness to accept differences, and a good mix of support, care and communication. Healthy relationships need constant work, and often need periodic reinvention.
Very similar considerations apply to the relationship between states and citizens, which so often appear fraught and strained to the point of breaking. By any historical standard the quality of the relationship between most democratic states and their citizens is good. They are more open, supportive and honest than ever before. We can remove bad governments; we know much more about what they do; and the quality of the services they provide has contributed to the extraordinary and unprecedented improvements in life expectancy, risks of violent crime and education achieved over the last 40 years or so.
But many citizens and commentators feel the opposite. Indeed it often looks as if we have moved from one set of unhealthy relationships – based on excessive servility and deference – to another set of unhealthy relationships marked by seething resentment and distrust, without even pausing for breath along the way. At the extreme there is anger and contempt; a view that governments and politicians are only in it for themselves; and an oddly infantilised mixture of belief that governments should be able to fix any problem and fatalism that nothing they do can ever work. The net result has been to increase the political space for a populism of denunciation, and to shrink the space for practical policy.
So what is to be done? What might a healthier relationship look like? Is it too late for therapy? Here I suggest some answers.
We need to start by disaggregating the question. The relationship between citizens and states is not singular. We relate to states in many different ways: as voters, campaigners, service users, or quiet beneficiaries of the state's capacity to provide peace or a stable economy. One dimensional views, whether romantic or cynical, can be misleading. Survey evidence confirms the public's differentiated feelings, with usually much more trust in those parts of the state which are close at hand and interacted with directly rather than observed indirectly through the media.
Each of these very different kinds of interaction then needs to be attended to as a relationship. The managerial theories that had so much influence in the last decades of the 20 century too often lost sight of this. An overly instrumental view of government squeezed out the space for affect. It was sometimes useful to think in the language of outputs and outcomes. But for the public it mattered how these were achieved too, just as in personal relationships we do not just want a spouse who will deliver a pay cheque or clean the house well.
A few years ago I argued in a series of papers that we needed to think in terms of a 'relational state'. That meant addressing what kinds of relationship citizens actually wanted, which turn out to be quite varied.
The romantics tended to assume that the ideal relationship had to much more active. An idealised view on the left and in some strands of liberalism wanted citizens to spend much of their time engaged in the uplifting work of governance. But in some cases people wanted the opposite: a more impersonal, frictionless and automated relationship with the state (paying taxes, applying for licences), that would leave them more time to get on with their lives.
In other cases, however, they did want the state to be much more human and engaged (eg with doctors, local police or politicians themselves). Indeed for many public services there is no avoiding the fact that most of the labour needed to produce better health, or better education, has to be done by citizens themselves rather than by service providers. This is even more true in an era when health services are dominated by chronic rather than acute diseases, and when ever-more education is needed to prepare for life and work.
Ethnography, conversation and deep listening can help in disentangling what is appropriate. These have become a prominent theme for the hundreds of public innovation labs that have grown up in national, regional and local governments around the world (Nesta helps link a network of them, providing newsletters, training and regular gatherings). Well known ones include Mindlab in Denmark, SITRA in Finland, the Seoul Innovation Bureau in Korea and the Laboratorio del Governo in Chile.
A high proportion of these labs emphasise citizen experience, as well as new uses of technology and data. And many aim to restore public trust.
Most of their projects focus on the practicalities of service delivery: jobs, education, taxation or transport. Reformers have found many ways to improve these everyday relationships. Websites provide ways for the public to communicate back to hospitals or police forces, and often it turns out that they want to thank or congratulate as well as complain. Officials have had to learn more conversational, and human, ways of responding. Budgets have been reshaped to give more control to the public over how funds relevant to them are spent. Personal accounts have been experimented with in many countries, particularly for social care, and are now being developed in new directions by Singapore and France in relation to training.
Citizens have also become much more active in helping states to see. Citizen generated data provides the inputs on everything from floods (Peta Jakarta in Indonesia) to corruption (Ipaidabribe in India), air quality (from China to Spain) to health.
Some of the labs are also interested in rethinking democracy itself in a more active, relational way. That does not mean perpetual referendums, a democracy of Facebook likes and binary choices. These are neither very effective at delivering good decisions or at increasing public trust. Instead platforms like DCENT, which Nesta developed with a group of European partners, aim to encourage more deliberation and discussion. They make it easier for citizens to track issues, to propose ideas, to comment, and in some cases to vote. These – in use now in cities including Barcelona, Madrid and Helsinki – allow democracy to tap the collective intelligence of the people, as well as harvesting a wider range of ideas.
These platforms work at multiple scales. They succeed most easily at the very local scale of the neighbourhood, dealing with issues of daily life, the management of public spaces or transport. They can also become part of the conversation in a city, as with Madrid Decide, closely tied into the role of the mayor. At national levels the tools seem to work better for more specialist topics, tapping into expertise that lies well beyond the political system, and allowing for detailed debates about options. They are rather less well suited to issues which are highly controversial, or founded very much on values and morality.
Seoul's mayor Won-Soon Park has probably been the world's most effective innovator on the citizen relationship, describing the citizens, not him as the mayor; introducing a vast range of new approaches to community involvement; pioneering more open approaches to data; reforming welfare provision and urban infrastructures. The ear outside city hall which allows people to propose and comment, and then shows the results inside the building, the mayor's dashboard of data which is also available online, and his over 2 million social media followers, all symbolise this more open, porous approach to governance.
Such richer styles of democracy are helped if governments and political parties can be more explicit about goals and means, and constraints, and more open about data and evidence. We at Nesta advocated, and helped establish some of what are now ten 'what works' centres in the UK providing different fields with syntheses of the state of knowledge – from policing and healthcare to schools and the economy. The simple idea is that anyone working in a field – such as schooling or eldercare – should have access to the best available knowledge in the world about what policies and practices are effective. That knowledge will often be uncertain or contested. But it is no longer acceptable for politicians or practitioners to be unaware of what is known. The aim is to provide deeper transparency about the knowledge guiding government, as a way of encouraging not just better results but also more trust.
This movement towards embedding evidence now has momentum at a global level – helped by formal structures within government such as South Africa or the Philippines, by parliamentary committees in countries such as Germany and Kenya. It can create discomfort for both politicians and the public – telling politicians that their cherished programmes do not work very well, and telling the public that the things they care about, like smaller class sizes or more police on the streets, may have little effects on improving outcomes. But greater visibility for evidence provides a foundation for a more adult relationship between states and citizens. It is still entirely reasonable for politicians or electorates to ignore the evidence – and of course they know that the experts have often been wrong in the past. But it is not acceptable for them to be ignorant of the evidence.
The media play a decisive role here. Some do all they can to fuel distrust, to undermine confidence in decision-makers and to promote appealing but impractical solutions. Others act more like mediators and guides, helping each better understand the others viewpoints. That sounds like a long shot. But it is what the best media already do, and the spread of fact checking sites, media committed to reasoned analysis, and intelligent blogging provides a counterweight to other powerful trends which dumb down debate.
For politicians the key, as in any relationship, is authenticity. Leaders need to explain what is and is not possible. Denouncing bureaucrats may win votes in the short term. But too much careless rhetoric corrupts political discourse, leaving inevitably unachievable expectations, cycles of illusion and disillusion. An adult conversation is a precondition for a restored relationship of trust with highly educated publics (the opposite may be true in other situations). There are few things more pathetic than a political leader who feels that they can only follow the public.
The various shifts described above – including a bigger role for evidence, data and citizen engagement - sometimes look to be at war with the alternative strands of 'post-truth' politics, and that strange hybrid of journalism and populist politics that sees little virtue in consistency or accuracy. But an optimistic view would see these as the natural direction of travel for more knowledgeable societies, and the only options we have if we want to believe that it is not, after all, too late for therapy.
CHAPTER 2
PUBLIC POLICY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The state as a platform
Nicolas Colin
For the fifth time since the end of the 18th century, our economy is undergoing the consequences of a technological revolution. As documented by Carlota Perez in her Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, every such revolution leads us through two consecutive phases: the installation phase, in which new technology driven markets are up for grabs as entrepreneurs and investors experiment with unproven business models; and the deployment phase, in which a new mode of growth, discovered through many trial and error efforts (and bursting bubbles),is finally imposed onto the economy, industry by industry, leading to a new 'techno-economic paradigm'.
The fifth revolutionis best understood through the history of personal computing. Thanks to the microprocessor, invented by Intel engineers in 1971, personal computing went beyond a narrow circle of hobbyists to finally hit mass markets. From 1991 onwards, the demilitarisation of the internet made it possible to connect all computing devices on the planet, giving birth to powerful networked applications ... and to the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. More recently, the financial crisis of 2008 has triggered a rapid acceleration in the transition from the old Fordist paradigm to the digital one. Technology companies are bursting into every industry to better serve digital-savvy consumers and force a redistribution of power between incumbents and new entrants.
As software is 'eating the world', many pillars of our economy are rendered obsolete. From copyright to taxation to labour law to taxi regulation, brutal wars are waged around legacy institutions that were designed for the 20 century Fordist economy, not for the emerging 21-century digital economy. Indeed before we take existing social and economic institutions for granted, we have to realise that most of them were set up less than a century ago to fit the characteristics of the booming Fordist economy – and that nothing suggests that those institutions will outlast the now failing paradigm that gave birth to them. Hence it is urgent to understand what the digital age is and to reconsider the shape and role of the state so as to make the digital economy more sustainable and inclusive.
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The first radical change concerns the essential resource that makes it possible for our economy to grow. The Fordist economy was born thanks to the abundance of cheap oil, which led to the birth of the car industry, the improvement of mass production through assembly lines, and the building of many institutions that explain the rise of the middle class, among them collective bargaining, labour law and the social state. Oil made urban sprawl possible, as it was needed to drive from the workplace to suburban areas and to perform critical functions such as heating in suburban homes. Oil also played a key role in many industries' supply chains and contributed a great deal to lengthening trade routes. We all realised the importance of abundant, cheap oil when it suddenly became scarce and expensive following the consecutive oil shocks in the 1970s: the economy immediately went off the rails, entering a long and painful period of economic stagnation and mass unemployment.
For a time, microelectronics was the digital equivalent of oil. Driven by the famous 'Moore's law', cheap microelectronic components made it possible to produce ever cheaper and smaller computing devices. But as Moore's law enters a phase of exhaustion, we can finally see that the digital economy's essential resource is not the computing devices provided to individuals so much as it is the individuals themselves. The reason why tech companies are so eager to serve us well, to lower their prices and to make our lives easier through ever more innovative products is because we provide them with more than money. As we use their applications on a daily basis, we provide these companies with data (searching on Google and Amazon), tangible assets (our cars on BlaBlaCar, our homes on Airbnb), even creativity and our propensity to share (on YouTube, Facebook and SnapChat). The reason why individuals have become so valuable for tech companies is that we, as a multitude, possess powers that every organisation must learn to harness in order to prosper in the digital age. Like oil in the past, this power is abundant and cheap, and the growth of the digital economy is based on the premise that it will stay this way.
Changes are happening in many dimensions – which is exactly what a transition between two techno-economic paradigms is about. Infrastructures change: we still need roads and bridges, but other infrastructures, such as cloud computing platforms, GPS satellites and the internet itself, have become more critical. Products change: fewer manufactured goods, more digital applications and entertaining experiences. Organisations change: not the rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies that used to thrive in the Fordist economy, but more agile and innovative stacked architectures that combine user communities, digital activities, and tangible assets within a constantly evolving business model. The managerial culture changes, too: instead of being obsessed by economies of scale, efficiency gains and standardisation, managers are now focused on providing an exceptional customised experience and generating increasing returns at scale.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "New Routes for Social Justice"
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