Will we (ever) get the future we deserve?
This was originally written in the days of light (2012): pre-Brexit, pre-Corbyn, pre-Trump... I considered updating it but, whilst some of it now feels stupendously naive, some of it is weirdly prescient and some of it still feels hideously accurate, so I thought I'd leave it exactly as I found it.
Sometime in the late 1990s, when ‘social inclusion’ was the buzz
phrase of the hour, I found myself attending a ‘community conference’, held in
a marquee in the grounds of a local church.
The conference had been organised by community activists to bring ‘professionals’
– that is, regeneration specialists, people from the council, consultants, academics,
people with money from central government and so on – together with ‘real
people’ - that is, people who actually
lived and worked in the neighbourhood. The
idea of the conference was to have a conversation about what the ‘real’ people
wanted from a recently awarded regeneration grant (quite a big one), and how
the ‘professionals’ could help them get it.
Like any professionals, of course, the professionals at this
particular conference (including me) arrived with their professional baggage:
their methodologies and their jargon and their assumptions. Key amongst these assumptions was an
important tenet of the ‘social inclusion’ agenda: namely, that ‘local people’
needed to be enabled and encouraged to participate in local democratic
processes so that their views and wishes could be properly reflected in what
local service providers actually did.
Such a notion, from our progressive professional point of view, made
huge sense: unless ‘we’ knew what people wanted, how could we provide it?
For a few hours we navigated the workshops and breakout groups that
are the standard fare of such events, listening as hard as we could and gently
guiding delegates towards the notion that if they ‘got involved’ – if they
turned up to meetings, if they formed neighbourhood associations, if they
expressed their opinions - then the regeneration funding that was available
would be more likely to be spent in ways that would help improve their
neighbourhood and, hopefully, their lives.
Our bubble was burst shortly before lunch when, in the plenary session
at the end of the morning, an exasperated woman stood up and said: Why should I
have to do all this? The people of
Moseley [a slightly more prosperous, adjoining neighbourhood] don’t have to do
all this. They have clean streets and
nice schools and their rubbish gets collected; that’s all I want. Why should I – why should we, just because
we’re poor – have to do anything different from them? I just want the same as everyone else.
******
This question remains as valid today as it did then;
and it applies even more so when we consider what sort of political mechanisms
we might need in order to deliver genuine sustainability.
In responding to the question, a useful starting point is to draw a
distinction between ‘representative democracy’, on the one hand, and
‘participative democracy’ or ‘deliberative democracy’ on the other. Representative democracy is the one we’ve
got, and the one we’ve got used to: we ‘the people’ are allowed to cast our
vote from time to time, by which means we appoint someone – an MP, a Mayor – to
represent us. At the time of the vote,
candidates make a variety of promises or pledges about what they’re going to do
or how they’re going to behave whilst they are representing us, and if in a few
years’ time we are happy we can vote for them again, and if not we can vote for
somebody else.
This is actually quite an efficient way of doing things; rather than
everybody having to be involved in every decision (which would be ridiculously
time-consuming and boring) we the people effectively appoint some others to do
this hard work for us. I don’t
particularly want – for example – to spend hours and hours trying to understand
what the best way of collecting and processing my household waste is, or how to
ensure that the air I and my children breathe is clean enough: I want simply to
know that someone is dealing with it for me; and that if I think they’re doing
a crap job, I can vote to get rid of them.
Such a system is also reasonably ‘open’ in that, if you choose, you
can get involved: you can attend council meetings, you can write letters, you
can join a political party and seek to shape the policies that the party has
from the inside, or you can join pressure groups or special interest groups
that seek to influence policies from the outside. You can even vote if you want to.
In many respects, this system served us well for decades, perhaps even
centuries; but, in both London and the UK more generally, it seems to be
working less and less well. Membership
of political parties has been in precipitous decline for many years; turnout in
elections (including, notably, the recent comic-book Mayoral election) is
sometimes alarmingly low; and trust in politicians and the political process –
never high at the best of times – is in perilously short supply.
Perhaps, in one sense, this doesn’t matter. The system is, after all, ‘open’ – you can
get involved if you want to, nothing’s stopping you – so low participation and
engagement merely signals passive assent.
If and when ‘we the people’ have had enough, we can simply assert
ourselves.
There are three big reasons for disputing this benign view.
The first might be termed ‘incrementalism’. This is the process by which small steps,
each individually insignificant, progressively build into something bigger, and
one day we wake up and find that the open-ness we had presumed is no longer
there. A process of co-evolution occurs,
whereby each part of the system progressively adapts to changes elsewhere in
the system, and slow-moving vicious circles develop: as fewer people join
political parties, for example, because they have a reduced sense of belonging
to the social class that that party represents, or because they have less
belief that participation in a political party can help them achieve their
aims, those parties inevitably become less representative of those people, thus
fuelling the process whereby people feel disconnected. After a time – and that time would appear to
have arrived for large numbers of Londoners – there seems little point in
‘engaging’: there may be no formal barriers to my participation, but I see
little evidence of it being worth my while, so what’s the point?
The second reason for anxiety flows directly from this, and is the
fact that the decline in more general engagement or participation leaves an
ever smaller, and more idiosyncratic, rump of those that are engaged. The kinds of
people who still join political
parties, who seek to become councillors, who try to become MPs and so forth,
are an ever weirder subset of the general population. With each passing year they become less and
less like ‘the rest of us’.
And the problem with that is two-fold: on the one hand, they become
less and less likely to really ‘get’ what life is like for everyone else, and
are therefore less likely to make decisions that truly represent our interests;
and, on the other, they become more and more open to influence by the
professionalised machinery around them.
If you’d spent all your adult life surrounded by other political
activists, by researchers and think tanks, by journalists and smooth-talking
lobbyists representing powerful corporate interests, you too might end up behaving
strangely in City Hall or the House of Commons.
Which gets us to the third reason for disputing the benign view, and the
one which speaks most directly to the challenges of sustainability.
The challenges we face going forward – of climate change, of excessive
consumption, of material depletion and habitat destruction – are sometimes
called ‘wicked’
problems: they are highly complex, and there are no clear answers. Most especially, the solutions will involve
everyone. These are not the kind of
problems that a suitably empowered government can just ‘fix’. No top down policy, from either City Hall or
Westminster, is going to be able to sort these kinds of problems out. Rather, everyone is implicated: government
will have to change, business will have to change, individual lifestyles will
have to change.
And for that sort of thing to happen, all the various ‘stakeholders’
are going to need to discuss, to negotiate, to reflect on the options, to
between them work out what’s possible and what’s not, what’s fair and what’s
unfair.
At the moment, we as a society seem incapable
of having such a discussion. The
shrill venality of the mainstream media no doubt contributes to the problem,
but the lack of a mature democratic process in which the citizenry can hear,
consider, reflect and choose is in large part the responsibility of the
political classes themselves. Yes, we
know that front of mind and front of door issues loom large: we can’t ignore
the woman who wants the streets cleaned and the rubbish collected and the
police to come by her house often enough to make her feel safe.
But we are entitled, too, to a proper grown up discussion about what
might really happen if the earth’s temperature increases by 2oC or 3oC
in the next thirty years, and how we might actually wean ourselves off our
consumerist addictions, or what kind of money and jobs we can really expect to
have in an economy that is perpetually changing and evolving but which isn’t
necessarily always getting ‘bigger’.
Which leads us towards the notions of ‘participative democracy’ and
‘deliberative democracy’. Though
distinct approaches – the former stresses techniques for ensuring that citizens
are actively and directly engaged in political decision-making processes; the
latter stresses that inclusive processes of debate and discussion should be an
obligatory part of the decision-making process – both challenge the notion that
we the people should simply hand over responsibility to our representatives. Deliberative
democracy, in particular, seems well suited for the ‘wicked problems’ we
increasingly face; and extensive academic and practical testing consistently
demonstrates two powerful things:
- firstly, that the general public are more than capable of engaging with the complications, ambiguities and trade-offs of complex (political) problems, given enough time, space and support
- and, secondly, that the initial or ‘knee jerk’ reactions that can come from focus groups and surveys (techniques extensively used by politicians and political parties to test their policy ideas, given that they can no longer rely on their membership as ‘representative’) can often bear little relationship to the kinds of views people formulate and express once they’ve been given the opportunity to really deliberate over something
It is true that deliberative processes are time-consuming, and can be expensive,
and can often reveal awkward or uncomfortable truths; but the opportunities provided
by modern communications technology are beginning to transform the
practicalities of the approach. The
concept of ‘liquid democracy’, for
example, has emerged from within the ICT world, but offers far broader
applications and has already had a significant effect on mainstream politics in
Germany. By combining elements of deliberation and
representation, it seems to offer a hybrid form of democracy that may well be
suited to the twenty first century.
If it is indeed the case that the challenges of sustainability – of
climate change, of social justice, of individual and collective well-being, of
physical and psychological health – are ‘wicked problems’; and if meeting these
challenges requires society as a whole to work out and through the solutions;
then it seems hard to believe that the traditional model, in which we appoint
some representatives on a short term basis, who compete for our vote by
shouting about the kinds of short term issues that they think will work well as
media sound-bites, is fit for purpose.
We need something smarter, more inclusive, more grown up, more
thoughtful.
What if, rather than waiting for the same old faces to present us, in
four years’ time, with their best guess package of what they think we want, we Londoners,
instead, inverted the entire process.
What if we used the internet to have a really thorough deliberative discussion
about what kind of London we want, what kind of lifestyles we want to lead, and
we use that deliberative discussion to draw up a list of important issues, and
a set of possible solutions, and a sort of manifesto of policy options? And we
could then vote on the policies, and invite people to deliver them.
It would probably scare the politicians. But would it be more sustainable? And would the lady in the marquee be any
happier?
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