Meeting with fellows
Filed under: Methods, Politics, Public Policy, RSA Fellowship
On Wednesday 7th October, as part of the 255th AGM and first meeting of the Fellowship Council, RSA Projects are discussing their work and findings with RSA fellows. Between 1.30 and 2.20 pm I am running a session on the work I am undertaking and setting up at the RSA, with a specific focus on our work in Peterborough.
The idea is for the session to be an informal and participative discussion. It offers me the opportunity to introduce myself and my work. But more importantly the objective is to use the session to open up a long-term dialogue with fellows and to encourage their participation from the beginning.
How to develop democratic engagement and deepen civic behaviour are complex issues that require innovative and practically-grounded thinking and strategy. The session will be of little value to passive observers. I want it to be an active and energised discussion with everyone involved challenged (and challenging one another) to outline ideas and solutions for addressing important issues such as these.
Having been at the RSA a very short time, it is already lucidly clear that I am working for a fantastic organisation - an organisation that has boundless potential. Part of this potential is inherent within the relationship between RSA Projects and our fellowship. We need to find a better way of harnessing and utilising this potential. These sessions are a good starting point.
Project Peterborough…exciting times!
Filed under: Methods, Philosophy, Politics, Public Policy
Its time to blog about a brilliant RSA project! Central to my work at the RSA and the Citizen Power programme is the ‘Citizens of the Future’ project – a hugely ambitious and exciting project. The project is based on a partnership between the RSA, Peterborough City Council (PCC), Opportunity Peterborough (OP) and Arts Council East (ACE). This will form the basis of a long term collaboration with the aim of fundamentally restructuring the social ecology of civic behaviour in the city and with it the relationship between local public services and citizens in Peterborough.
To give the project focus, we are looking at the complex relationships of place, identity and collective action through a specific focus on ecological sustainability and what we are calling ‘sustainable citizenship’ that links sustainable, ecologically friendly behaviour to the wider project of increasing levels of pro-social, civic behaviour at a local level that harnesses the innovation of the arts.
I am now on my way back from a ‘Citizens of the Future’ project meeting with Peterborough City Council, Opportunity Peterborough and Arts Council East, which I attended with our chief (Matthew Taylor) and Michaela Crimmin (RSA Head of Arts). It was an excellent meeting – how refreshing it is to collaborate with three organisations (PCC, OP and AC) genuinely committed to substantial social change, open to real innovation and who are willing to put their money where their mouth is! Yes – all at the same time…
As part of this project, we are currently undertaking a rigorous scoping phase at the RSA that consists of (a) a comprehensive literature review (b) deliberative discussion groups with local people and community groups and (c) in depth interviews with a diverse range of local public service leaders in Peterborough. Today we presented some interim feedback and findings on the project so far. Here are some of the key ideas and principles that are emerging:
1. We cannot and should not create a distinction between a place and the people who inhabit it. They form what we might call a ‘Hegelian totality’ in which each part is mutually dependent but quasi-autonomous. Places are the people who fill it with meaning. The collective identity of place whether that be a city, town or neighbourhood is defined by the behaviour and self-identity of its people. By definition, the identity of a place cannot be imposed upon or distinguished from the people.
2. The starting point is the cultivation of civically minded people with the necessary capabilities for living a civic life of co-operation. For this to happen, public services should be focusing less on branding and short-termist communications exercises and more on building the social ecology of conditions – institutional, cultural and socio-economic – most conducive to pro-social, civically minded behaviour.
3. To do this, public services need to shift their focus from “place shaping” to “person shaping”. The identity of place is dependent on active citizens – that is, people who not only identify with what a place represents and symbolises but who reflect that identity in their actual behaviour.
4. This innovative emphasis on what Matthew Taylor calls “Person shaping” demands a new approach to policymaking – listen to the excellent Radio 4 programme, Persuading Us to Be Good, presented by Daniel Finkelstein and featuring MT. Cultivating pro-social, civic behaviour is a complex process, thought one that is a realistic goal for all ambitious public services. But it requires strong and visionary leadership (as demonstrated by Peterborough City Council) and a ‘gestalt shift’ in public policy with long-term strategic policymaking the norm not the exception to the rule.
5. Local public services need to be making far better use of the powerful insights into human decision-making being generated in social psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience. As part of the ‘Citizens of the Future’ collaboration is the plan to undertake a ground-breaking RSA-led longitudinal study of the impact of behaviour change on sustainable consumption, civic action and public solidarity.
6. If the ‘social-aspiration gap’ is going to be closed, we need an essentially different relationship between local public services and local people; one in which people are not ‘service users’ but ‘active agents’ (citizens) shaping the direction and identity of their lived environment, and local public services ‘co-producers’ and partners and not ‘service providers’. Under such conditions the very concepts of ‘service provider’ and ‘service user’ become redundant, replaced by the concept of ‘citizen-led organisations’ aimed at the common good.
7. In order for this to work, the relationship between public service and citizen needs to be rebuilt a local level. To build a connection with citizens, local public services first need to establish a collective identity people want to buy into. This means directing action and policymaking at the local, neighbourhood level. This is the level most conducive for the development of ‘meaning’ and collective identity.
8. For a place to have an identity that is durable it needs to have an identity that is self-generated from the bottom up. People are far more likely to identify with something they helped develop. Indeed, attempts to impose an ‘identity of place’ will only lead to failure and an inefficient allocation of resources.
9. Urban regeneration can have a key role in developing a specific sense of place as has been seen recently in places such as Manchester and Castleford. But all such projects should have collective targets and goals. A collective aspiration to achieve goals at a neighbourhood or community level instils within people a sense of purpose that binds people together. We have found, for example, that pledges, community contracts and other forms of collective agreement in which people openly agree to a course of action can be extremely effective in terms of strengthening community cohesion and influencing civic behaviour.
This is just the start. The ‘Citizens of the Future’ collaboration offers the RSA a real opportunity to turn innovative ideas into social action, shaping the very substance of a city with great potential and a big future.
Engage effectively or not at all
Over the last decade, public consultations have become an integral part of public policy in the UK. With the emergence of the ‘empowerment agenda’ the pressure on local public services to involve local citizens and communities in their decision-making has continued to increase. Engaging and involving citizens in local decision-making is no longer the preserve of progressive, forward-thinking government departments or public services but a statutory duty.
Situating the voices of citizen at the heart of public policy decision-making is something all public consultation and engagement should aspire to. When designed and delivered effectively, public engagement should harness and galvanise the potential and confidence of citizens and communities to solve their own problems.
Public engagement should deliver both de facto power (real power to influence change) and subjective power (increased sense of personal efficacy) – see my report Activating Empowerment (2009). This is rooted in the real demands of citizens themselves who want greater capacity to influence and actively shape their lived environment. The latest Citizenship Survey data shows that 79% of citizens consider it very important to have real influence over local decisions. The problem is that this civic energy (i.e. the desire for influence) is not been being harnessed. Indeed, the new Place Survey data shows only 22% of citizens feel they can actually influence decisions affecting the UK.
This cannot be differentiated from the way most public services tend to view public engagement and consultation. Rather than viewing it as a process of exchange in which power is redistributed from public services to citizen, public engagement is all to often viewed as an end in itself. When public engagement processes fail to ‘reward’ engagement with real decision-making capacity (a) the public consultation process is diminished (b) it deepens public cynicism and (c) devalues public engagement methods.
For the braver public services committed to redistributing power and influence to citizens the challenge is how to tackle its unequal distribution. David Halpern – Director of Research at the Institute for Government – makes this point very clearly:
“It is said that ‘liberty is power cut into small pieces’, but the pieces are by no means evenly distributed in the Britain of today, and on some measures have become less so. While levels of voting may have fallen modestly, levels of alternative political engagement have risen dramatically. These activities are strongly skewed to the more affluent and more educated”
In the UK today, one in five people have absolutely no engagement in political life at all and this minority is overwhelmingly dominated by citizens most lacking in financial and social capital. As Halpern rightly argues, the signs are that this gap is only going to increase in the future. This threatens the representative of our democratic institutions and points to the failure of public consultations (as they stand and are often carried out) to provide more than a talk-shop for citizens who already recognise and actualise their capacity to influence change.
“easyCouncils”…not for me thank you!
The Tory emphasis on developing ‘progressive conservatism’ marks an attempt to move away from the ideology of homo economicus and the neo-liberal economics and philosophy of Hayek and Friedman that gripped Thatcher. The commitment of the Conservative Party to developing a socially and economically progressive policy agenda without recourse to its neo-liberal default position of the last two decades will be a fundamental test of just how progressive and radical Cameron’s conservatism is. It will also be a big test of his leadership and power to keep onside and tame Daniel Hannon and other maverick ultra-Thatcherites. As Matthew notes in his blog yesterday:
“Under the pressure of office it would be all too easy for a Conservative administration to abandon its social ambitions and enthusiasm for localism and civic action, instead reverting to a Thatcherite ‘strong state, free market’ model of modernisation.”
Just how committed are the Tories to a new politics and philosophy of civic and democratic renewal? Robert Booth’s article in last Fridays Guardian may shed some important light on this question. The article documents the plans of Barnet Council (a leading Conservative run council) to model their public service provision on the business model of budget airlines like Ryanair and easyJet. Booth writes:
“The practices of the no-frills airlines, who charge customers extra for services which were once considered part of the standard fare, are being emulated by the London borough of Barnet as it embarks on “a relentless drive for efficiency”. A spokesman for the council has unofficially dubbed the project “easyCouncil”
The “easyCouncil” concept captures what Habermas describes in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action (1984) as the “colonisation of the life-world” – the process by which the logic of the financial systems (e.g. instrumental means-end rationality) become embedded in the public sphere (“life-world), deforming it of its essential character (collective action and shared responsibility). Indeed, the concept of the “easyCouncil” embodies the absolute antithesis of a progressive, forward-looking politics and local government policy agenda – radically at odds with the local government Green Paper the Tories put out last year.
Is this what future Government policy will look like in 2010-2015? For the sake of everyone, I hope not. And the real question remains: just who are the Conservative Party and what can we expect from them as our next government? With a General Election just eight or nine months away, the party most likely to be elected (increasingly I think by a healthy majority) is one that appears to me profoundly at odds with itself.
Taking the long view
For Deleuze, Nietzsche was the great anti-Hegelian. And while profoundly at odds with one another in rather fundamental ways, both Nietzsche and Hegel would nevertheless have agreed that truth is often hidden within its apparent opposite. This principle has important implications for how we understand social processes and events, and also how we evaluate them. Both Nietzsche and Hegel teach us to take what Max Weber called “the long view” (see his great essay, “Science as a Vocation”) in which we assess events in relation to their long-term impact on culture and society.
The global economic crisis may provide us with an interesting case study. With unemployment figures moving beyond the 2.4 million mark and the IFS predicting real term cuts to public spending of 7 per cent from 2011, it is difficult to shape a positive story out the global recession. But from very different perspectives, recent speakers at RSA, the economist Nassim Taleb and the communitarian philosopher Amitai Etzioni both warn against viewing the near collapse of the global financial system as an unambiguous disaster. For both, the economic crisis may have profound and positive long-term benefits.
For Taleb, the long-term benefit might turn out to be a fundamental change in economic policy built around growing recognition that a robust global financial system needs to produce frequent crashes – but with citizens immune to them – rather than infrequent total collapses that cannot be coped with. And for Etzioni, the current economic crisis holds the possibility for a “radical transformation” in the cultural value-systems of the UK and US with “communitarian and transcendental pursuits” replacing consumerism as our dominant modes of living and evaluating ‘success’.
While certainly attracted to aspects of Etzioni’s work and thinking, it is not my intention to validate the substance of his views; less still Taleb’s. But what I do like is the focus of both on cultivating something like a ‘social imaginary’ (see Charles Taylor’s essay) in which we turn the economic crisis into a condition of possibility for making positive and fundamental changes to society and the lives we lead.
It is improbable but not impossible that the consensus in fifty years time will be to interpret the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a kind of political ground-zero in at least two important respects: First, the precise point in which the emergence of a new progressive politics and social philosophy of the common good became possible. Second, the precise moment neo-liberal orthodoxy in public and economic policy self-destructed and unmasked itself as a deranged mythology driven not by the ‘rationality’ of the market but the ideology of homo economicus and its impoverished conception of people not as citizens but consumers (see the last of Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures this year).
First blog
My first blog!
Welcome to my first blog. I’m the new Director of Public Participation at the RSA. I’m setting up the Citizen Power project to look at ways in which citizens can influence public policy and the role of public participation in contributing to progressive social change and civic renewal.
I’m now entering my third working week at the RSA having moved from Ipsos MORI where I led their work and thinking on citizen empowerment and deliberative research methods. I loved my time there but the opportunity to come and work at the RSA was an opportunity that had to be taken with both hands!
I’m really excited about the idea of using the blog. It’s a real opportunity to experiment with ideas, to reflect upon and communicate the work of the Citizen Power project and engage with people on issues I feel passionately about. The problem is being able to sit still in one place long enough to write it! I was just thinking about something the great German critic, Walter Benjamin, once said. He claimed that you can measure the intensity of a thought by its capacity to leave you motionless. My experience is the opposite. The more intense and exhilarating the idea the more restless I become. Hence my default position is to generally write very quickly!
While my reflections will no doubt be idiosyncratic at times, the blog will cover some key areas of interest to me and the Citizen Power project. In no particular order these will be issues of public policy, philosophy, politics, research methods and how they relate to my work and the RSA. What is the real aim of the blog? Badiou and Ranciere both argue in recent books that the elevation of ‘consensus’ to an almost transcendental category beyond criticism captures an anti-political current in both contemporary political philosophy and mainstream political discourse and policy. According to this definition, this blog is unashamedly ‘political’ (but NOT party political) in so far as I want to actively encourage productive disagreement but with the proviso that an alternative way of seeing or doing things is put forward. If only our political parties adhered to this mantra…
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Future RSA Events- The Selfish Society April 22, 2010
- The Big Short April 19, 2010
- The Tyranny of Guilt April 19, 2010
- Red Tory: The future of progressive Conservatism? April 1, 2010
- Doing Good is Good Business? From rhetoric to reality March 30, 2010