‘People power means a public services lottery’…what a load of rubbish!
Filed under: Methods, Philosophy, Politics, Public Policy
A while ago I wrote a blog saying that the financial crisis might actually turn out to have rather positive unintended consequences: one being the need to re-think the nature of public services and in particular the relationship between the state and citizen in which people and communities have far greater power and influence over key decision-making and public services.
What we are talking about here is a shift from public involvement to civic action. This should be enshrined in newly negotiated local contracts between citizen and state. But we should go further and also establish binding practices of solidarity and shared commitment amongst citizens and between citizens and their communities. This could take the form of ‘pledgebanks’ (or some other pledge scheme) in which people are encouraged to come up with solutions to local problems and publicly commit to behaviour change. This can work across a broad spectrum of public policy issues from climate change to anti-social behaviour, public health to the educational attainment of young people.
Some are sceptical, I know, and for good reason. Elites tend to hoard power and individuals are often more than content to redistribute their responsibility as citizens (and therefore influence) to others whether that is other people, public services or government agencies. But the academic and exploratory work on declarative norms though public agreement is strong enough to suggest that it might be one way of facilitating the explosion of community programmes and civic action needed to build more resilient and dynamic civic spaces.
This all comes back to the collective imagination of people. With this in mind, the Guardian Public Services Summit has just taken place. One of the key findings was the emphasis on turning the current squeeze on public services into a driver of innovation and decentralisation (or localism).
As part of the reporting of this, the editor of Society Guardian, Alison Benjamin, has written an interesting piece this week making the argument that ‘people power necessarily means a public services lottery’. She concludes by outlining a preference for innovation through new technology and efficiency as demonstrated through Total Place initiatives. All important things but utterly ineffective as a strategy (on their own) for developing the types of public services local communities need today – responsive to individual need but capable of generating civic commitment and attachment by offering a genuine sense of ownership of public services.
This argument Alison Benjamin puts forward is based on two legitimate concerns. The first is to do with outcomes. The fear is that a ‘new settlement’ between state and citizen based on ‘people power’ would disadvantage the most vulnerable in society (i.e. most in need of support and public services). This tends to be the case with our current ‘consumerist’ model of public services which disproportionately benefits and reflects the views of the most vocal and noisy. The second is to do with intentions. People power might be used to justify a more traditional Thatcherite agenda of cutting back the state (and therefore financial support) under the pretence of empowerment.
The classic Tory line of replacing the ‘state with society’ will nearly always disadvantage the most vulnerable in society. There are many reasons for this. The challenges people face will always be more complicated and require more extensive support and time than the pooled resources of ‘charity’ can ever hope to meet. It also wrongly assumes an ‘equality of capability’. People are not equal in their capacity to realise their capabilities.
Despite what our reactionary populist press splash across their front pages on a daily basis, all people have capability in some form of another that is valuable to society. But it is plainly wrong to argue that all capabilities are recognised, valued equally (if valued at all) or cultivated in anything like an equal way. Society tends to operate according to what Bourdieu calls the ‘logic of exclusion’. All systems of social norms do. But the goal is not to make everything equal. The goal is, however, to ensure the different capabilities of people are cultivated and enabled to flourish.
Precisely because of this the Weberian or managerial state (or something closely resembling this) is clearly not a viable alternative! Precisely because it tends to be disempowering, inefficient and driven by the kind of top-down logic that cripples the creativity and invention of people to make a difference.
The problem with Alison Benjamin’s piece is the conclusion. People power is not an argument about the size of the state. It’s an argument about the nature of it. To what extent does it reflect the interests and hopes of the collective good – this is the real question. The argument outlined in the Guardian article is predicated on an impoverished vision of what public services and a ‘new settlement’ between the state and citizen might and should look like.
The argument remains trapped within a hyper-individualised account of public services as an ‘open’ market place with people consuming public goods as if they were magazines or chocolates on a supermarket shelf.
Giving people more control does means localised differences. It does not mean a public services lottery because the difference is not likely to be quality of service. What links local differences is the right and responsibility of local people and communities to shape the direction and substance of their place. This is ultimately the most effective way of delivering high quality public services which meet the needs of the common good.
Developing a new generation of public services owned by local people and communities who ultimately desire the responsibility, investment and reward that comes with this is the way forward. This will require a big shift in the mind-set of public services and local people. Many talk of co-production between service users and providers, which is something I fully support.
But something more fundamental is needed. So we better start now, and with the gusto and vision for what that future should be rather than what it is based on current patterns of behaviour and thinking! What a pious preacher… Let me know what you think!
And if you could just sign here…
As a first blog I thought I’d begin by musing over the recent announcement by CLG that they’ll be starting to encourage councils and local authorities to sign community contracts with local residents (Please note the above joyful contract-signing scene from the early 90s as a visual reference – Mark Mardell reporting for the BBC far left). The idea being that these contracts (also known as neighbourhood agreements and local charters) will contain clear standards of service expected from the council but also a commitment from residents about the role that they’ll play in achieving this; a kind of social compact between the two. And according to Mr Denham all’s gone to plan in his pilot schemes across the land. For instance, residents on an estate in Sunderland developed a ‘Clean Green Safer’ contract between themselves and the local housing landlord who run the estate. The result was an apparent drop in all complaints relating to anti-social behaviour and a marked improvement in the local environment. Cue raised eyebrows.
After reading much of the IPEG literature on community engagement exercises – IPEG were also the ones who were contracted to conduct the evaluation for the community contracts pilots – it’s clear that the use of contracts is very much a popular tool among others in the emerging scene of behaviour change techniques. Another example that comes to mind is the ‘Home-school agreements’ between students, parents and schools laid out in the PMSU’S 2004 report on personal responsibility and changing behaviour.
The premise underlying the idea of these contracts comes from a number of interesting theories relating to individual, interpersonal and community-wide behaviour. Take, for instance, David Halpern’s view that when there happens to be a clash between an individual’s actions and their values, people often resolve the discrepancy by changing their attitudes rather than their behaviour. By agreeing on paper to a set of behaviours that correlate with ‘pro-social’ values, an individual is far less likely to break them – no one wants to look like a quitter. Another strand of thinking relates to that of self-efficacy and consequential reasoning: according to BrookLyndhurst there is a greater likelihood of someone doing something if they believe their action will have a notable impact. In the case of community contracts, having a formalised process in establishing goals with regular feedback and praise allows the resident to work towards something with a tangible, motivating reward. These are only a small fragment of a wider theoretical rationale set out to justify these contracts.
I can’t help but thinking, however, that there are quite a few theoretical as well as practical caveats to these contracts than is obvious on first inspection. One of the first problems that spring to mind is something often called a ‘moral-reasoning dilemma’. Coercion or reward for adhering to certain practices may actually ‘crowd-out’ and undermine other-regarding and altruistic behaviour that an individual was happy to participate in anyway; having an agreement may be seen as cheapening those innate values. Along with this you have the obvious problem of having to defend the contract from those who see it as another ‘nanny-state’ interference. The last thing you want to do is alienate people. A third problem regards trust. Although these contracts are designed to build trust between members of the community and service providers, are they not simply indicative of a lack of trust; are we negating trust to the back-burner in favour of something that is perceived to deliver immediate results in community participation? Trust, a key ingredient of social capital and therefore community engagement, is something that takes much longer to cultivate; community contracts, however they are worded, may in certain cases actually damage a community’s tacit level of trust and sense of belonging.
If councils across the UK do decide to jump on the community contract bandwagon, there needs to be a serious and careful consideration of how they implement them. One interesting project I came across a couple of months back was the work of artist Katya Sander. In Berlin during 2005 thousands of badges were distributed throughout the city bearing the tagline “Wenn du die liest, gebe ich es dir (um auch zu tragen)” – “If you read this I’ll give this to you (but then you must wear it too)”. By wearing the badge, and more importantly by asking for it, you bound yourself into a sort of social contract that was entirely transparent. As soon as someone asks for the badge they have then also agreed to bear the contract. The key point is that individuals themselves instigate the contract and whatever that entails rather than it being constructed by a higher source. Interesting stuff, eh?
Localism is more than a set of principles
In the last couple of years all the major political parties in the UK have been falling over themselves to talk up their radical credentials. Much of this is filtered through the ‘localism debate’ and ideas surrounding the decentralisation of power and influence away from Whitehall into the hands of frontline staff and local people. As my old boss, Ben Page, said at a recent local government event I attended, “we are all localists now”.
Research being undertaken by the Citizen Power team at the RSA on ‘civic behaviour’ shows this to be a good thing if by localism we mean something like a strategy that aims to radically devolve power and resources away from central control. It is a commitment to what the great American philosopher Stanley Cavell has described as the ‘creative propensity of people to shape the substance and form of their lives’.
But localism is only radical if it becomes more than a set of principles. It needs to be an ethics of civic action. In this sense, localism embodies a radical democratic ethos that assumes significant conditional rights and responsibilities on the part of people to actively shape their lived environment. The idea of people being rewarded for community acts through a ‘community credit scheme’ or reductions to council tax are things we should actively explore as a mechanism for opening up civic action.
Localism seems to me a pragmatic problem-solving approach to some of the most acute public policy problems we are dealing with today. Generating civic behaviour in areas of low social capital, tackling entrenched anti-social behaviour in areas of multiple social deprivations and helping long-term drug addicts to overcome their dependency on Class A drugs are good examples of problems that resist simple rule-driven solutions and which require citizens to be actively engaged if interventions are to work. They need a localised approach to capacity building, citizen-led participation and long-term strategic thinking that cannot be resolved through traditional forms of behaviour change and short-termist thinking.
Our research at the RSA also shows that decision-making aimed at the local, neighbourhood level is the most effective way of building trust between citizens and citizens and public services, and strengthening social capital and civic commitment. It is the level at which place and identity are most likely to be forged. We did not need the MP expenses scandal to recognise the importance of rebuilding trust and legitimacy. General Election turn out has declined by roughly a quarter since 1950 and political party membership has been in sharp decline for the past four decades. According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, politicians have now replaced journalists as the profession least-trusted by the British public. In fact, 82% do not trust them to tell the truth – the highest negative proportion seen for politicians in the 26-year history of that particular survey.
Both are symptoms of a decline in political legitimacy. It is not, however, a symptom of apathy. Political and civic apathy is a powerful myth that serves to legitimate the rotting infrastructure of representative democracy in the UK. Indeed, the numbers of people – particularly the young – involving themselves in pressure groups and non party political campaigns is rapidly increasing. And interestingly, new research from the US shows that levels of volunteering are thriving despite rising unemployment and economic instability.
We do not need to have read Foucault or Nietzsche or have run deliberative forums to know that consensus so often contains the perverse logic of preventing precisely what it is generated to achieve. My concern is that the political consensus regarding localism is fragile and ephemeral. The extent to which the parties are prepared to redistribute power is a test of their political strength (it is in fact weaker to hoard power). It is also a real dividing line on which to assess the commitment of the political parties and the political establishment more broadly to the virtues of localism and the ideal of citizen power it assumes. To my knowledge, none of the political parties are seriously entertaining the concept of local public services generating and determining their own revenue even within a broad framework of minimum national standards. Without this all talk of localism is superficial and deeply questionable.
Neither is localism necessarily an argument for a minimal or small state as we always hear. It is not an argument for more or less government. Small government did not create Sure Start or introduce the National Minimum Wage. It is an argument for more effective government, which means two things. First, re-thinking the very structure of the state and the relationship between central and local government in which the state acts as a support mechanism for municipalities not their overlord. Second, that public policy problems are addressed in their specificity and complexity at the level at which problem-solving is most likely to work.
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.
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