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?
Politics of the common good
On Tuesday 13th October, the American political philosopher, Michael Sandel, is delivering a speech here at the RSA on what he calls the ‘politics of the common good’. This follows the publication of his latest book, Justice: What’s Right To Do based on his famous course, Justice, he delivers at Harvard each year, and his recent Reith lectures.
Those who have read his work – in particular, his critique of Rawlsian liberalism in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice – will know that Sandel is one of the major political philosophers writing today. Commonly (and wrongly) considered a communitarian, I tended to always think of Sandel within a tradition of thinkers – in this I would include Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer – who emphasise the importance of collective action and identity as integral to the substance of the ‘good life’ without entirely negating the Kantian insistence on the individual right to self-determination.
But his new book, Justice (2009), which I read last night, struck me as a shift to a more clearly defined neo-Aristotelianism more akin to Alasdair MacIntrye’s brilliantly original position outlined in After Virtue. An interesting and easy read which concludes with a powerful (but certainly contentious) set of arguments in defence of what he calls the ‘politics of the common good’. He positions it as an alternative to the ‘moral neutrality’ of rights-based liberalism of Rawls (see Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism) inspired by Kant (see his Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals) and the utilitarian conception of justice as the ‘maximisation of utility and/or welfare’ inspired in different ways by Bentham and Mill.
What this ‘politics of the common good’ actually consist of is not fully developed in any coherent or systematic way. But Sandel does offer four ‘key themes’:
1. It requires ‘citizenship, sacrifice and service’. A politics of the common good aims to cultivate a ‘dedication to the common good’ and ‘civic virtue’ in opposition to what he calls ‘purely privatised notions of the good life’. For Sandel this requires the establishing of social practices and institutions that embody these principles, for example, citizenship education and some form of national service.
2. It requires recognising the ‘moral limits of markets’. It asks profound questions regarding the ‘rightness’ of applying the logic of the market (e.g. financially incentivising pro-social behaviour) to the public sphere on the basis that it contaminates the moral fabric of collective action embedded in public life.
3. It requires a focus on ‘equality, solidarity and civic virtue’. The politics of the common good advocates ‘redistributive justice’ on the basis that increasing levels of income inequality leads to an erosion of the public sphere and the interaction between citizens because those who can afford it ‘opt out’, which severely weakens social solidarity. On this basis, Sandel advocates a shared commitment to developing ‘shared public spaces’ (e.g. schools attractive to those from different socio-economic backgrounds, public health clinics etc).
4. It requires a ‘politics of moral engagement’. Rather than ignoring and/or avoiding the deliberation of conflicting substantive moral and ethical issues, Sandel calls for the generation of a more ‘robust public dialogue’ in which differences and similarities are openly explored. The objective is not agreement but openness and engagement.
But what does this all mean in practice and what public policy strategy is needed to cultivate the ‘politics of the common good’ Sandel is starting to develop? Let’s hope he gives us more detail when he visits the RSA in a couple of weeks time.
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.
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.
Future RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - The Wavewatcher's Companion October 5, 2010