Of all of the essays from Rebooting America that captured my attention, it was probably the one from Beth Simone Noveck, about completely envisioning a new style of citizen participation in governance and decision-making, that most captured my imagination.
She starts with an acknowledgement of a lament close to my own heart, that deliberative conversations seldom connect to action, which can mean that they’re even worse than non-participation, because they give people the feeling of having a stake, when they really do not. She calls them “one-off affairs, not tied to governmental practices of agenda-setting, policy-drafting and decision-making.”
And she’s right.
But we know that officials don’t need to be sole decision makers, that, in fact, we’d come up with better policy solutions, and better paths to implementation, if more voices were included, in meaningful ways, in that process.
And that’s when Noveck’s essay gets really interesting. She lays out a practical framework for micro-participation, of sorts, that would allow the public, writ large, real involvement in government decisions, in such a commonsense, pragmatic way that it’s really hard to find much objection.
Don’t think about other experiences in “participation” that you may have had–she’s not thinking roundtables with colored dots, or advisory councils galore. She points out that we don’t need large numbers of people to work on issues and that, in reality, relatively few government officials make many very important policy decisions today. And she’s not talking about some high-tech public comment or voting system on every piece of legislation, either. At least to begin, she focuses on regulatory action as policymaking, and envisions a mechanism of crowdsourcing in which a few dozen experts and enthusiasts would handle these regulatory issues by providing their consultation in the ‘action stage’ of governing.
There’s certainly no reason to think that these lay experts couldn’t craft regulatory policy as well as the current bureaucrats do, and involving the 5 or 10 or 100 people who know best, a percentage of whom will want to contribute to solving community problems, would not be an insurmountable technical or logistical challenge, either, especially in light of today’s technology.
She makes a compelling case, too, that such a system would be no more prone to corruption than current practice, and that the openness and transparency that would come more naturally to such a participatory model would, most likely, serve as a deterrent to corruption.
I love this idea.
I’ve met dozens of social work students and practitioners whose passion is something relatively obscure–rules about when foster care providers can also serve as foster families, for example, or restrictions on voting rights for those with mental illness, or reimbursable services for Medicaid recipients struggling with post-partum mood disorders.
I WANT these individuals engaged in policymaking, directly, on these topics. They know them, and they care about them, and they would do a better job than I would, or than an elected official balancing hundreds of different policy issues, none of which dovetail very well with the above.
But even more importantly than the substantive policies that could emanate from such a system are the skills and competencies that participants in such a crowd would develop, skills that would enable them to not only advocate more effectively in disparate topics, but also to leverage their voices and relationships in the legislative policy realm, too.
I agree with Noveck that it’s time to move participation beyond talking. Our government would be better off, and so would our citizenry. If you’re intrigued, check out the Democracy Design Workshop, a “do tank” oriented around projects that seek to build such tools. There’s an awesome e-rulemaking interface to improve public participation in federal regulatory policymaking, a policy wiki for collaborative legislative drafting, and ‘clickable statutes’, which creates interactive diagrams to help lay people better understand legislation.
Government by the people…maybe it really is possible?
Classroom to Capitol 
America Speaks: The federal budget, the limits of consensus, and a confession
photo credit, America Speaks
A good friend of mine was very involved in the local contingent of the national deliberative process around the federal budget, earlier this year, through the organization America Speaks. A couple of days after the town hall, she and I were waiting for our kids to finish swimming lessons, and, as we often do, talking about democracy and public policy and social change, instead of…whatever else we might talk about?
And, while I don’t remember exactly, I can imagine that I might have rolled my eyes a bit. Because the truth is, as many of those who had social work classes with me, or those who have shared a table with me at any sort of deliberative process function know, I have this major ambivalence about the whole “consensus-building” process.
I’m totally pro-citizen engagement, as you know–but that’s citizen engagement with those in power, vying for power themselves, making a mark on the policymaking process, making their voices heard by those with the authority to do something about it.
And that’s where the disconnect has often been for me with these facilitated ‘conversations’ about critical social issues: they can give sitting around with people who have absolutely no intention nor ability to change anything the appearance of being real democracy, which, I believe, can actually do significant harm. People who feel that things should have changed because they spent 4 hours (or, in this case, 8!) talking about them (and, in fact, are given the impression that they will) can lose heart and disengage from the tactics that would be more likely to bring results.
There are few things more disempowering than false empowerment.
So, I probably said something about how I’m less interested in consensus and more interested in building the power that will enable me to win (my most infamous example of this frustration with process comes after a painful seminar on consensus organizing, when I admittedly told the woman who had illustrated the philosophy behind the approach with a “tiny fire of smoldering embers” that, “sometimes, what we need is a big ass bonfire to really burn some stuff up.”)
So that gives you a sense of how I struggle with this stuff.
Still, when some of my students brought up the America Speaks: Our Budget, Our Economy session during class discussion on the federal budget last week, I resolved to sit down and really go through their work. Because, to a large extent, something that can get people worked up enough about reasonable strategies for deficit reduction is doing something very, very right.
And, I’ll say it.
I was wrong. Okay, partially.
Because there is really a lot to get excited about, at least in the way that this particular organization approaches the whole deliberative democracy idea, even if I still have a lot of caveats to my enthusiasm.
What I love:
But, still, I have a few worries. I’m not sure, really, that these are avoidable in this whole deliberative exercise, but they still concern me:
When we were talking about the local event, my friend lamented the protestors outside who were criticizing America Speaks for (in their opinion) including options that would threaten Social Security and ignored the potential of single-payer health care. I, on the other hand, was delighted. Because the truth is that we need that, too–people who will stand outside and scream, until the conversation happening inside has to shift, somewhat, to accommodate them.
But, still, I stand largely corrected. And, Brandi, I promise, next time I’ll let you watch your kid swim.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged deliberative democracy, empowerment, federal budget