Reactivating civil society
Sophia Parker [right], writing in the RSA eJournal argues that "Civic innovation will only realise its full potential once citizens are involved in setting the agenda and the terms of engagement." (The RSA is the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, founded in 1754 in London.)Is Parker's argument more than an intellectual's scheme to get us to stop "bowling alone?"
Putting you in the frame
"Sixty years ago, the emphasis was firmly on the need for new institutions in order to transform British society. Since the start of the 20th century there had been growing concerns about the ability of a patchwork of voluntary and charitable organisations to provide appropriate support to people in need.
"These concerns, along with the experience of living through two major wars, led to a powerful cross-party consensus about the benefits of a more interventionist state. The creation of a massive publicly owned infrastructure designed to tackle Beveridge’s five giants of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want marked a new vision of how to create a fair and equitable society.
"As the 20th century progressed, this vision began to tarnish. The optimism of the early welfare agenda was replaced by a fear that an unwieldy state was threatening to undermine people’s own capacity for action, creating a dangerous dependency culture. Capturing the popular spirit of the times, Thatcher argued that it was the power of the market, not state bureaucracy, which would lead to greater wellbeing...
"Of course, both the socialists of the post-war years and the Thatcherites later on recognised that people had a role and some responsibilities for looking after themselves and their neighbours. But implicit in the neo-liberal critique of the welfare state was the view that a large state eroded civic action...
"The ‘third way’ underpinning Labour’s dramatic electoral success drew heavily on communitarian thinking, which sought to put communities themselves back into the picture. Some careful bedtime reading of academics such as Amitai Etzioni and Robert Putnam led to an agenda that placed a new emphasis on the ‘invisible bonds’ that connect people, alongside the ‘invisible hand’ of the market...
"Levels of trust and satisfaction have dropped steadily since 1997. In part this can be explained by a gap between what we want from our interactions with public services and what was being measured. Sure, waiting lists went down, but we wanted more than seven minutes with the consultant.
"This ‘performance paradox’ can also be explained by a deeper problem. Our expectations of what the state can do to alleviate social ills is rising faster than its capacity to deal with an increasingly complex set of problems...
"Implicit within this is a new paradigm of government. Taken to its most radical conclusion, the civic innovation agenda is about blurring the distinction between state and citizen action. It demands that we worry less about the size of the state, and focus instead on how it operates and how it works with each of us as citizens and members of communities. ‘Co-production’ may be an ugly word, but it could be the key to transforming our conception of the public realm and how we can each shape the decisions that affect our lives and those of others around us...
"In that sense, this agenda goes to the heart of what it means to live in a democracy. There has been much hand-wringing over the decline in voter turnout and political party membership, which has been particularly steep in recent years. But these issues cannot be tackled meaningfully while we continue to understand democracy in the sterile terms of casting a vote every few years. We need to modernise what we mean by politics, recognising the inherently political nature of campaigning and volunteering (both activities are becoming more popular), at the same time as returning to the ancient ideal of democracy as self-government...
"So where should politicians go from here?
"First, they should resist the temptation to claim this agenda as uniquely theirs...
"Secondly, unleashing a wave of civic innovation relies on seeing us as ‘whole’ people...
"Thirdly, Number 10’s recent foray into using the internet to unlock participation with its e-petition may have caught them out by its popularity, but the massive growth of social software such as Facebook or eBay must not be ignored..."
Sophia Parker is the author of Unlocking Innovation: why citizens hold the key to public service reform (Demos, 2007), The Journey to the Interface: how public service design can connect users to reform (Demos, 2006), Strong Foundations: why schools must be built upon learning (DfES/Demos, forthcoming), The Other Glass Ceiling: the domestic politics of parenting (Demos, 2006), and Disablism: how to tackle the last prejudice (Demos, 2004).
See earlier entries on civil society.
Labels: civil society, UK
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:32 AM
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