Monthly Archives: June 2016

communities saving coral reefs: an illustration of Elinor Ostrom’s findings

A new Nature article by Joshua E. Cinner and many coauthors entitled “Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs” is getting a lot of play in mass media. The authors find that, despite grievous damage to coral reefs around the world, some reefs are doing much better than predicted. Among the causes of their success are local institutions and norms:

Our initial exploration revealed that bright spots were more likely to have high levels of local engagement in the management process, high dependence on coastal resources, and the presence of sociocultural governance institutions such as customary tenure or taboos. … For example, in one bright spot, Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea, resource use is restricted through an adaptive rotational harvest system based on ecological feedbacks, marine tenure that allows for the exclusion of fishers from outside the local village, and initiation rights that limit individuals’ entry into certain fisheries

According to economics before Elinor Ostrom, an unowned and unregulated resource is doomed because individuals will exploit it. A coral reef is a perfect example of an unowned resource; thus it must be enclosed and controlled by a private owner or a state to save it from the Tragedy of the Commons. But Ostrom found that communities around the world have developed durable means of protecting such resources for their own use. They apply tacit design principles for the successful management of what she called common pool resources, including clearly defined boundaries, rules for appropriating resources that are congruent with the local biological and cultural circumstances, practical means of monitoring the resource, and procedures that most people in the community have some capacity to influence.* Although the above description of Karkar Island is brief, it seems to manifest these principles.

Ostrom’s findings are profoundly significant, because all over the world, local institutions for protecting common pool resources have been bulldozed (metaphorically or literally) by states and markets. That form of modernization is one cause of our global ecological crisis. If more people were permitted–or even supported–to manage local resources as the Karkar Islanders do, the world would be in better condition.

It is also true–as the Nature authors emphasize–that deadly external threats beset local resources (in this case, coral reefs). As long as we heat the earth at a global scale, it’s virtually inevitable that many or most reefs will be destroyed, regardless of how local people manage them. But it’s a mistake to read Elinor Ostrom as a “Small-is-Beautiful” romantic. Her insight is that collective action problems are omnipresent, but they are not inexorable tragedies. They are “dramas” that can turn out either tragically or happily, depending on how we organize ourselves. The moral of her work is not that indigenous people can save the earth if left alone, but that institutions at all scales must learn to manage resources using the principles that happen to be traditional in places like Karkar Island.

*Ostrom et al., “Covenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources,” in The Constitution of  the Good Society, ed. Karol Edward Soltan and Stephen L. Elkin, 1996, pp. 23–38.

See also: Peter Levine, “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies’” (The Good Society, 2011); Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012on the contributions of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom; and the cultural change we would need for climate justice.

register now for the National Conference on Citizenship

 

Strengthening America’s Civic Health: Developing Strategies for Enhancing Civic Life and Improving Communities 

Peter, 

Please join us for this working convening in Washington DC, co-hosted by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) and Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. For more information and to take advantage of our early bird registration, please follow this link.

We think of civic health as the way that communities are organized to define and address public problems. This convening will focus on how to strengthen civic health to aid the efforts of those working everyday on their communities’ most pressing challenges.

This working convening will be informed by you—individuals, agencies, and institutions who are working to support engaged, resilient communities. With a focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion, we are inviting your feedback to help shape this important discussion in October through the following avenues:

  • Connecting the Dots: The Role of Civic Health in Community Problem Solving: You are invited to join a webinar conversation to provide input on how best to enhance consideration of the relationship between civic health and the challenging issues you face. Webinars will be held July 11th and 14th at 2pm Eastern. Register here.
  • Community Conversations on Civic Life: Together with the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), NCoC will support a series of community conversations on civic life. More details will be available soon.
  • Pre-Convening Survey: Together with our partners at the Tisch College of Civic Life, we will gather feedback from registrants that will help inform content and shape the discussion in October. All registrants will receive an invitation to offer their input.

Register now to receive the early bird registration rate of $150.

 

being a friend to a project

The other day, in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, we were reading a long review article about Positive Youth Development (PYD). PYD can be described as a set of empirical hypotheses with supportive evidence (e.g., that youth flourish best when given opportunities to contribute to their communities). Alternatively, it could be defined as a set of value propositions that may or may not be empirical (e.g., youth have a right to contribute to their communities). It can also be described as a set of programs for young people. Those programs exist because of funding streams and other policies that can be categorized as PYD as well. And it’s a community of people–scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and maybe youth–who are involved with PYD.

Presented with an article, you can read it, learn from it, agree with it, criticize it, assess it, share it, cite it, even assign it. But you can’t be a friend of the article. It exists in its final form and can’t be influenced. It can have fans, but not friends in a recognizable sense of that word.

You can be a friend of something like PYD, assuming that it is a community of people or set of programs. Such a friendship can incorporate criticism–or even require it. For instance, I think PYD should be more political. Youth should have more opportunities to change official systems. I can say that as a friend of PYD, even as part of the PYD community. My friendship is predicated on a decision that PYD has potential, that it is worth engaging. My friendship does not depend on my assent to any particular list of hypotheses or principles, nor my endorsement of any particular program.

I say all of this for two reasons. First, academics learn how to relate to texts as critical readers. We are also supposed to learn how to relate to other scholars as people. But we learn less about how to be friends of communities or movements. Some of us are good friends (in that sense), but it’s not really part of our training.

Second, I think the relationship between empirical hypotheses and actually existing movements is widely misunderstood. It turns out to be true that many youth flourish when offered certain kinds of opportunities to contribute to their communities. That claim of PYD is true because a community of practitioners set about to create such opportunities and made them work. The knowledge that we have gleaned through research on PYD is a product of their efforts. This doesn’t mean that knowledge is subjective or relative. Some programs succeed, others fail, and we can measure the difference. But no program succeeds without being designed and implemented, which requires a prior commitment by some organized group.

The knowledge contained in an article about PYD is thus dependent on people’s work in the world. You can’t be a friend of the article, but you can be a friend of the people upon whom it depends. If the article contains a mistake, you should notice that. If the programs fail to work, you can help them to work better. A community can falter, splinter, or go in the wrong direction, but it can’t be invalidated. That means that a critical response to a publication is disagreement, but a critical response to a movement is action.

saving relational politics

In the June edition of Perspectives on Politics, I have an article entitled “Saving Relational Politics“* I review Caroline W. Lee’s Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry and Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics and I advance an argument of my own.

I argue that what’s most valuable about activities like public deliberations, planning exercises, and Participatory Budgeting is not actually “deliberative democracy.” Neither political equality (democracy) nor reasonable discussion about decisions (deliberation) are essential to these activities. Instead, they are forms of relational politics, in which people “make decisions or take actions knowing something about one another’s ideas, preferences, and interests.” That makes them akin to practices like one-on-one interviews in community organizing–or Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed.

Relational politics has disadvantages and limitations–it’s not all that we need–but it is an essential complement to well-designed impersonal forms of politics (bureaucracies, legal systems, and markets). And it’s endangered, because genuine forms of relational politics are not valuable to governments or companies. Relational politics still occurs at small scales, but we need strategies for increasing its prevalence and impact against powerful opposition.

Lee’s book is a useful critique of typical strategies for expanding relational politics, which involve developing small models and trying to get powerful organizations to adopt them. Lerner contributes a strategy, which is to make processes more fun so that they are desirable to both citizens and institutions. I review both books positively but argue that they leave us without a persuasive strategy for saving relational politics. After considering some alternatives, I argue that relational politics is most likely to spread as a by-product of mass movements that have political agendas. However, we need some people to pay explicit attention to the quality of the participatory processes.

*Per the copyright agreement, I am posting the “version of record” on my personal web page after its appearance at Cambridge Journals Online, along with the following bibliographical details, a notice that the copyright belongs to Cambridge University Press, and a link to the online edition of the journal:

Saving Relational Politics

a political defense of Hamilton

The political theorists Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick make the political case against Hamilton, the musical. In the debates among the founders, Alexander Hamilton was the elitist, the one with the most “contemptuous attitude toward the lower classes.” He was “perfectly comfortable with the inegalitarian and antidemocratic implications of his economic vision.” As friends have noted, this might be why Hamilton is so popular among contemporary liberal elites. It could be a sign that the left-of-center seeks a thin kind of diversity (in this case, color-blind casting) that is perfectly compatible with boosting Wall Street’s interests. In the musical, Jefferson criticizes Hamilton with these words: “Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration / As Wall Street robs ‘em blind in search of chips to cash in.” The lyrics give Jefferson the chance to make that kind of point, but why is Hamilton the hero?

I think this is an important line of argument (I’ve been waiting for prominent writers to make it in public), but I’d defend the musical on two main grounds.

First, I am no expert on Hamilton (the man), but Hamiltonian economics has an important truth to it. In a market economy where corporations, not landowners, are the most important actors, self-rule is impossible unless the people have a powerful instrument, the state, that they can use to regulate the market. Hamilton built the federal state in the face of Jefferson’s opposition. Jefferson’s sociology (envisioning a nation of independent farmers) was false to his own time and became irrelevant in the following centuries. In 1909, Herbert Croly recommended “Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends”: giving the central government enough clout to make local self-rule possible. It’s that aspect of Hamilton that aligns with the center-left today.

By the way, in the musical, the character Hamilton doesn’t espouse elitist views. So if there’s a political problem with the musical, it’s not that it defends elitism but that it misrepresents a historical figure. There are not many references to economics at all. At one point, Burr asks, “Or did you know, even then, it doesn’t matter / Where you put the U.S. Capital?” Hamilton replies, “Cuz we’ll have the banks.” That could imply that banks are good, or it could just mean that banks are important, and New York will “have” them as instruments.

Second, the musical has a powerful political message that’s not about economics. It’s about the positive joy of political participation, the “public happiness” of which Hannah Arendt wrote. The musical shows why you should want to be “in the room where it happens.” It’s also a frank celebration of the kind of political ambition that is about trying to make something great and be known for it. I think that kind of ambition is not only a useful motivation for service but an intrinsic good. I’m with Arendt that zeal for public repute is honorable.

Finally, the musical embodies a kind of cultural appropriation that I admire and recommend. I’m not against cultural appropriation in general, and especially not when a marginalized group appropriates the most prized possessions of the dominant culture (Shakespeare, for instance, or the King James Version). In this case, we have a musical about the founders of the Republic in which the dominant genre is hip hop, the genius writer is a Puerto Rican, and the cast is multiracial. They are claiming the legacy of the founding for themselves, which is their birthright.

See also: notes on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (on public happiness in the Founders’ generation); the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitutionwhen is cultural appropriation good or bad? and cultural mixing and power; and (for an argument in favor of cultural appropriations like Hamilton“a different Shakespeare from the one I love”.