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The World Bank has published a book entitled Accountability Through Public Opinion: From Inertia to Public Action. Its premise: governments perform better when citizens hold them accountable by seeking information, deliberating, and acting politically. Anyone who holds strongly negative stereotypes about the Bank–as a bastion of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus–may be surprised to see, for instance, Marshall Ganz’ chapter on “Public Narrative, Collective Action, and Power.” (Ganz is a leading figure in the American left.)
My chapter is entitled “‘Social Accountability’ as Public Work.” I address the increasingly common practice of governments asking citizens to evaluate, influence, or inform policy. I see merit in this strategy, but also limitations …
- Motivational: Most people lack sufficient reason to devote substantial time and energy to improving the performance of government. If governments provide incentives to participate, then citizens’ engagement is dependent on government.
- Epistemic: If you are merely asked to assess the government, without having deep experience in addressing public problems, you may not know enough to evaluate well. You may have information but not deeply held, considered, experience-based values.
- Political: Public forums and meetings are what John Gaventa calls “invited spaces.” The officials who issue invitations can revoke them. Power remains with the government.
I suggest an alternative, drawing on Harry Boyte’s concept of “public work.” Many millions of people are already at work addressing public problems, either as part of their jobs or as unpaid efforts. Work is motivating, educational, and empowering. If we see public consultations, deliberations, and input as aspects of public work, we can reframe these processes somewhat. In particular, we can embed them more thoroughly in jobs, professional roles, and volunteer activities.
Peter,
I think that’s all good. But one other opportunity is a creative investment in making participation more attractive – if you like, the ‘Nudge’ idea – find a way of making a process interesting or encouraging people to help you to ‘describe the problem’ and the use of infographics (particularly particpatory ones where others can copy and improve your work) or collaborative authoring tools with volunteer ‘moderators’ – people who have experiences managing online communities – identifying cognitive biases or poor argumentation.
In the UK, the public are surprisingly process-obsessed. They don’t moan that you (as a government) did something – they moan that you did it with insufficient consultation time (though if you did allow enough time they wouldn’t have participated anyway).
The idea of getting people to volunteer to manage the process (rather than volunteering to game their opinions into the final draft) is an appealing one.
Duplicate
Hi Peter,
I wonder whether the limitations above are at the right scale. For example,
any single person or group of people aren’t really being asked to
participate in opportunities across government are they? Isn’t it a
question of participating where motivation exists because one stands to
benefit or lose as a result of the outcome, or issue by issue a person
has intrinsic or extrinsic motivations?
On another tack, the primary limitation here
seems to be the quality of public trust or civic mindedness that enables
a decision to “stick” once a subgroup of the population as a whole has
had the opportunity to inform the process and outcome. I worry most in
the US (and perhaps this plays out elsewhere?) of the collective
citizens’ capacity to accept as legitimate and in good will the outcomes
of these participatory processes. So for example, even if the outcomes
were demonstrably reproducible in poll after poll or public procedure
after procedure do we have the civic mindedness and civic discipline
culturally to bear up and move forward those outcomes?
What’s your thought? Cheers,
lars
Paul, I am all in favor of making these processes maximally fun and interesting. I still worry if the locus of power lies with the government (which can make the processes boring if it wants to). On the other hand, the demand you describe for open processes is a source of public power. But the public must then exercise its own responsibility to participate. That goes to Lars’ point about “civic mindedness and civic discipline.”
Lars, you’re right that if all we need is samples of people to deliberate, than no individual will get many calls to do anything. The motivational demands are then low. But so is the effect on social capital and power. That’s why I’m more interested in “embedded,” pervasive forms of participation–but they raise the motivational requirements.