Here is a passage from We make the Road by Walking, a dialogue between the American civil rights leader Myles Horton (who founded the Highlander Folk School) and the Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire. We talked about it today in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies as we discussed when power operates in a hidden way (by affecting people’s beliefs); when intervention is appropriate and helpful; what is “education” versus indoctrination or leadership; and related questions.

Myles [Horton]: We had to find ways to handle our own “weakness of culture.” One of the real problems in the South in the early days of Highlander was segregation, discrimination against people of color, legally and traditionally. One of our principles is that we believe in social equality for all people and no discrimination for any reason—religious, race, sex, or anything else. The social customs were to have segregation. Now how did we deal with that social custom? The way that was used by most people working in what then was called race relations was to talk about it and pray over it and wait for magic changes, I suppose. Some dealt with segregation by having segregated programs, and educating Blacks here and whites there, like it was traditional to do. We chose to deal with it directly, knowing that a discussion and analysis wouldn’t change their minds.

We decided to hold integrated workshops and say nothing about it. We found that if you didn’t talk about it, if you didn’t force people to admit that they were wrong—that’s what you do when you debate and argue with people—you can do it. People didn’t quite understand how it was happening. They just suddenly realized they were eating together and sleeping in the same rooms, and since they were used to doing what they were supposed to do in society, the status quo, they didn’t know how to react negatively to our status quo. We had another status quo at Highlander, so as long as we didn’t talk about it, it was very very little problem. Then later on, participants started talking about it from another point of view, a point of view of experience. They had experienced something new, so they had something positive to build on. When we started talking about it, it wasn’t to say: “Now, look you’ve changed. We were right and you were wrong.” We said: “Now you’ve had an experience here. When you get back you’ll be dealing with people in your unions who haven’t had this experience, and they’re going to know you’ve been to an integrated school. How are you going to explain it to them?” So they started, not ever talking about how they had changed or how they had faced this problem, but with how they could explain to other people. We just skipped the stage of discussion. Of course, it was going on inside all the time, but we didn’t want to put it in terms of an argument or a debate.

One aspect of the writing that fascinates me is the changing definition of “we.” First Horton, a white Southerner, chooses to describe racial segregation as a problem of the community to which he belongs–“our own weakness of culture.” But then the “we” becomes the Highlander Folk School: “our principle … is social equality for all people and no discrimination.” Later, “we” becomes the people who have experienced Highlander’s integrated meetings and will go back to their segregated communities. Even if you assume that “we” should not intervene to change “them,” who counts as “we” is usually open to change.

Another important theme is the avoidance of explicit argumentation. Horton thinks that to argue against segregation would be … what? Merely counter-productive in the particular situation? Poor pedagogy? Or unethical, because it would fail to respect the people who come to Highlander?

Bent Flyvbjerg is one of the authors we teach in our Summer Institute of Civic Studies. He is a Danish social scientist who has developed a radical ideal of social research that he calls “phronesis” (Greek for “prudence” or “practical wisdom”). I would introduce it as follows:

A very common method is to identify some feature of practice or policy that can be described generically. It may be an “approach,” a “strategy,” or an “intervention.” The goal is to show that this thing works in general, all else being equal. The ideal method is a randomized field experiment (individuals are randomly assigned to receive or not to receive the intervention, and we measure the differences in results). Alternatives to experiments are acceptable, but overall, social programs are treated like drugs. If something is effective, it should work reliably in whole categories of contexts. So any positive finding should be replicable.

In reality, we find many programs that work in their original contexts for the people who enroll, but very few that prove replicable when tested in randomized studies. One conclusion might be that government and nonprofit agencies just can’t do any good; they aren’t up to it. But that seems very odd because no one wants to (say) disband all the schools in a suburban, middle-class town on the theory that interventions never work.

An alternative conclusion is that there is something wrong with the method. Social interventions don’t work like drugs because the behavior of groups of human beings is not law-like. People know what is going on and influence any treatment, as well as being affected by it. They have a variety of interests and motives that do not all align neatly with the experimenter, and they adjust as they are being experimented on. People act differently if they feel that a social process is theirs instead of someone else’s experiment. Context is highly variable and very important. That includes the “macro” context of major events in the world, which constantly change people’s values and beliefs. There are complex interactions between subjects, researchers, and contexts.

Flyvbjerg goes so far as to say: “The natural science approach simply does not work in the social sciences. No predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying. This approach is a wasteful dead-end.”

On one hand, I want to say that Flyvbjerg is wrong. In our Institute, we read work by scholars like Elinor Ostrom and Archon Fung who identify methods and approaches that seem to work fairly regularly in various contexts. Ostrom has identified design principles to use if you want to manage a public resource voluntarily. Fung shows that certain formats and strategies for public meetings work better than others for various purposes, under various circumstances. Such research seems very important for reform efforts.

On the other hand, these are not literally “predictive” theories. They do not deny people’s freedom to change outcomes. There is nothing inevitable about the recipes that Ostrom and Fung identify. Further, the search for powerful explanations, regularities, and generic solutions in social science does seem disappointing overall. As the volume of data rises, analytical tools improve, publications proliferate, and more and more people work at understanding social issues, faith in actual solutions only seems to recede.

Flyvbjerg has a constructive alternative, based on his own intervention as a researcher in the city politics of Aalborg, Denmark. In his model, “social scientists and social science professionals [are] analysts who provide food for thought for the ongoing process of public deliberation, participation, and decision-making.” They do so by immersing themselves in a concrete situation and asking (with all due methodological rigor) the following four questions:

(1) Where are we going?

(2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?

(3) Is this development desirable?

(4) What, if anything, should we do about it?

Note the following features that are absent in purely positivist social science (although they are practiced by many fine scholars): a combination of values, facts, and strategies; a forward-looking orientation; a sensitivity to power that does not preclude hope that something good can be achieved; and a presumption that the researcher is part of the community that must act (“what should we do?”).

The Nobel Foundation announced yesterday that Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. She is the first woman to win the prize and surely one of the few non-economists. When Lin was president of the American Political Science Association, she was a strong voice for civic education and has been a consistent supporter of CIRCLE–a coauthor of our paper on civic education in universities and co-editor of a book that includes my chapter on youth-led research. She was one of the small group of political theorists who originally envisioned the Summer Institute of Civic Studies that we finally turned into a real course at Tufts last July. She is a model practitioner of collaborative community-based research who combines patient, low-profile interactions with practitioners and high-level theory–each enriching the other. She has built an institution, the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, that I see as an ideal model for all “engaged” universities. Before the Nobel Committee snagged her, we awarded her the 2009 Tisch Research Prize.

I started last summer’s Institute by reading aloud Margaret Mead’s famous exhortation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I noted that Mead’s statement is false, because many other things (wars, governments, floods, plagues) have also changed the world. Mead is also wrong to imply that committed citizens always succeed, or that when they do the results are necessarily good. Mussolini and his fellow fascisti were committed–and even thoughtful in their way–yet they made the world a lot worse. I said that what we need is a real study of active citizenship that includes: (1) empirical evidence about when small groups of citizens can change the world; (2) moral analysis that tells us when their methods and their results are good; and (3) strategic advice about how to support and encourage their most effective and beneficial efforts.

Such research is scarce because social science tends to think first of institutions and macro-level changes, being skeptical about the impact of small-scale, deliberate, citizen politics. (In fact, we citizens have relatively modest effects. But what we do is the most important factor for us to understand; everything else is context.) Further, social science still cannot comfortably handle arguments about values. For their part, moral philosophy and political theory address values but cannot handle strategy. Yet a value or an ideal that has no practicable strategy is worse than nothing.

In my opinion, Elinor Ostrom is one of a small number of thinkers about citizenship who combine empirical insights, moral arguments, and strategies. The ideal for Lin Ostrom is a group of people who manage to overcome collective action problems, such as the “tragedy of the commons,” through voluntary action. The tragedy of the commons is enormously important–if we perish as a species, it may be because we fail to address such problems as climate change that can be understood this way. Yet Lin has shown empirically and with great rigor that people can voluntarily overcome collective-action problems–using appropriate rules and techniques, under appropriate circumstances.

Promoting such achievements requires a whole set of strategies, from constitutional and other legal provisions, to reforms of institutions, to research that reveals effective techniques, to civic education that imparts the necessary skills. As just one example of her many reform proposals, Ostrom argues that we should reverse the trend toward consolidating school districts, because each school board teaches its members participatory skills. Going beyond mere proposals, Ostrom has helped to build and lead institutions that promote and embody these ideas. The Nobel Prize will surely help endow the Workshop that she and her distinguished husband Vincent Ostrom have created.

In my ideal university, Ostrom’s methods and topics would be right at the heart of the whole enterprise. There is no more important question than “How can we improve the world?” The scarcity of really rigorous answers–not to mention the marginality of the very question–is a scandal. Ostrom’s work is a shining exception that richly deserves recognition. As one of my colleagues wrote last night, “this is the first Nobel Prize for civic studies.”