Last week, at a conference of scholars interested in the civic mission of colleges and universities, I offered some general remarks about how academia can help strengthen democracy. I said something like this:

Although it’s a complex story, we do not live in a good era for democratic government in the US. Whether measured by levels of participation, citizens’ satisfaction with the political system (broadly defined), gaps in engagement and power by social class, the actual performance of public institutions, or norms of public reason and civility–most of the trends do not look good.

But we do live in an era marked by three potentially exciting developments that are relevant to the conference.

First, the last 30 years have seen interesting and important developments in democratic theory, broadly defined. Civic republicanism, deliberative democracy, communitarianism, sophisticated new versions of populism, and cosmopolitanism are some of the intellectual movements that have real momentum.

I am particularly interested in intellectual movements that are related to practical experiments. I entered this broad field 25 years ago by studying the deliberative democratic philosophy of Jürgen Habermas in a sophomore seminar and then spending a summer at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, OH. Kettering was then organizing the deliberative events that are still known as National Issues Forums. I am not sure whether Habermas is personally all that interested in such practical experiments, but the next generation of deliberation scholars definitely is interested, and the exchanges between practice and experience have been fruitful.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize one particular stream of democratic theory that is exemplary, that has influenced several of us at the conference, and that deserves recognition today because we recently lost its founders, Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, in rapid succession. Lin Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for revealing how, when, and why groups of people overcome collective action problems to manage common resources. A definition of good citizenship is implicit in her theory: the good citizen is a person who co-manages the commons. That ideal contrasts at least slightly with some other worthy definitions, such as the citizen as an altruistic volunteer, a judicious decision-maker, a or fighter for justice.

Because Lin found that people regularly succeed as good citizens, but only under certain conditions, her theory had profound implications for public policy, for education, and for the strategies of reformers and activists. For her whole life, she was engaged in dialogues and collaborations with all those kinds of people, in her classroom, in Bloomington (where she and Vincent lived), in Indianapolis, in settings around the world, and online–she helped to explain the structure of cyberspace. And yet I would basically want to honor her as a contributor to the intellectual renaissance of democratic thought.

A second stream of work also begins in academia, but it takes higher education itself as the main site of reform. The presenting complaints are: students and professors have lost a sense of mission and calling; they are not learning all that well or flourishing as people; and they are harmfully disconnected from their peers within academia and (even more so) from the broader society. This conversation took roughly its modern shape during the 1980s and has since spawned a whole range of influential practices. For instance, when students collaborate with community-based organizations that have ongoing partnerships with colleges, the theory goes, they can benefit intellectually and psychologically while contributing to the public good. But that requires engaged scholars, robust community partnerships, appropriate pedagogy, etc.–all of which we have been busily developing for the past thirty years.

The third stream is democratic renewal and innovation that emerges from outside academia. I have already mentioned deliberative democracy, which, in practical terms, means recruiting citizens to talk about public issues. That is a large-scale enterprise now. The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation has more than 2,000 individual members who are interested enough in organizing and facilitating public discussions (often linked to local action) that they subscribe to the NCDD mailing list, which is full of practical suggestions.

I also already mentioned the idea of citizens managing common resources. In the robust field of civic environmentalism, people are busy doing that, often applying concepts directly from Ostrom. Just to mention one example, the River Network has formal partnerships with 600 local nonprofits that are involved in managing watersheds.  America’s 4,600 community development corporations have financed and built 86,000 housing units. (I don’t want to bury you in statistics but merely suggest that these democratic reform efforts are serious business.) The American Libraries Association is a different example of an organization that thinks of itself as the guardian of a commons–in this case, a “knowledge commons.”

Another thread in the tapestry is contributed by broad-based community organizing, which often has a deliberative aspect (participants talk and decide on strategies and goals), but certainly differs from pure deliberation in its emphasis on action–including “Direct Action” events. The Industrial Areas Foundation has 47 regional affiliates now, most of them capable of drawing 2,000 people to a given event.

Innovations that originate within government and as the result of public policy also deserve mention. Just to name one type, Federally Qualified Health Centers provide health services at the local level. By law, they must have governing boards of which more than half are current clients of the center who demographically represent the population that the center serves. They employ 123,000 full-time staff and may have, by my estimate, 120,000 citizen board members.

I could go on. In fact, a book of mine coming out this summer is substantially devoted to mapping the whole field of civic renewal and providing some theoretical underpinning. Maybe it can suffice for this evening to say that there is a lot of civic innovation outside of academia, and I estimate that at least 1 million Americans are actively involved.

By the way, my list of organizations and my count of the civically engaged Americans both depend on what qualifies as authentic “civic engagement.” That is (and ought to be) a contested question, related to fundamental debates about what makes a good society and a good human life. I won’t defend my whole philosophical position here, except to say that the efforts that impress me most always have three dimensions. They are deliberative, involving talking and listening about public issues. They are collaborative, involving actual work that yields public goods or helps build the commonwealth. And they improve civic relationships, which are relationships characterized by mutual respect, appropriate power dynamics, and such civic virtues as loyalty and hope.

Having identified three major streams (intellectual movements, reforms in academia, and civic renewal efforts outside of higher education), my next obvious move is to argue that they must flow together. That’s built into the cliché of “streams.” It’s always easy to say that several important things are going on and now it’s time to combine them. The hard part is actually doing bringing them together. But more than usual, we need combinations of intellectual work and practical experimentation–within and beyond academia–because our students lack compelling political movements that would give their activism shape and purpose. Fortunately, these streams do come together in all kinds of interesting and fruitful experiments that may ultimately produce the political movements we need.