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Tom Atlee, posted to 9 Feb 05
Dear friends,
Margaret Anderson has shared a fascinating Feb 2005 Government Accounting Office Report > highlights of their December 2004 Forum on "The Long-Term Fiscal Challenge." (Topic translation: "As a society, we're not going to be able to afford the things we've afforded before. So what are we going to do about that?") A major part of the report deals with how to engage the public in addressing this problem.
I did not read the whole report, but focused on the sections about public engagement. What follows is my critique of those sections of this report from a co-intelligent politics perspective. Before I begin, I want to stress that I view this as a truly remarkable document. It reflects what leading edge powerholders are thinking about public engagement in these times of increasing crises. The impulse to convene this Forum was, itself, notable. I find the Forum conversation fascinating, both for what it affirms and for what it avoids or discourages. Finally, the report is jammed with intriguing facts and divese views, all very engaging.
Participants in the Forum included public officials, academics, consultants, mainstream journalists, think tank representatives, and several public engagement professionals. Although it is heartening to see public engagement being discussed so openly at such high levels of government, I was disappointed (though not surprised) that this inquiry didn't include consultations with "ordinary people" about how they might WANT to be involved in this crucial subject.
The GAO report offered the following definition of "public engagement":
"Public engagement is an approach to elevating the public's understanding of an issue through a community or group event, e.g., a town hall meeting. It typically focuses on hearing the voices of people usually left out of decision making and seeks to involve them in a dialogue. The aim of public engagement is to build a common understanding of an issue and the need for change and to help people deliberate trade-offs embodied in proposed policy changes. In contrast to public relations, public engagement does not seek to 'sell' a solution but rather help a community or group of people work through difficult issues and find areas of agreement. In some forms, public
engagement seeks to use the results of its public deliberations to inform policy choices." (p 22)
Embedded in this definition is an implicit spectrum of motivations for engaging the public:
1. Public relations: Convince the public to support or accept certain solutions and policies
2. Public education: Inform or educate the public so they can better fulfill their roles as individual citizens (by voting, etc.)
3. Public judgment: Help the public weigh options, work through difficult issues together and find areas of agreement.
4. Public input: Inform decision-makers about what an informed, deliberative public thinks and wants.
I'd like to offer two further bands -- not mentioned in the above definition -- to fill out this spectrum:
5. Public empowerment: Help the public, itself, offcially design and choose good policies.
6. Public collective intelligence and wisdom: Enable the public (as We the People) to self-organize its collective affairs continuously and wisely, learning as it goes.
Apparently most Forum participants didn't want to move too far toward the sort of empowerment and collective intelligence represented by these last two bands. This higher-level approach was piloted recently by British Columbia's government in an official Citizens Assembly
This ad hoc body of 120 randomly selected citizens deliberated every other week for a year about a controversial issue -- voting methods. They came up with an innovative proposal that the electorate will vote on. If it passes, it will be made directly into law. That's true "rule by the people" -- democracy -- of a kind well described by Alexander Hamilton in his suggestion that "the deliberative sense of the community should govern."
In the GAO Forum, participants saw public engagement somewhat differently. They viewed it primarily as a means to "elevate public understanding" of the issue (2, above -- this included good thinking about how to engage the media and educational institutions) and to provide "leaders with information on [informed] public opinion" (4, above). But some participants "cautioned against using public engagement as a way to make policy" and suggested that "an expectation that the public should take time from other activities to develop policy solutions was an unreasonable burden." [NOTE: That problem is addressed by using citizen deliberative councils
They involve only a few citizens at a time in concentrated deliberations that are comparatively free of special interest biases. Thousands of citizens have participated and found the experience rewarding.]
The report continues: "Leaders [have] the responsibility to develop policy solutions." Therefore, advanced dialogue and deliberation methods might best be used to "help leaders reach consensus" among themselves. "Participants pointed to the 1983 reform of Social Security as an example where leaders developed solutions and successfully gained public acceptance for changes that were 'outside the comfort zone.' Š In the view of these participants, the role of leaders was to arrive at solutions; a 'permissive majority' would then support them." (pp 25-26)
It seems to me that this begins to edge towards the very "public relations" (1, above) that the GAO's initial definition of "public engagement" tried to distinguish itself from. At the same time, it is understandable that many mainstream leaders would fall back on such manipulation, since our adversarial majoritarian system elevates them into decision-making roles where they are rewarded for mustering support for specific proposals rather than for fostering public dialogue to discover something new and better from the people.
There is a very interesting list of public engagement efforts on pages 23 and 24 of the GAO Report. And Appendix VI is a presentation by Daniel Yankelovich and Ruth Wooden of Viewpoint Leaning, entitled "Rethinking Public Engagement and Countering Mistrust." I found their public dialogue slides on pages 75-82 very useful. Their perspective could apply at any level of the spectrum above. Their diagram on page 85 offers a thought-provoking overview of Yanelovich's perspective on deliberative public involvement. It drew me to the Viewpoint Learning website, especially <
which I hope to explore more in the coming weeks. I suggest you take a look at these resources.
As suggested earlier, what's lacking in this, for me, is a sense that public dialogue and deliberation, properly designed, wouldn't just
"engage" the public, but actually enable and empower the citizenry (We the People) to wisely guide (not just "have input into") public policy. Public dialogue and deliberation should be more than mere "public education" -- and more than the "creation of consensus" where "consensus" means "a permissive majority" that won't protest official decisions. The understandings, judgments and agreements produced by public engagement should reflect well-informed common sense, a values-based wisdom and the creatively integrated views of the community's diverse perspectives. Such outcomes should be honored as the legitimate voice and will of We the People, and duly empowered.
Many years ago Yankelovich took the leap from doing public opinion polls to sponsoring public deliberations, and began promoting the idea of a deliberative "public judgment." In so doing, he began to move beyond the PR manipulated version of public participation. He inspired my own "Call to Move Beyond Public Opinion to Public Judgment"
And yet I'm seeking something that goes even further -- something which may take some time for us to adequately understand and develop, but which will shift our concept of democratic leadership away from centralized decision-making by elite leaders toward forms of facilitative and distributed leadership that nurture the collective intelligence of the whole community or country to direct its own affairs. As Lao Tzu says "When the leader leads well, the people say
'We did it ourselves.'" (Which is the main reason my book is entitled THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY.)
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT IS EVOLVING
When the GAO Report notes that "the values-based dialogue approach...[to] public engagement [may be] a possible tool to help leaders reach consensus on solutions to the long-term fiscal challenge," I sense that that MAY be a sign that new motivations are surfacing to support dialogue and deliberation. The fiscal challenges of the coming decades are very real and will generate extreme divisions among the citizenry and various stakeholders and partisans -- as scarcity often does -- making politics a minefield for public officials. If citizen or stakeholder deliberations can come to agreements, politicians can legislate those agreements into policy with
far less risk than if they were legislating partisan approaches or backroom deals. The promise of a way around political minefields may inspire official support for deliberation that might otherwise be lacking. Stakeholder deliberations for this purpose already exist in the form of official "Consensus Councils" in a few states and in a proposal at the federal level <
In this realm of crafting agreeable policies, there may be more support for stakeholder deliberations than for empowered citizen deliberations. There is reason to believe that much of the "fiscal challenges" we face are due to the top 10 percent of the population increasingly absorbing society's wealth, while the costs of profit-making activity are increasingly "externalized" -- i.e., consumers, taxpayers adn unborn generations are having to cope with and pay for fixing up the undermined health, environment, community, employment, global security, etc., which result from certain profitable activities. This suggests that if the other 90 percent of the population were actually empowered to understand what was going on (through deliberation) and do something about it -- as was done in the case of British Columbia -- the elite "leadership" of the society might not be so eager to follow through.
So I expect that most top-down public engagement programs will not tend to empower the collective intelligence and will of ordinary people. But this factor may be less significant at the local level, especially in smaller towns and college communities where a populist grassroots community spirit often prevails (or waits to blossom). There, the deliberative sense of the community may, indeed, be able to govern quite effectively in the near future.
A final factor I see is that in times of shrinking public funds and mounting social problems, it is in the interests of both ordinary people and power elites to make public space for people to help each other out, to develop systems of mutual aid, and even to pull together their communities to build local self-reliance. This is a dream shared by both sustainability advocates and certain traditionalist conservatives. Building such local capacity and "social capital" in pluralistic communities will usually involve public engagement through high quality public dialogue and deliberation. Interesting alliances among unlikely bedfellows may be possible where the focus is on local capacity building, for there is much common ground to be found among neighbors in a local community, however diverse they are.
TRENDS
So we have a number of factors influencing how dialogue and deliberation may develop in society over the coming decades. There are more factors than I've mentioned here, of course, but the ones I see most clearly at this point are:
a. Stakeholders and community leaders will support dialogue and deliberation that provide politicans with safe solutions to address "hot potato" issues.
b. Elites will support public dialogue and deliberation that educates the public on tough issues and prepares them to accept the "tough decisions" of politicians without generating "unrealistic" solutions that challenge status quo power arrangements or institutional habits.
c. Existing elites will ignore or undermine efforts to actually empower public dialogue and deliberation, in order to prevent challenges to status-quo leadership and power arrangements, or
simply because they can't comprehend how it would work.
d. Public dialogue and deliberation will be used increasingly to build local community capacity as we face increasing budget cuts, scarcity, crises and breakdowns.
To these we could add
e. Leading edge lovers of true democracy -- mostly grassroots activists and dialogue practitioners, but also some enlightened politicians, official leaders and elites -- will do many experiments in public dialogue and deliberation for democratic empowerment and wise public self-organization. These initiatives will sprout here and there around the country and world, demonstrating real possibilities, awaiting the right conditions to spread rapidly. When the time is right, they will spread like wildfire -- IF we do our work well now.
It seems to me that this GAO report is feeling its way towards (a) and (b) -- public engagement that aligns with existing power structures. This represents progress from decision-making systems that simply ignore the public or address public opinion primarily through manipulative PR, to real engagement of the public in mind-expanding deliberative dialogue, albeit within limits. But the last three trends -- (c), (d) and (e) -- initiatives that move beyond the old forms, and
the resistance to those initiatives -- are also well underway. I have a feeling a lot more of all five of these trends (and more) will be happening in the coming decade, making it a very juicy time to be doing this work.
May it all add up, in the end -- through all the twists and turns of cultural evolution in crisis -- to a wiser civilization
Coheartedly,
Tom