New democracy, new bin day?

I’m spending a week in wonderful Mexico City with friends and soon-to-be-friends in the People Powered network, discussing practical action on participatory and deliberative democracy. The discussions have been very good, and the people, food and city and total delight. Throughout it all, though, I have been wondering whether there is something more we need to be talking about - a theory of government.

The topic of our discussions so far has been institutionalising participatory and deliberative democracy - institutionalising is a word I don’t love, but it means turning one-off events into standing, long-term engagement processes.

That’s a good idea - one-off events are unlikely to have impact - but the discussion in the last two days has been on institutionalising the mechanisms for better decision making, and it has made me think that how we design the implementation of those decisions will shape the institutions the sector is seeking to build.

I call it a theory of government, but it is perhaps more accurately described as a theory of the State or a theory of public administration.

Whatever you call it, it is an essential area for development if innovative democratic processes are genuinely going to change how government is done. It’s a cliché that “who controls the minutes controls the meeting” - and it’s true a thousand times over if civil servants and existing delivery structures are given free rein to interpret broadly-phrased recommendations, and turn them into a practical distribution of funding and services.

How decision become actions is 90% of what government is. If you don’t understand how you want the State to work, what sort of institutionalisation can you design? You'll end up with a slightly better consultation mechanism - one that still leaves the power to shape the State fundamentally with representative politicians and the existing machinery.

Maybe that’s OK. State administration since 1945 has been like a huge river of funding, carving deep channels in the landscape of delivery structures, public expectations and essential services. Rerouting those channels is not easy, and won’t be popular. Why not leave things as they are, but feed a bit more citizen voice into the top of the process?

I would argue that is too unambitious. I work in this field because that I think government isn’t keeping up with the more individualist and networked society we are living in. Until is does we won’t be able to reenergise democratic systems, and without doing that we won’t be able to deal with our global challenges. Jim Hacker and the Ministry of Administrative Affairs are not going to solve climate change on their own.

What is the theory of government that sits alongside deliberative democracy?

Conservatives have a theory of government - it should be as small as possible, as privatised as possible, and unconstrained by pesky things like human rights. If they are in power, you can expect services to be pushed out to civil society, and plenty of efficiency drives.

Socialists have a theory of government - several - but underpinning them all is a well-funded state that works to reduce inequality and ensure that services are equitably delivered. If they are in power, you can expect funding increases, new equality duties, and a fair bit of central control.

What is ours? When we reach the point where representative and participative/deliberative democracy are in a new stable equilibrium, what should people expect the State to look like? How will it deliver services? How will it pass down decisions? How will it manage local flexibility alongside systemic equity? How will it create multi-level governance on global decisions? How will the needs of the least involved and least confident be taken into account as decisions are implemented?

These choices matter.

If you think deliberation is going to be a bit more participation at the top of the cash funnel, with the State working more or less as it currently does, then don’t overpromise about impact.

If you think deliberation is going to usher in a remade, ecologically friendly, locally responsive and highly decentralised State, then don’t assume you can avoid thinking through what that means in terms of finance, equity and delivery.

Either option is possible, as are thousands in between, but we can’t theorise what future democracy looks like without theorising what future State administration looks like, and how trade-offs and tensions would be managed. If we don’t get it right, then the experience of a more participatory State could be more chaotic and unpopular than the current situation - and I know from experience that the public might want a new democracy and a new politics, but the thing that will get them on the streets is messing with their parking spaces.