Restricted movement

People in Brussels want a cleaner environment, less air pollution and easier traffic flow. People in Brussels hate the new mobility and air quality plan, called GoodMove.

The problem is that the people in question are different “people”.

The people who can vote in regional elections voted for parties that have environmental action in their manifestoes, and GoodMove is therefore in the coalition agreement.1

The people who were consulted on the proposals for GoodMove where it has caused the greatest difficulties (in Schaerbeek commune) were in favour - but there were only a few hundred involved, from an affected population of tens of thousands.

The people who protested at the Council meeting, and who tore signposts out of the ground, were small in number, fewer even than those who had participated in the consultation, and not necessarily representative of the area, but they had an immediate impact.

This is a scenario that will be very familiar to anyone who has ever engaged in local politics. The forces against change are much louder and angrier than those in favour.

Also familiar will be the response of the commune - to pause implementation for further consultations. I assume that in a few months, they will bring back a proposal that has a few cosmetic tweaks but no major differences, in the hope that by that time the protestors are pacified, bored, or busy with other things.

Everyone in this drama thinks that they are speaking for the people. The Council and Region are elected. The participants in the consultation were the “people who turned up”. After the trouble, the battle of petitions has been running at two signatures for GoodMove to every one against - but fewer than 0,1% of the region’s population have signed. The protestors feel that they are speaking on behalf of the unheard voices, particularly of tradesmen and others who have no alternative to a car or van.

So - what if we had a citizen assembly?

It’s not a rhetorical question. The Region has just announced a standing citizen assembly on climate. 100 citizens, selected through sortition for one-year terms, will advise on climate change issues. Mobility will almost certainly be one of those.

The use of a citizen assembly fits with the views of about a quarter of Brussels residents, who said in a survey for RTBF that they thought a system of citizen assemblies would be the best way to take decisions - though 31% preferred sticking with the multi-party coalition model that we have (and 0,6% wanted a dictator).

If GoodMove were being designed now, what would this citizen assembly have changed? Possibly not much.

The assembly would have been working at the strategic level, making recommendations on the importance of good mobility, and the balance between investing, say, in public transport and in cycling.

It’s very unlikely that they would have given advice about traffic flow around Place Verboeckhoven-plein - but perhaps one of their recommendations would have prompted the transport engineers to think about something they had not considered before.

Perhaps the sense of public discussion, or the representativeness of the Assembly, would make those recommendations seem more legitimate than the decisions of politicians. That would require an unlikely level of interest in regional political processes, but it’s possible.

However, it seems unlikely that better participation on the grand strategy would head off complaints on the detailed implementation.

It might even make it worse, if people thought that 100 participants from the 1,2m in the city were the driving force behind GoodMove. On Twitter at the time of the protests both politicians and public pointed to the number of people consulted as woefully inadequate.

A lot of this is motivated reasoning - the right-liberal and far left parties in opposition have made an unlikely alliance in opposing the plan2 - but there is a brutal simplicity to the argument that a hundred people is not very many, the city-region is large, and mobility is a difficult question. As a practitioner, I can explain how selection and deliberation work to access wider views, debate better and reach consensus - but in politics, as Reagan said, if you're explaining, you're losing.

You can construct a situation where the citizen assembly makes better policy, and that makes for better decision making. I don’t think, though, that would mean that there would not have been angry people in Schaerbeek. The protestors were not a representative group, and you don’t need many of them to make a noise.

A citizen assembly, and a process like GoodMove, needs to be built into a process that goes from start to finish.

You need politicians who are willing to take responsibility for difficult decisions (unlike our Minister-President, who folded like a cheap deckchair at the first sign of trouble).

Politicians and officials need to work to build consensus on the overall approach, which might well include citizen assembly or deliberative activity to understand the full range of local opinion.

Locally, officials need to consult effectively on the detail of implementation, and most importantly give clear review points so people can see how things could change if they aren’t working.

And finally, they need to built the culture of trust and discussion among citizens that allows them the freedom to manoeuvre.

All this comes from a participative style of leadership, rather than the top-down sort, but also action in specific communities and among the general public.

It is possible to implement GoodMove without riots. In the City of Brussels, GoodMove has been implemented without any of the protests that have been seen elsewhere. Perhaps we will see them in the future, perhaps we are more passive than our Schaerbeekois neighbours, perhaps we are just better led.

However, whatever worked in Brussels, we need a lot more of it.

Reducing car traffic in a car-choked city with some of the worst air quality in Belgium is one of the easiest environmental decisions imaginable. Other climate choices will not be so simple.

As those choices become more difficult, politicians can’t use 100 assembly members as a human shield. They need to build the wider processes and create the culture of trust that will bring the public along with them. If they can do that - and it needs long-term commitment, then they will be better able to stand up to the people who protest, in the name of the people who participated, and the people who voted.