In the previous posts, I defined civil society and described its form -social infrastructure that stretches connection, trust and belonging beyond our personal networks of around 150 people; I explained how conversations are the currency of civil society, and that through them we can measure, in real time, the process of learning to live peaceably with each other; and I proposed how this communication translates into the action of mutual aid, exchange and barter of goods, and organic deliberative democracy.

In this fourth set of posts I will describe the impact of these interactions, starting with social capital, before moving on to the underlying power of civil society and concluding with enhancement of individual and collective well-being.

First, social capital. The quotation from Andy Haldane and David Halpern symbolises the widespread acceptance of the importance of social capital. Andy Halpern regularly discusses the concept in the Financial Times. The above quotation is from a publication from Demos and was funded by Local Trust, two highly respected civil society organisations.1 The concept of social capital is underpinned by a long and deep evidence base. Haldane and Halpern say it drives economic growth, the Holy Grail of the United Kingdom government, and indeed most administrations around the world. Yet the words social capital are absent from most public policy documents.

I think this is because social capital comes from civil society, from daily interactions between people in places and spaces, from the communicative action of mutual aid, exchanging, buying and selling goods, and deliberative democracy. There is no direct line to government policy. Plus, a point I will develop later on, civil society is organic, it is a self regulating system, it is not instrumental. There is no Director of Civil Society pulling the strings. There isn’t a tap the government can turn to increase the flow of social capital. (The flow can be increased by simultaneously turning several public policy taps in right direction, and turning others off altogether, but that is for later).

My experience over the last decade leads me to stress the value element of social capital. Communicative action has utility. We can put a price on it. Knowing people who are better or worse off, or who are older than us or younger, or who speak a different language has value. (A child with these connections will do better at school, and will have more choice in the job market and ultimately will earn more). Living near to a school that transcends economic difference between students, offers a rigorous, disciplined curriculum with shared moral outlook has value (All students in such schools will enjoy better education outcomes, and the cohesive effects will bridge divides in the community). Living in a place where children can walk to school, or where there are neighbours who can be trusted to walk your kids to school, and will look out for them on the street has value. (In these kinds of neighbourhoods, apart from the simple efficiencies of parenting, crime is lower). There is value in living in a community where you don’t have to worry about your neighbours doing you down, or strangers attacking you. (In these kinds of neighbourhoods, the cognitive capacity lost dealing with the darker side of human relationships can be invested in putting down roots, and contributing to social order and stability).

This value, this capital, this money in the bank, so to speak, that can be drawn on when needed, is built from the lived experience of having supported others or having been supported by others. It is built from the lived experience of the positive sum generated by trusting relationships as demonstrated by the 12 year olds playing the trust game. It is built also from the lived experience of having disagreed agreeably about hyperlocal political matters and finding consensus positions with neighbours.

A shared understanding of the world both feeds into and is generated by social capital. People living in communities rich in social capital will have a broadly consistent view of what is, in Habermas’ terms, true, right and sincere, and they will feel comfortable adapting that view over time.

Social capital and shared understanding sustains civil societies through difficult periods. I think of it as cash flow. A community with six months worth of social capital in the bank can weather the storms of pandemic, economic crisis, or natural catastrophe better than one with limited cash flow.

Tracy Hadden Loh served on Mount Rainier City Council in Maryland, but she is perhaps best known for her research on how people use places and spaces and economic exchange to structure decision making around hyper-local politics, outside of the formal political process.2 I call this organic, deliberative democracy. It is a part of what Habermas calls communicative action. I am imagining it is something akin to to discussions between members of nomadic tribes 10,000 years ago, or in Gernika six centuries ago, and today. This kind of deliberative democracy doesn’t involve sortition or citizens assemblies. It is rooted in conversations between people about day to day life and things that matter locally.

Hadden Loh shows how these conversations coalesce, first into what she calls ‘a web of association’, and then into representative local coalitions. This is where the real world problem solving takes place, the decline of the High Street described by Matt Hyde in his podcast for example. The conversations and activity can shape the way local people understand their communities, and the shared conclusions can feed into the formal process of representative democracy.

As I will show in later posts, civil society is also the source of major social change. I mentioned earlier, that Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett saw civil society as the catalyst for the shift from an ‘I’ society to a ‘we’ society in United States.3 It involves a process adjacent to organic deliberative democracy best described by Mancur Olsen in his book The Logic of Collective Action.4 He finds that small, highly disciplined groups concentrated on specific objectives are the most likely to make major change happen. Larger groups generally fail because it is harder to maintain discipline, and stay focused on the goal.

I have found that what I call ‘moral agents’, people who go against the grain of the dominant moral order tend to be the catalysts for major social change. They gather around them the small, disciplined groups described by Olsen. They stay focused on a single issue over extensive periods of time, at least a decade. Most fail. (Moral agents are like entrepreneurs. Most of their work fizzles out in a matter of months. Only the very few break through and change the world). Most groups are ‘grass roots’, operating without the apparatus of a formal organisation until the work nears fruition and there is widespread support for a previously unpopular idea, women voting for example.

I have mentioned some of the moral agents I have met over the last decade, Charlie Howard, Maff Potts and, Avril McIntyre, and in the coming posts I will bring many more into the story. I love these people for their determination, focus and moral outlook, but I don’t always agree with them. I am mindful when I read about the work of serious people seeking to undo progressive liberalism, and with whom I not only disagree but I also oppose, that they, too, are moral agents seeking to persuade the world of the legitimacy of their ideas.

In my earlier reflection on how civil society is defined, I noted the tendency for Europeans to take a broad conception and the United Kingdom a narrow view. The broad European conception includes the market. For reason that will become clear later on in the story, I am going to use the term ‘pure market’ to delineate things like Matt Hyde’s family business from corporate business, the corner shop versus one of the big four supermarkets in the United Kingdom. The pure market encapsulates exchange of goods with and without money, including barters and loans.

I have taken my lead from Jürgen Habermas whose conception of civil society, what he calls the ‘lifeworld’, the public sphere where people talk, debate and form opinions, includes the pure market.1 At Ratio we have studied and experimented with ways in which interchanges within the pure market strengthen connection in community, build trust and generate a sense of belonging.

We have studied the Self-Help Group movement in India. Its founder, Aloysius Prakash Fernandez, toiled for a decade in rural Indian communities testing different ways for women to come together and take control of their lives.2 The winning formula involves 20 economically poor women from the same places but often initially strangers to each other. They save together weekly, often tiny amounts of money at the beginning. The women can make loans to each other to stimulate enterprise, for instance buying chickens to breed and/or produce eggs. After three years, the groups can take a collective loan from an Indian bank, and group members can make larger loans to each other. These small and slowly increasing financial exchanges build a strong trust bond within Self Help Groups, and a deep sense of belonging to the 200 million other members across India. This is how the Self-Help Group movement became the lynchpin of India’s anti-poverty strategy.

I took this picture literally sitting at the feet of Jyoti Mhapsekar at her home in Mumbai. Jyoti is one of the founders of Stree Mukti Sanghatana -roughly translated as Women’s Liberation Organisation. She was relating the story of waste pickers, women who live and work on rubbish tips, recycling the detritus of city life. They organised into Self Help Groups, building connection and trust and gradually taking control of the business of recycling in Mumbai.

Another example, this time experimental. In our work with young people, generally 12 year olds with well developed minds but limited inhibition, so they are often very creative, we have used the trust game, a product of game theorists, to demonstrate how co-operation builds trust and generates a ‘positive sum’, meaning the group as whole gains as well as individual players.3 Typically we might have six to 10 young people in a group. Each has 10 pounds in Monopoly money. Player one is invited to give some of his money to player two. The banker triples the donation of player one. Player two decides how much money to return to player one. It might be nothing, it might be whatever was shared, it might be everything player two now holds. The game proceeds with player two and three, and then three and four until everyone has had a turn. We might do this for a couple of rounds, generating winners and losers, making a note of the collective gains. Before the second iteration we talk to the young people about trust, and give them the maxim ‘Nice, Consistent, Punish, Forgive’. It asks the students to be nice; assume that the other players will be fair; to be consistent so that other players can see their strategy; to punish those who don’t return much money to them, by giving the next player less on the next round; but to forgive them in the round after that. The players apply the maxim, and when the collective pot is counted it is greater than in the first iteration. There is a positive sum. Everyone benefits.

Matt Hyde is describing a real life example of Montesquieu’s gentle commerce described earlier. Within the communicative action of quotidian financial exchanges on the High Street, within groups of women in India, and in games 12 years olds play with Ratio, connection, trust and belonging is built.

Habermas talks of communicative action. In this and the next two posts I will concentrate on the action side of communication. Specifically I will explore three activities that generate social capital and shared understanding across civil society. How these activities are done matters as much as what they achieve. Terry Conroy radiates this idea.

The first activity is mutual aid, and that takes us to the work of Peter Kropotkin.1 His 1902 book is subtitled A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin sees co-operation as intrinsic to the human condition. His work was a corrective to Darwin and the idea of the survival of the fittest. Kropotkin is arguing that the success of most species is the product of co-operative behaviour. Once again, the ‘we’ serves the ‘I’.

Kropotkin also reflects on the way in which the state constrains natural patterns of co-operation. His theory played out at the beginning of the pandemic. When the state stuttered, people like Terry Conroy filled the space and started to organise around voluntary action and mutual aid. To Kropotkin, things are better absent the state, hence his being a champion of anarchism (the absence of rulers).

His thinking fits with one side of two arguments about the emergence of the state that I will elaborate later on in the story. The first position best set out by Thomas Hobbes states that anarchy (the absence of rulers) led to violence and war and a life that is, in Hobbes’ famous words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.2 The state is the least worst alternative to this awful situation. The second position, set out by Luke Kemp, finds that pre-state anarchy was a time of egalitarianism and democracy, and that it is the state that is the source of inequality, violence and war.3 Were he alive today, Kropotkin would be very much in Kemp’s camp.

Kropotkin suggests organisms and people survive and flourish through co-operative action. Reciprocal support leads groups of people to defend and care for each other. Reviewing this evidence, my mind strayed to the work of Erik Klinenberg on living alone.4 There are two sides to his argument. One, living alone is a new phenomenon. It was extremely rare in any society prior to the 1950s. Second, people who live alone in the modern era are more social with friends and neighbours than people who co-habit. Again, co-operation seems to be part of our nature.

The phrase ‘mutual aid’ was first used by Zoologist Karl Fedorovich Kessler. Kropotkin built on Kessler’s work, noting how civil society institutions like guilds -later trade unions- clubs and associations grew out of what we might call organic co-operation.

Terry Conway’s work lies between the organic and the institutional. Mutual aid emerged between people and between organisations, informal and formal. At the time of the pandemic, there was no template to work from, but make it work they did. Terry seems to understand the ecology of her community, and the sense of meaning that residents take from mutual aid. This is communicative action in practice.

At one level, the response to Covid-19 pandemic, and especially Terry’s experience, tends to support the Kropotkin thesis. In the first lockdown, 4,000 groups involving a million people emerged. The Office for National Statistics calculated that nearly half the adult population helped someone outside of their household, up from just over one in ten prior to the pandemic. A third of people helped someone they had not previously met. This behaviour bled into the recovery of social norms around neighbourliness.

That said, the Bennett Institute published good research that reveals the response to be uneven, at least with respect to formal, named groups, often underpinned by social media on which good data are available. (Most informal activity goes unmeasured).

Conversations, verbal and non-verbal, are the currency of civil society. Annie Ernaux’s observation of interchanges in a butcher’s shop reveal one of the many bad habits, millennia old habits, of humans, what Luke Kemp calls ‘status competition’, our possibly innate desire to appear better than others, and to display the difference.2 (I will write more about the darker angels of our nature later in the story).

A lot of human communication not only manages our darker traits, it also seeks to establish what is true, right, and sincere. Jürgen Habermas calls this communicative action.3 It is people giving reasons to one another and trying to agree about what is true in the world, what is right in relation to a shared understanding of norms, and how sincere are our intentions. When we speak we are making a claim about the truth. Our conversations question and defend these claims. It is an organic version of the scientific process. I am telling you what I believe to be true about civil society. Some of you are questioning the truth of these claims. The conversation leads me to adapt my ideas.

As mentioned in the last post, conversations are the currency of machine learning as well as civil society, and over the last decade Ratio has been using the former to help us understand the latter. Most of the analysis has focused on measuring connection, trust and belonging in groups as a proxy for the strength of civil society. But along the way, we are beginning to understand how language mirrors the patterns of social interaction. For example, we hear:

• Testing conversations, with people asking each other are we safe? Are we connected? Do we understand each other? Where the civil society context is strong, connection, safety and understanding can be taken for granted and these conversations become redundant.

• Learning conversations leading to questions such as how do you do things in this place/in this space? What are the rules, norms, and expectations of each other here? How do I fix this? Where can I buy this? What is the best school nearby? I have met a lot of people in public systems and civil society organisations wasting time on directories of services that are never read. The knowledge is held and communicated by local people.

• Entertaining conversations, including song, dance, joking around and eating together. When we gave £1,000 to over 300 groups of people to do good in their community, the great majority sought to create connection through having fun.

• Spiritual conversation, exploring what is beyond us, what do we collectively not understand. In the Ratio Talks podcast series On Religion, it was striking that where religious observance has dropped off, people have sought other means for spiritual connection, often less efficient than that offered by monotheistic religions.

• Punishing conversations to deal with the darker side of human nature such as the status competition in Annie Ernaux’s vignette, and free-loading, the rational taking advantage of others without reciprocity. Typically this might involve gossip, ridicule, shaming and shunning consistent with tactics used in the earlier story of Cephu and his Mbuti Pygmy tribe.

• Belonging and othering conversations such as stories about the virtues and vices of people from another group ranging from light hearted fun to full blown racism.

• Trust building conversations, which as I will describe in the following section, appear to emerge out of civil society functions of mutual aid, exchange, barter and trade, and deliberative democracy.

A lot of conversation appears to be talking for the sake of talking, reflecting on the weather, chatting about sport and, where I live, about food. But listen carefully, and you will find these exchanges lead into some version of the search for truth described in Habermas’ communicative action. I think of this as the continuous work of seeking to live peaceably with each other.

Habermas ties action to the communication. In the next three posts, I will describe the most powerful examples.

Ratio has used social media extensively in experiments on social networks, and for the most part I have found the effects on relationships to be either benign or a force for good. For example, we have used WhatsApp to give money directly to groups of people to do good in their community, to build networks of civil society organisations, and to support groups of people to collect and reflect on data on themselves, what we call Data Clubs.

At the same time, there appears to be an avalanche of evidence on social media harms, some of which has contributed to legislative change such as age restrictions in Australia and the United Kingdom.

I simply haven’t studied enough to be able to interpret these data. Some of the best known evidence suggesting significant harms to children and young people feels a little overstated. I am mindful that similar concerns were expressed about the iatrogenic effects of the printing press, radio and television, and ultimately the fears were not realised. But I need to do more work to properly understand.

Another challenge for my work is to tease out the effects of social media from the corrupting influence of corporate ownership of social media. A central part of the general theory is that effective civil society can be undermined or colonised by the state and/or by corporations. Would social media operated outwith corporate owners and their corralling algorithms be harmful?

What we can say for sure is that social media is now a primary social infrastructure for civil society. And, as will be seen in the coming posts, the data generated by virtual exchanges is a robust test of this general theory of the relationship between civil society and state.

Places connect many tens or hundreds of thousands of people. They provide a sense of affinity and belonging. This connection is primarily subjective. It is in an idea in our heads, in the heads of most of the people in a place. We meet only a tiny proportion of the people who live in ‘our’ places.

The function of face to face contact is delivered by multiple spaces that both bring together people who already know each other and, fundamental to an effective civil society, they connect strangers.

Social infrastructure again provides the frame. Ray Oldenburg wrote extensively about ‘third spaces’ between work and home such as coffee shops and pubs but also parks and civic buildings like libraries and leisure centres.1 Some connecting spaces are large, like the local football stadium, some are small -most of the 40,000 football clubs in England. Many like the Basque Txokos and community centres are organised, others, parents gathering at the school gates for example, are entirely ad hoc.

Oldenburg notes that third spaces don’t restrict agency. People are free to come and go as they please. Consequently, spaces can cross socio-economic, class and ethnic boundaries. They bring together those who would not otherwise meet and, without strategy or instruction, encourage conversations about subjects many might otherwise have avoided.

The French philosopher Montesquieu popularised the theory of gentle commerce to explain the expansion of business in the 17th Century. He found that economic growth rested not only on the self interest and competitive spirit of business people but on the co-operation and good manners required for economic exchange. All such exchanges, monetary or otherwise, require trust. I will give you this, and you will give me that. From Montesquieu’s perspective this gentle commerce shapes moral behaviour. Market interactions produce norms of reciprocity, predictable behaviour and therefore trust. All this plays out when we nip into the corner shop.

In some respects, religious institutions perfected the art of the third space. When I analyse data from Meta on social connection it appears that going to church, temple, mosque or other places of worship is the primary way of meeting new people in the United States, whereas clubs do most of the heavy lifting in the United Kingdom.

Places and third spaces stretch social connection beyond Dunbar’s number. Third spaces have three distinct qualities. One, as mentioned, the interaction is face to face. Second, the context accommodates a steady flow of strangers. Members of a Txoko generally cook with friends, but they will expect to meet new people. Third, the strangers we meet in a third space typically live nearby. We may not get to know them well, but we might expect to see them in the street from time to time.

As will be seen, the different qualities of places, spaces and other forms of social infrastructure are designed to make civil society work effectively and therefore make a significant impact on our health and well being.

In this part of the story I will describe the function and impact of civil society, what it looks like, how it works and what it produces. I will start with form.

Civil society takes the form of social infrastructure, the contexts in which people connect. Much of this doubles as physical infrastructure, such as housing, factories, offices and transport links that get people from A to B. All the components in the expansion and re-birth of Dagenham.

Our ancient ancestors were by necessity nomadic, moving in groups of 30 to 50 from place to place. Climate change after the Pleistocene created large swathes of fertile land and people learned to farm, and store food, and therefore settle. Places like Tell es-Sultan formed, growing from around 2,000 people 8,000 years ago to around 25,000 today. Tell es-Sultan is modern day Jericho in Palestine.

The next great shift came with the Industrial Revolution from rural to urban. Today over half the world’s population lives in cities, and the United Nations predicts the proportion to rise to over two-thirds by 2050.

Yet, as Robin Dunbar’s research shows, the basic structure and size of friendship groups has remained the same, about 150, limited by our cognitive capacity. But a person born in Tell es-Sultan today will feel a strong affinity to the six million or so people in the Palestinian diaspora. I feel some kinship to the half a million people in Liverpool, the city of my birth, a significant proportion of whom do not share my ethnicity. I am by birth English, and, despite Brexit, I remain European. This broader sense of belonging is generally to places, plural, and the social infrastructure of civil societies, plural, is a binding agent.

The social infrastructure shapes civil society. It provides continuity. (It can also resist change). Show me pictures of typical buildings in three Northern cities and I would be confident of identifying them by their architectural style. I might be able to do the same from pictures of people dressed up for an evening out. In the past, I could do it from the colour of the buses (central government and corporate colonisation has made that more difficult). In the North, listening to accents would make the task easy. The social infrastructure of place tells us where we are, and as I will argue later in the story, as a species knowing where we are is important.

Places also embrace, adapt and resist external forces. The Dagenham story reflects a mixture of global capital and state planning. Dagenham is also a working class story. The town had strong links to Ford in Halewood, Liverpool, and to other ‘motor cities’ around the United Kingdom connected, not least, by trade unions, one of the strongest of civil society institutions in the expansion years. The film Made in Dagenham about a strike by women machinists at the Ford plant is also a social history of changing cultural styles in the 1960s. And then there is religion. The Christian churches that were built in the pre-war Dagenham expansion have been supplemented, and in some cases taken over by, mosques and gurdwaras.

Places stretch civil society well beyond Dunbar’s 150. This extended ‘we’ brings extended benefits, and challenges. To some extent each place has a distinctive civil society, which is to say relationships between people and between networks of people in each place are unique. At the same time, to some extent, there is an overarching civil society shared by everyone on the planet.

The more time I spent in ‘the contexts in which we relate’, anything from a teepee erected by the Association of Camerados in a hospital foyer to a ‘self-reliant group’ in Mumbai, part of a movement of 200 million women in India, I began to understand I was looking at civil society, and that civil society was the foundation of social life. In this post I explain how I came to that position, and in this section I will explain how civil society shapes our lives.

The empirical argument

As I have observed, nearly all contexts are relational. There are exceptions. It is hard to argue that switching the gas supply from poisonous ’town’ gas to natural gas is relational. But the changed context saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Is making car radios integral to cars and therefore impossible to steal relational? Probably not, but the new context made a big dent in crime figures.

But putting a teepee in a hospital foyer past which several thousand people, many extremely stressed, walk each day? Well that is another matter. The Association of Camerados is a movement that says ‘all we need is friends and purpose’ and, it was pretty obvious to them that the teepee could change the stressful context of a hospital. We found people were naturally drawn to the teepee with over 1,000 people entering each week. A third of those going into the tent sought a spiritual connection, and two-thirds social connection. We measured an impact on altruism and mutual aid.

I began to see how people appear naturally drawn to using relationships to create life enhancing contexts. I was captivated by a little known study by Konrad Elsdon, John Reynolds and Susan Stewart with the inauspicious title Voluntary Organisations: Citizenship, Learning and Change.1 Their survey of ‘voluntary’ activity revealed 12 million people were involved in 1.3 million groups and mostly small organisations in England. Elsdon and colleagues called them ‘small democracies.’ They describe the benefits for the 12 million participants as a “growth in confidence, …. self-discovery, freedom in forging relationships and undertaking tasks, belief in oneself and in one’s potential as a human being and an agent (to) …. change both the context of the organisation’s objectives and in others”. (P47).

Of course, in the many partnerships Ratio forged over the decade, I also saw the uncomfortable side of forging a ‘we’ society such as gossip, shame and shunning, not so different from what Andrew Turnbull observed when living with the Mbuti Pygmies.2 I say ‘uncomfortable’ but I kept in mind the evidence that these tactics help to keep order in social groups, and maintaining or extending the common good.

But the difficult side of relationships forced me to ask ‘what was civil’ about the contexts in which I found myself. I began to seek ‘uncivil’ contexts. Airports are one example. The agency of the majority of people in an airport is constrained. Passengers are ushered through security, passport control, shopping malls, and places to eat and drink before getting in line for the flight. Few travellers talk meaningfully to people other than the family and friends they are travelling with. Nearly all conversations are transactional. Exchanges are pleasant, if a little formulaic, and there is neither violence nor agon. But would one call it civil? Probably not.

Unfortunately, too many public contexts are beginning to resemble airports. In the era of new public management, there have been too many well run hospitals where successful outcomes and avoiding scandal is achieved thanks to an uncivil, transactional context that leads publicly spirited doctors and nurses to forget to introduce themselves to patients or refer to patients by name. This approach generates short term efficiencies, but is ultimately counter-productive (there is a robust evidence base on the health benefits of what used to be called ‘bedside manner’.)

The definitional argument

In the United Kingdom in the last half century, we have tended to associate civil society with civil society organisations. There is no definition to justify this association, it’s just that the larger, registered civil society organisations (and volunteers) are relatively easy to count.

In Europe, definitions of civil society are much broader. Hegel places civil society as everything that sits between family -the private sphere- and the state.3 He includes economic exchange, work, legal relations, and social institutions that manage conflict and dependency. Civil society, for Hegel, is by definition unstable. It both enables freedom and generates disorder.

Jürgen Habermas builds on Hegel. He calls civil society ‘the lifeworld’, the shared background of meanings, norms, identities, and everyday communication through which our species arrives at mutual understanding and coordinates action.4 The state has the potential to colonise civil society via bureaucratic rules, expert management, and administrative control. When civil society is colonised, Habermas observes, mutual understanding is arrived at through incentives, regulations, and consumption patterns. These kind of ideas led me to think about the relationship between civil society and state, and later to explore finding a balance between the power of each.

There is much more to be said about definition. For the moment all the matters is this broader sense of civil society. Habermas has the lifeworld. The French use the term la vie associative, and I hear some analysts, Cormac Russell in Ireland for example, speaking of the associative life to refer to the power of social connection to shape both ‘I’ and ‘we’. These wider definitions of civil society are a better fit with what I have seen in society and community during my work for Ratio.

My shorthand definition of civil society has evolved into relationships between people, and between social networks, although, for reasons that will become clear in the coming posts, I am drawn to Buddhist psychologist John Vervaeke’s phrase ‘an ecology of people, practices and places’.5

The next task is to set out what all this means in practice. What does civil society as defined here look like in terms of its form, function, and impact on our lives?

How does Adam Green and the Prison Choir Project create a safe context within a high risk environment? The last set of posts have described three sets of relationships that are fundamental to answering that question. I have seen them at work in nearly all the innovations with which Ratio has been involved this last decade. Not just in micro interventions like Prison Choir Project, but also in complex system change operating across a local or regional government area.

Each relationship shapes, and is shaped by the context in which we live, work, learn and play. The first of the three sets of relationships operates through agency, our capacity to make choices, act and impose our will on the world, individually and collectively. Collective agency is the primary agent, since it shapes and is shaped by individual agency. By changing the physical environment -working in the chapel- and the people relating to each other -prisoners alongside officers and professional musicians- and the reason for being together -the disciplined and repetitive rehearsal of beautiful music for public performance- Adam Green creates a context in which participants see the potential to collectively shape their world. They may fail. But they have a sense of ‘together we can do this’.

This context shapes behaviours, and most importantly via the relationship between, on the one hand healthy conflict -the agon- and, on the other hand, behaviours that allow one person or group to restrict the agency of another, for example violence and psychological aggression. Where people come together, conflict is ubiquitous. We don’t all want the same things. You will know this from your family life. You experience this at work. It is part of community. As difficult conversations about how we live peaceably with each other give way to violence and psychological aggression, agency becomes restricted, ‘I’ begins to eat away at ‘we’, and minority groups -the rich, those brandishing historical power, those grabbing power- come to dominate. In the prison chapel, the context is one of agon.

The third relationship is between ‘we’ and ‘I’. In the prison chapel, the context is transitory. It exists during the rehearsals, and it endures for a few months after the public performance. But it can spread much more widely, and last much longer. I previously mentioned Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s analysis that suggests the United States became a ‘we’ society and no longer an ‘I’ society in 1925, a context forged, they say by civil society.1 It lasted until 1965, as the authors like to say, tongue in cheek, ‘at about the time when Dylan switched from acoustic to electric guitar’.

These three relationships operate through context. They shape and are shaped by the context. They strongly influence our social networks. They matter when it comes to the decisions we make collectively and individually. They therefore guide our behaviour to others.

As I say, this argument will manifest itself again and again in the evidence and policy examples throughout the remainder of this story. But first there is a gap to fill. At the heart of the diagram, there is a box marked ‘contexts in which we relate’. Now is the time to give this box more definition.

The evidence building out from Libet type experiments can be interpreted to suggest that all human behaviour is shaped by context, and that human agency is a myth (I will review this literature, and its policy implications in later posts). As I have explained previously, my work suggests that context is powerful. But I also find that agency -our capacity to make choices, act and impose our will on the world- is fundamental to health and well-being. My explanation depends on the existence of free will, on the possibility of people having control over their lives, and the potential to act independently of social norms and institutions.

I will be making this argument on two levels. The first is individual agency, that I decide on what I do in this life, and you decide on what you do in your life. The second is collective agency, that people living together in a neighbourhood, or people working together in a factory or in an industry, or students studying in the same university can generate a sense of ‘together we can’ and have the capacity to make collective decisions, exert a collective will, that they can take collective control of social situations, and impose collective power, and so change their world. I will also show that collective agency shapes individual agency.

For the moment, I will put these ideas on hold. I mention them now because they form part of one of the three balances that underpin the general theory of the relationship between civil society and state.

The relationship in question is between individual and collective agency on the one hand, and the contexts that shape that agency on the other. I am helped here by the English sociologist Anthony Giddens and what he calls ‘structuration theory’.3 (It is an ugly word, indicating how social structures are formed and how they influence behaviour).

Giddens would say that context doesn’t determine what we do, but neither are we free from context. Instead there is something akin to an admix. Context shapes agency (which shapes behaviour), and what we do shapes our contexts.

I am reminded here of Rebeca Sandu’s work showing that agency doesn’t always translate into behaviour.4 Many of the young people she worked with decided to stop being homeless, or to stop taking drugs, but didn’t follow through. And we all have experience of making decisions that have unintended consequences. So the relationship between context and agency is, like life itself, messy.

The clarity comes from the patterns and routines in social life. We come to recognise the rules, norms and resources in our communities. But how, and where, and by what mechanism? That is where this story goes next.

A few posts ago, I mentioned my doctoral graduate Amelia Kohm’s study of why good people do bad things.1 Her answer is context. In a summary of her work Amelia writes: “Most researchers today agree that how individuals act in a particular situation is not only a function of their personalities but also of the conditions and social dynamics they encounter. Research suggests that anti-social behaviour is stable across time and circumstances for only a small percentage of people (three to nine percent) and decidedly unstable for most others, suggesting the importance of contextual factors”.

I took the story of the Zimbardo experiment from Amelia’s paper. It is shocking but micro. Jürgen Habermas’ work is assuredly macro.2 He grew up with fascism, and devoted his working life to explaining how societies collapse into barbarism. His explanation for Nazi Germany is the colonisation by the state of what he calls the ‘lifeworld’ -shared meanings, cultural traditions, social norms, and personal identities that make everyday communication and understanding possible. In this context, people like me and you are capable of becoming the apparatchiks who organise and manage the transport and execution of millions of people.

Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s work lies somewhere between the micro and the macro.3 In their ’s-frame’ health is shaped by social determinants of the places in which we live and work. This contrasts with the i-frame that asks the individual to take responsibility for exercising, eating properly, not drinking too much and accepting every invitation to be screened for cancer.

There is a bit of i-frame and s-frame in the way context operates as a change agent. Some contexts simply take away opportunities from individuals. Here are two famous examples.

The following graph brings together different sources of data to summarise the change in the rates of suicide for men and women in England and Wales since 1901. It is a story of decline. Rates were falling from the 1960s but the drop accelerated between 1967 and 1977 when gas stoves were converted from coal derived ‘town gas’ that contained sufficient carbon monoxide to kill to natural gas that is safe.

Ron Clarke and Pat Mayhew looked at this evidence and concluded that changing gas supplies accounted for 40 per cent of the reduction in suicides.4 They were intrigued by people not seeking alternative methods to kill themselves once the opportunity of death by gas was removed.

Clarke developed this idea into his crime as opportunity thesis. It says certain contexts encourage all of us to break the law, or at least social norms. It is consistent with Mancur Olson’s theory of free-loading, that if we can get away with something Scot-free, we will.5 (Olsen will appear several times in this story). Clarke’s research didn’t bother with the potential criminals. It focused on designing contexts that reduced opportunities for crime. Better security in houses and cars followed. It turned out that posting an alarm on a house deterred break-ins in all the neighbouring houses. Theft of radios from car dashboards was eliminated. Crime rates plummeted, as summarised in the next diagram.

Context acts as a change agent in another way. It can change relationships between people. This is more in line with the s-frame. Zimbardo’s experiment is an uncomfortable example. More uplifting are the results of a natural experiment within the Great Smokey Mountains Study led by E. Jane Costello and William Copeland and colleagues starting in 1992.6 Three years into the work, which traced the mental health of 1,420 children aged nine to 13 years, part of the sample benefited from an increase in household income averaging twenty per cent. Relationships between parents improved, alcohol and drug consumption decreased and children’s mental health and education outcomes rose.

Another relational example. For her doctoral studies, Amelia Kohm replicated the work of Christina Salmivalli that reduced bullying between students in Finnish schools.7 Scandinavia has a strong track record in this area. The Swedish-Norwegian psychologist Dan Olweus led the way with a programme to reward pro-social behaviour in classrooms. Salmivalli changed the relationship between bullies, bullied and bystanders, increasing the likelihood of the latter group intervening and not turning a blind eye to bullying.

In this second class of context as change agent, relational bonds and obligations are integral to the change mechanisms. Reciprocal bonds and obligations form naturally in communities, but they can be enhanced. And, as Habermas shows, if they are stripped away, the consequences are dire.

Criminologist Manuel Eisner supported by his sons trawled through books of medieval nobility -the privileged class of their time- and found that a third had murdered, and another third had been murdered. Violence was the norm. In the seminal study that followed, and as the following graph illustrates, Eisner found that violence has decreased century on century since the 1500s.2 Most of us are appalled by the wars in Gaza, Sahel, Sudan and Iran, to name but a few, or the random homicides on our streets, but the uncomfortable truth is we are safer from violence today than at most other points in the history of our species.

The story told in this Substack explains this downward trend.

One might imagine that the opposite of violence is peace, love and understanding. But this isn’t what I have seen as I have immersed myself in communities in the United Kingdom, Spain, India and the United States this last decade. What I encounter, even in the happiest and healthiest contexts, are ambiguity, negotiation, contradiction and tension. This is social life, captured in Gillian Rose’s words of the “difficult work of the middle” or mediation “that demands we engage with the anxiety, suffering, and political compromises of modern life” and step away from the “fantasy of mending the world.”3

Rose also uses the Greek word ‘agon’ meaning a contest or gathering, and refers to the intense struggle of living a good life in harmony with others. Agon keeps violence at bay. When agon ends, violence begins.

The modern world urges us towards resolution, to an outcome. The state is structured to deliver outcomes. But social life is not. As Rose concludes, moral order and moral responsibility are born and developed in agon, in the difficult middle.

Given it so difficult to relate, how is it we have become so social? Christopher Boehm is among many anthropologists who have shown how altruism and co-operation is born of self-interest.1 The collective ‘we’ benefits the solitary ‘I’. Each ‘I’ recognises the benefits and works hard to shape the ‘we’ to protect the future gains.

Boehm’s work is based on hunter-gatherers. He studies our ancestors 10,000 years ago, and he tests his findings with the five or so million people who live in contemporary hunter-gather groups.

The very act of coming together into a tribe is to recognise the positive sum generated by collective action. By working together, hunter-gatherer families can eat more for less effort.

The story of Cephu at the top of the page comes from the work of anthropologist Andrew Turnbull, and is widely cited in Boehm’s work. Turnbull lived with the Mbuti Pygmies in the Congo. Cephu was caught taking an unfair proportion of meat from a hunt. Historically, the punishment for cheating is death, and Boehm shows that, even today, rates of violent retribution in hunter-gatherer groups are higher than in mainstream societies. Execution deters future cheating, but it also robs the tribe of an able bodied hunter.

Cephu experiences the millennia old relational mechanisms of social control. His reputation is marked out in gossip across the group, holding Cephu accountable for his behaviour. Shame is used so that others in the group can anticipate the potential damage to their reputation if they behave like Cephu. A moral standard is reinforced not only by collective policing, but also by it getting into the heads of other tribe members. The moral standard is internalised, and nobody is physically injured in the process. Cephu not only continues to hunt, he works harder, acts more generously, and shares more as he seeks to make amends.

This story of a stronger ‘we’ built from the self-interest of ‘I’ continued beyond the domination of hunter-gatherer tribes ten millennia ago, and into contemporary social life. Emile Durkheim talks about the punitive power of small, traditional, homogenous moral communities in his book The Division of Labour in Society written in 1893.2 In it ‘we’ benefits ‘I’, and the ‘I’ shapes the ‘we’ to optimise the gains. The shaping is not pleasant. Gossip, shaming, ostracism, and, in the last resort, violence. These too are core elements of contemporary social relationships.

“‘I’m coming your way now, please spare some change, paper is welcome too.’ His sense of humour is appreciated, people laugh. He receives a lot of money; to the passengers who give something he bawls, ‘Have a nice day!’ And to the passengers who give nothing, ‘Have a crap day!’ Those who laugh are on his side. As he leaves the carriage he yells: ‘Well, folks, see you tomorrow.’ Everyone roars with laughter. His approach is excellent in that it respects the social hierarchy. I’m homeless, I drink and I don’t work -quite the opposite of you. He does not denounce social values, he reaffirms them. A buffoon, he is there to keep his travelling audience at a fair distance from the social reality, poverty and alcoholism, represented by himself. A role he performs instinctively, and with great talent.”

Put yourself on the RER as the homeless person taunts the commuters. There is a lot to process.There isn’t a right or wrong thing to do. Giving money and not giving money are both defensible positions. The mirror held up by the homeless man may or may not make you feel uncomfortable. You may or may not be strongly influenced by the response of your fellow passengers. (Did everyone roar with laughter?) All of these dilemmas are relational. The business of relating is one the most difficult aspects of life. And not just in relatively unusual encounters like a homeless person on an RER train. Relationships at home are challenging. Relationships in schools and work are challenging. Relationships are challenging. There is a lot to process. Relating consumes huge amounts of our cognitive processing power.

The relational capabilities of humans have evolved, much more so than other species. But they remain limited. The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar found that the neo-cortex of our brains has expanded over the millennia to the point where we can maintain stable relationships with around 150 people. This is ‘Dunbar’s number’. Historically, the number is consistent with the size of villages, military units, and church congregations.

Other species have smaller neo-cortexes. The neo-cortex of a Chimpanzee is roughly a third of that found in a human, and Chimpanzees are able to cope with proportionally fewer close relationships.

As the graph taken from Robin Dunbar’s research shows, the human brain’s ability to process human relationships evolved significantly over a period two or million years. And then, about 10,000 years ago, the improvements all but ceased.

And yet, at the same time, our ability to live more peaceably with each other has increased. We remain a violent species, but violence is decreasing. Altruism appears to be increasing. We continue to be constrained by Dunbar’s number, but most of us co-exist in communities of tens of thousands, and are part of cities of hundreds of thousands, and travel to work areas of several million people.

We have become more ‘we’, and on average, our species has become healthier and wealthier. How so? I am going to argue that most of the work is done through three sets of interlocking relationships.

Chief Executive of an Integrated Chair Board: We find ourselves caught in many traps of our own making. We incentivise patients to die in hospital, for instance offering the latest experimental treatment. About half of people now die in hospital. So the language and culture of caring for people dying at home -they call it death literacy- is weakened. Most people want to die at home. Health professionals don’t want people to die in hospital. We are short of beds. But here we are.

I am not here to represent the world as it should be. What follows is a story, told by someone who only started studying this field a decade ago, and so recounted with humility, about the world as it is. Or, at least, as I understand it to be given the evidence before me.

This isn’t going to be a romantic story. It isn’t about the glories of community or the failings of the big, bad state. The history of our species is one of violence. The antidotes to that violence include shaming, ridicule, gossip and invoking the wrath of gods. We humans are drawn to power and hierarchy, and to identifying some advantage ‘our’ group has over others. Social relationships are difficult and messy. But, agonisingly slowly, we have begun to figure it out. The state has helped and it has hindered but, again, the overarching story has been one of progress. There is still a long way to go, but over the millennia violence has declined and altruism increased. This is a story of how that happened, and what it tells us about future public policy.

The problem

The contemporary challenge is the culture of ‘I’. Alexis de Tocqueville writing about the United States at the beginning of the 19^th Century equated ‘I’ with individualism, and the imbalance of personal liberty and the common good.1 Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett use a wide array of data to demonstrate how the United States switched from an ‘I’ society between 1850 and 1925 to a ‘we’ society between 1925 and 1965 and back to ‘I’ thereafter.2 They conclude that the great advances in human health and well-being are generated by ‘we’.

Nick Chater and George Loewenstein show how individualism seeped into public policy in the United Kingdom.3 They juxtapose an ‘i-frame’ with an ’s-frame’. The former encourages people and public policy to blame individuals for their personal struggles such as obesity, school failure, or not saving enough for old age. The ’s-frame’, by contrast, puts the focus on the context in which we live. As Chater and Loewenstein put it, outcomes depend on the rules of the game and not the players. Ipso facto, we need to change the rules not the players.

My analysis picks up this theme. For me the starting point is relationships between people, and between networks of people. For reasons that will become clear, I call this civil society. A ‘we’ society is generated when the state and civil society balance each other and channel the strong influences of capital, corporations and religion.

A lack of equilibrium undermines the equally powerful capacity of state and civil society to keep us healthy, maintain a vibrant economy and respond to existential challenges like climate change. The state can get in the way of civil society, and civil society can get in the way of the state. In the last three decades, bolstered by a culture of ‘I’ and shaped by the ‘i-frame’ the state has diminished the power of civil society and, in so doing, run down the capacity of civil society to maintain its part of the bargain.

The theory

My response to the problem is framed by a general theory of the relationship between state and civil society, or relationships between people and between networks of people (I will define civil society in full next week). The theory is built, bottom up as they say, from the evidence about how people live peaceably with each other, drawn from research and multiple small experiments. The theory and the lived experience on which the theory is founded fundamentally challenge the way we have been seeing the world. As I tell the story I will set out two dozen or more propositions that are at odds with contemporary thinking about relationships, social networks, community, and power.

The general theory appears to have utility in a broad range of contexts, for example in my work with Katherine Zappone on understanding movements for social change, extending democracy and evolving what Katherine calls ‘an inclusive statecraft’.4 We feel the ideas can inform the response to the linked existential threats of climate change, uncontrolled migration and unethical machine learning.

But my primary interest is to bring evidence to bear on public policy, and address the problems described by public system leaders at the top of the page.

Relational social policy

The general theory of the relationship between state and civil society indicates a series of radical changes to public policy. Over the next month, I will elaborate this idea. The following summary uses the five principal levers for system change set out by Dana Meadows.5

First, a relational social policy demands a paradigm away from the doctrine of new public management, shaped by the culture of individualism and the i-frame and towards a culture of ‘we’ and an s-frame.* The general theory supports a new paradigm in which the state finds an effective and dynamic equilibrium with the power of civil society.

Second, the goals, structures and rules of public policy, what Meadows calls the ‘mindset’, can evolve so that:

• the focus is population level outcomes that are supported by a well informed public

• it is acknowledged that, using Lin Ostrom’s words, a co-production of state and civil society will be the most effective way of achieving population level outcomes,6 and

• there is a rebalancing of state investments:

  • From fixing to connecting

  • From services to meet individual need to shaping places and spaces that encourage people to be their better selves

  • From siloed service mentality to whole system approaches that embrace the power of relationships between people, and between peoples.

Third, the objectives for population level change can be agreed by people in place using the power of organic deliberative democracy and, where necessary, extending democracy with citizens assemblies. In my conversations with people around the United Kingdom, I get the impression that people are most bothered by safety, health and security, but this could be decided from place to place.

Fourth, the new paradigm can usefully unleash the power of civil society to innovate, respond to collective challenge, co-produce outcomes like safety, health and security, and hold government to account.

Fifth, there is scope for a radical change in the incentives, sanctions and constraints for public systems. I will share dozens of examples as this story unfolds. The following gives a flavour. How about ceasing inspection processes that incentivise families to move their offspring between schools, and for schools to ease out or exclude low performing pupils.

The testing

The general theory of the relationship between state and civil society is just as it says on the tin; a theory. It is, as will be seen, supported by a lot of evidence, but it isn’t proven. So the story extends to a series of large scale experiments, exploiting the benefits of power devolved to strategic and local authorities in England, to test the theory. They include exploring new ways to re-integrate the 900,000 English children out of school; local people recovering agency and literacy about death and dying and reducing deaths in hospital; ending police stop and search as a mechanism to reduce crime and improve black mental health; radically reducing the proportion of economically deprived families being assessed by social workers -currently one-in-five of children aged five years or less- and radically increasing normative social connection between families with young children; and achieving analogous re-balancing of adult social care.

I am a trained researcher. I know how to survey, do experiments, and measure changes in health and development. We started to bend our knowledge to the next context. We collaborated with philanthropic foundations to give hundreds of thousands of pounds to ordinary people to do good in their communities, and measured the impact on connection, trust and belonging. We have used game theory to build trust between school children. And we regularly use machines to measure social networks. But the empirical work alone was never going to be sufficient.

I am happy in the library. I have read book after book, and article after article on the place of relationships and social networks in human flourishing. Much of this literature is ignored, but it provides another foundation for this story.

But there is a lot that is interesting that isn’t written, and I am always interested in ideas that nestle between what people say or write. The Lloyds Bank Foundation supported us to set up reading groups of practitioners and policy makers to find those ideas. And we started the podcast Ratio Talks to learn from people in communities, movements, academia and government around the world: people who think differently about the world. This is how I learned about community power, religion and moral agents who change the world.

We sat alongside free spirits like Charlie and Maff, and innovators in civil society organisations, helping them to learn and simultaneously drawing out generalisable knowledge that could be useful across society.

And we have been fortunate to collaborate with local government leaders who recognise that the game is up, that business as usual is not sustainable, that the supply of adult social care services cannot keep up with demand or that the incentivising a million or so children and young people to stay out of education may improve school outcomes but that it isn’t good for society. Some of them came and supported us to think about alternative models.

I have tried to build on ’s work on one to one relationships summarised in the last post. Rebeca explained how a relationship changes how people think and act. I want to explain how communities of people change how we think and act.

I was helped by one of my doctoral graduates Amelia Kohm who studied how context explained the bad behaviour of good people.3 In certain conditions law abiding people, me and you included, do things of which we are ashamed.

I will develop that evidence. It is compelling. But at its heart, not always but mostly, the context appears to be shaped by relationships between people, or between networks of people. That shows up in robust evidence revealing significant differences in health and well-being between communities, even between those adjacent to each other. But we don’t need the evidence. We feel the differences in our sense of safety. We see the differences in the health and vitality of residents. We hear the differences in conversations in cafés and pubs.

In economically developed nations, it is impossible to explain relationships between people or the differences in health and well-being from one place to another without factoring in the state, particularly the welfare state. In the second half of the last century, the growing welfare state seemed to deliver only positive impacts on community relationships and health and well-being outcomes. But that statement no longer holds. In the coming posts, I will share plenty of examples of the state undermining community relationships and having negative impact on outcomes.

This led me to explore the question, can the state be relational? A lot of moving parts are needed to find the answer. There is the role of context, and the contributions of relationships between people within a context. There is the relationship between community and the state. As I pushed deeper I realised that religion, capital and corporations played a disproportionate role. And then there is the challenge Rebeca Sandu addressed with respect to one-to-one relationships, how does this get into the body, in other words how does it change what individuals and collectives think and do?

Is it all about relationships? In the early stages of the work, I found it hard to find the words to tell that story. For the first three or more years, I failed all of Liz Kendall’s tests. It took a lot of new knowledge from the diverse sources described in the next post to help me make sense of it all.

at Ratio has spent most of the last decade focused on the first bullet at the end of the previous piece; how one to one relationships influence health and well-being.

She studied the lives of young people in really difficult straits who formed relationships analogous to that of Sarah and Almira in the United Kingdom and the United States. Rebeca calls people like Sarah ‘relational workers’. They see their role as forming deep, meaningful and long-term relationships with young people, and connecting them to social supports.

Relational workers relate; they don’t treat. They connect; they don’t fix. They converse; they don’t teach.

After meeting Alan, Asha, Badda, Lindford and the others, Rebeca sketched four letters on a piece of paper.

It was the beginning of an idea that she has now elaborated in a series of academic articles and a summary report.1 She is now applying the ideas with a network of relational workers in the United Kingdom.

The R indicates a strong relationship (and nothing more). A lot of the conversations between relational workers and people like Asha are about the weather or sport or Taylor Swift.

The C1 is for cognition. When relationships are strong, people like Almira begin to entertain new ideas. She might ask herself ‘maybe I could go to college?’ It doesn’t mean she will act on the thought. But the thought is there.

The A is for agency, the sense that as much as I was disadvantaged, I am still in control of my own destiny. If I am going to go to college, if I am going to quit drugs, I am going to be the one to do it.

The C2 is for connection. The emotional rewards of a good relationship are significant. Once you have one, you want others. So young people who benefit from a relational worker shake up their social network to include more people who bring the emotional rewards and fewer people who undermine those rewards.

Rebeca has developed her argument into something much more sophisticated and useful for society. But even her early ideas had me thinking. If this is how a relationship can get into the body, how might a community exert its influence and could the relationship between state and community make a difference? And if it did make a difference, how so?

1

read the summary report here

The Relational Worker

882KB ∙ PDF file

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A summary report of five academic articles about how one to one relationships change human health and development, and who is good at relating.

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The story starts with Alan, Asha, Badda, Lindford and about 15 other young people who were homeless, suffering with their mental health, sometimes misusing drugs and alcohol, and all out of kilter with society. Here is a picture, greyed out to anonymise, of some of the group having fun at a bowling alley.

When I met them, I led a team of what are called ‘intervention scientists’, people who study the effectiveness of curricula to improve social and emotional regulation, or of treatments for disorders of the mind, or programmes to re-integrate homeless people back into society. We studied how to fix people’s problems. Ours was a world of epidemiology, experimental trials, and scaling what works. We were good at it. And we had an edge over other teams. We knew how to apply evidence in the real world. Our work was used by governments and big philanthropy around the world.

We felt well set up to fix Alan, Asha, Badda, Lindford and the other young people they represented across the United Kingdom. But it turned out our methods were useless in this context. We couldn’t explain the aetiology, how the problems occurred in the first place, and so we were clueless when it came to proposing interventions.

Alan, Asha and the others were not so hamstrung. They said “it’s all about relationships”. I was sceptical. So was my team. The young people elaborated. “It’s relationships that get us into this situation, and it’s relationships that will get us out.” In elaborating this idea, they seldom mentioned public services, and when they did it was never in flattering terms.

We learned a lot from this work1 but we only seemed to scratch the surface of what the young people knew. A small group of us left the team and set up Ratio. We gave ourselves a decade to explore the proposition ‘it’s all about relationships’. Our initial focus was:

• how one to one relationships influence health and well-being

• why some communities foster healthy relationships better than others, and

• the impact of the relationship between communities and state services.

We gave ourselves a decade to find out. That decade ends next year.

This substack series summarises what we have found with respect to the last two of the three bullets above. Before I get to that, in the next post, I will briefly summarise what we learned about the first bullet about one to one relationships.