Policy and Practice for Inclusive Statecraft
Last week we reflected on the U.K. election and the Labour Party’s massive majority at Westminster.
We asked what it would take for Labour to secure the three terms needed for national recovery. It will require more than delivering on the mission. It will mean changing the way that politics is done and how it is seen to be done, between as well as at elections.
In broad terms we called for a statecraft that views civil society as an equal partner, and relational social policy that focuses as much on the places where people live as the services they need. We claimed that social change can fuel economic growth, if the state respects and invests in it.
What would that look like, though, in practical terms? Can a blueprint be drawn while we have this unique opportunity for fresh and fruitful collaboration between state and civil society?
The sketch below holds components that have a common thread. In each, the state engages to respect, learn from and make the most of civil society’s knowledge, power and capacity for good.
Firstly, we need to extend democracy, by making more use of participatory and deliberative democratic processes at all levels of government to inform political decision making.
Ireland’s experience is instructive. One set of deliberative processes are citizens assemblies. They have been used sparingly on issues where the electorate can contribute as much to a shared challenge as those they elect. The process has been integrated into representative democratic structures. It doesn’t always work, just as representative democracy doesn’t always work. But as Katherine Zappone knows from deep experience, at its best the process brings consensus and constitutional change on highly contentious issues, marriage equality and women’s reproductive rights, for example.
Staying with Ireland, we can see the benefit at this juncture in U.K. politics for fora that bring together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet, and get them talking about issues they might otherwise avoid. Employers and workers. Central, regional and local government politicians. Civil society organisations and commissioners.
There were many ingredients to the Celtic Tiger. One was social partnership that began with employers and unions finding consensus on wages and eventually extended across all borders of state and civil society. The full gamut of social partners, working in unison to analyse and design policy from their own distinctive lenses, provided this form of participatory democracy with an innovative edge. As with Citizen’s assemblies, new designs of these processes must learn from past experience, and revamp accordingly.
Secondly, we believe that elected politicians have the capacity to respect the fundamental force of civil society, by listening to competing claims, and negotiating deals to deliver policy that will serve the electorate.
One practical and inexpensive step forward could be to increase the resources for members of parliament and ward councillors to listen, respond to and debate with their constituents. The size of the Labour majority means there will be many more politicians off ‘the government payroll’, and with capacity to link state and civil society between elections. The extra resource could be usefully used to better connect central and local government representatives.
Another opportunity, also demanding relatively little resource, would be to boost independent funding for communities and moral agents working to advance community power outside of organisational structures. The Guerrilla Foundation in Germany is an example. Too much community power is funded by and inevitably constrained by the state. Using an intermediary funder like the Community Power Fund would maximise impact.
We also called for a rebalancing of investments between place and services. Consider one practical example. The Government is committed to building 1.5 million homes. What about the social infrastructure to connect these homes? Much can be gained by giving residents the chance to design their communities, particularly the facilities, spaces, networks and services that support quality of life and well-being for our communities. Much can be gained by ensuring that as well as houses there are what Jennie Popay calls sense making, design and governing spaces that nurture the natural deliberative democracy of day to day life.
Finally, how about social change to unlock economic growth? Our colleagues at the MCR Foundation are establishing the Gen Z Manifesto with a decade long mission to re-connect 250,000 children in or on margins of the foster care system with ‘significant adults’ who want to give back to their community. They are not doing this to be nice to poor children. They seek to unlock the potential of these young people to be future innovators, entrepreneurs and public servants.
What can these and other examples of fruitful collaboration between state and civil society achieve? Many in the North-West of England were inspired by Margaret Simey, a champion for the people of Liverpool. As a local politician and as a civil society activist, Margaret worked to keep the state accountable to the people. For Simey, accountability is not a mechanism. It is a relationship. It is the foundation of reciprocity between society and its members, between those who govern and those who consent to be governed. It is a bargain that binds state and civil society in a joint enterprise.
The examples of potential policy change we provide, and the many more others will contribute, have the potential to empower local communities and moral agents who follow the footsteps of Margaret Simey. Such an engagement with the political power of the day can build trust rooted in soil deep enough to sustain the long haul of national recovery.
Michael Little, Katherine Zappone and Geoff Little, Ratio, July 2024
*design by Luca Picardi