Making participation work

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Over at the BBC, Home Affairs editor Mark Easton is taking a look at the way the Conservatives in government are talking differently about who will hold public servants to account:

Whitehall's mandarins were told their job was no longer "to guarantee the outcomes" in public services. Nor "to directly intervene to try and improve their performance" … Accountability won't be driven by opposition politicians, quangocrats, journalists or pressure groups in Westminster. Bang go many of those expensive national bean-counters, beavering away to ensure taxpayers' money is being spent effectively and wisely. Instead, the idea is that pressure will come from the great British public - at local level.

As you might expect, this is welcome to the Democracy and Participation team. But Easton foresees problems:

Direct democracy, critics say, produces policies which tend to be unworkable, unconscionable or plain silly.

The government's recent attempts at what's called "crowd-sourcing" have seen websites asking the British people for ideas on how to improve government and save money. Among the responses were proposals to sterilise young girls who "just breed at will", to replace MP housing allowances with tents and, helpfully, a recipe for beef and vegetable casserole. So far, not one idea from the public has translated into government action.

More seriously, though, there is a concern that bottom-up accountability is simply not as democratic as the prime minister likes to claim because the public don't, actually, want the responsibility.

School governors, for example, can control millions of pounds in budgets that directly affect local children and yet there are complaints that so few parents are prepared to do the job that often appointments are made without any election at all.

In essence, Easton is identifying the two key criticisms made of participatory democracy: that people aren’t capable of getting involved or that they simply don’t want to. 

The first point: that British citizens don’t have much to offer to political decision making should, I hope be pretty easy to dismiss. While I’ve argued before that there are specific problems with the Spending Challenge project, it’s pretty obvious that the public can tell you a lot about how the services they use could work better. Ask a parent about what their local school could do better, or a patient about their local surgery and they will offer a wealth of well-thought out suggestions. Not that they have a monopoly on wisdom – doctors, nurses, teachers and other public service professionals have plenty to contribute – but it’s clear that the people who use services are in a great position to tell you about them. That’s why it’s so encouraging that the Cameron was talking about accountability at the local level: a far cry from the all-encompassing Spending Challenge.

The second point is more challenging. It’s certainly true that recruiting school governors is difficult. For starters, it can be hard to find the time. That’s one the reasons nef is so interested in a move to shorter working weeks. But beyond that, the way that participation is structured can be very important to how many people participate. After all, more than a third of people in England volunteer every month, so laziness is hardly the problem.

Rather, it’s the way that participation is structured that’s part of the problem. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has been investigating what makes people take part and what puts them off. Many of the reasons for getting involved are unsurprising: helping others, trying new things, meeting new people. But, depressingly, so are the barriers: bureaucratic recruitment processes, complex structures to navigate, a feeling that the people who get involved are just ‘not like me’. Looked at like this, it’s no wonder that, despite wanting to help, so few people want to be school governors: it’s intimidating, bureaucratic and professionalised.

If we want to make participation democratic, what we need, then, are new ways for people to get involved which harness their desire to help others but aren’t intimidating or off-putting. That’s why nef’s Democracy and Participation team works on new, inclusive ways to make decisions. Approaches like Crowdwise, which give everyone a chance to contribute to a decision, or Democs, which presents information on a complex topic in a simple, game-like format offer clues as to how the idea of bottom-up accountability can work in practice.