At @epc_eu in event on #cofoe #TheFutureIsYours and future of EU democracy. We’re discussing this excellent report, which was presented by @jaemmanouilidisepc.eu/en/Publication…. My four points:
1. We need to think more deeply about the power relations on the politics side. COFOE has shown how hard it is to run hybrid decision making processes without a clear agreement on power and process up front.
2. There is risk that the language or practice of citizen participation, which is developing quickly, runs ahead of political culture and structures. We need to move the latter faster and be careful not to overclaim and create disappointment.
3. Institutionalisation (👋 @ClaudiaChwalisz) doesn’t mean a democracy bolt-on to each government body or structure, it means creating the structures in the middle that each government body can work through so we don’t duplicate design, expertise or networks.
4. We can’t just work with panel-sized audiences. How can we create the digital tools for larger scale participation – with the design quality, legibility and flexibility that the best in class current apps have?
Thanks to @epc_eu and other participants for a great event.
Just spoke at the #clubofvenice / @cap_com event here in beautiful @Toulouse@Occitanie. A few points from my notes on the topic of “placing the citizen at the centre of European debate” in this thread.
1. Citizens don’t always know that they are in a European debate. They come into all sorts of conversations with their own expectations and experience, and don’t know (and shouldn’t need to know) which level of government is responsible for what.
2. Policy makers come into European debate thinking about specific policies and reforms. That’s fine, but there needs to be two way interpretation between the connection, complex human stories that citizens bring and the organisationally-structured questions of institutions.
3. This argues for a connected approach that allows for ideas to come from the bottom up and the top down, and for local conversations to be federated into European ones, and European information to be better used in local conversations.
4. Civil society orgs can help with that. Locally, they provide the associative infrastructure and the trusted local voices that can ensure that participation reaches out wider. They also can run democratic processes themselves, so participation isn’t always about …
…politics and partisan issues but everyday life as well.
5. Internationally, civil society can provide networks of learning and support and trusted external validation for processes.
6. But civil society also has needs, most of all for stability of resources. That’s not just about cash – we also need trained facilitators available locally, good information that we don’t have to design ourselves but is well-tailored to citizen needs.
7. And finally we need the security that enables us to hire and train for the long-term rather than just 12- or 24-month contracts.
8. Long-term participation is only going to be possible if we are able to hold on to participants to update them, train and validate facilitators and designers to ensure that processes can run well and be started at short notice.
9. And that requires us as civil society to work closer together, but also governments at every level to think about how they can support this whole space in a holistic way.
10. Funding for orgs like @demsoc will always be triangular – foundational (European grants, foundations, other big patient resources); project-based (quasi-commercial); and members. At the moment too much focus is on the second point in the triangle.
11. Horizon Europe is promising in its focus on democracy but even with several million euro it’s still just one funder among many – we really need to think about how we can connect up the initiatives – and better connect up the networks that help deliver it.
Originally posted as a thread of 13 tweets on Twitter on 16 February 2022.View the original thread.
This new focus by PS on “effective freedom” seems interesting, but a lot of the ideas at least at this stage of development seem a bit underwhelming. But scope for more concrete things between now and September lesoir.be/424125/article…
You certainly need *some* sort of connecting theme for social democracy other than generalised complaint and @PaulMagnette‘s argument that says “freedom’s no good unless you can use it” has appeal both in liberal and statist directions (and problems in both too).
Speaking personally I prefer the language of power for citizens and individuals rather than effective freedom, which risks being a bit wonkish, but that’s why I run a citizen participation organisation, I suppose.
I guess the question is whether the multiple layers of concertation to come will give more or less clarity to the question of what this all means. To take the most touchy example for PS, I think effective freedom means that women who want to wear a headscarf should be allowed to,
and those who don’t want to shouldn’t be forced to, but there are plenty, not just on here, who would say that I was betraying social democracy to think that.
Originally posted as a thread of 5 tweets on Twitter on 15 February 2022.View the original thread.
Articles, reports and other links I shared on Twitter this week.
This feels like the right choice by De Croo. I’m lucky enough not to need support for my energy bills, better to focus on those who do. lesoir.be/417882/article…
I would have thought Brighton’s shops were pretty resilient to the pandemic (small, local etc). But quite the opposite – oof! Thanks to @ft and @xtophercook for the graphics. Check stats for your area at ft.com/content/9348c6…
If you live or work in the Quartier Nord in Bruxelles-Ville, the city wants to hear from you about how to make it better. Give your views here, and read the assessment of the area from @perspective_bru : perspective.brussels/fr/actualites/…
This is an interesting article (€) but I don’t know that deliberative democracy alone solves the challenge of political disaffection. « Horizontal » democracy is great but most problems are vertical. lesoir.be/419733/article…
The « refoundation » @BenoitScheuer calls for needs to balance democracy in decision making, effectiveness in execution, and the multilevel complex nature of today’s challenges.
Made me think of the application of @landemore’s vision of open democracy to economic rather than political activity and how it relates or doesn’t to Cole’s thinking. (cc @ClaudiaChwalisz)
Originally posted as a thread of 3 tweets on Twitter on 18 January 2022.View the original thread.
The New Yorker piece on the flood of new fiction is good, but I feel the same about policy articles. Most blogs should be a tweet, most articles a blog post, and most books a blog post. And still there would be too much to read.
I have many policy preferences (all of which are, I assure you, the inevitable logical consequence of whatever is leading the news cycle today), and yet I am reluctant to add to the flood.
I mean, “democratic innovation person favours democratic innovation”, “European social democrat favours greater European solidarity”, “person worried about climate change thinks we should do more on climate change”
“Extracted from my forthcoming book, Democratic European innovation for a fair climate change transition (590pp, €100).” Not only have you read it all before, you don’t even have time to read it.
And, I will not lie, I often put an article in the “skip” pile because I know the position of the person who wrote it and I assume it’s just arguing that position based on some current news hook.
And yet … I feel like if I *don’t* put something out there, I’m not contributing to the debate on the issues I care about, and I don’t have time to do something really beautiful or crafted that I would be proud of as a piece of writing…
It’s Publish or Perish: Policy DLC pack. Unanswerable I suppose, unless I start doing policy interventions as freeform dance expression.
Originally posted as a thread of 7 tweets on Twitter on 26 October 2021.View the original thread.
Which is not to say that the Polish constitutional court is in the right, far from it. But Europe is now dealing in too many political and personal issues to use a fundamentally economic-regulatory mode for integration.
It’s a mark of the success of the European project but « what got you here won’t get you there »
Originally posted as a thread of 3 tweets on Twitter on 19 October 2021.View the original thread.
Reading a couple of books from 2017 (that have been on the pile for a while) and contemplating how policy books are « second draft of history » artefacts. So much of what is in them has either been overtaken by events or become a truism.
(The specific books are Krastev’s After Europe and Mounck’s People v Democracy)
Particularly after Biden and Covid, reading about the defining roles of the 2015 refugee crisis and Donald Trump feels like rewatching an episode of Tomorrow’s World about Minitel.
Originally posted as a thread of 3 tweets on Twitter on 24 August 2021.View the original thread.
Thought provoking evening last night at the launch of @PEHumaine #PourUneEchelleHumaine (For a Human Scale) in Paris. It’s a collection of essays by a group of 89-generation (so, 30something) activists and politicians. 1/x
The core of their ideas is a three-point approach covering ecology, democratic renewal (this being France, they used the word republicanism) and altruism. They are also very post-party-politics, though you’ll guess from the topics that it’s broadly left/green. 2/
The three point programme I mostly like. It’s self-evident, to me at least, that without some kind of common programme around just transition, democracy and quality public services parties to the left of centre can’t win. 3/
I also liked that there was real practical experience in the room. Politicians and activists who had done things on estates, not just policy position taking. Respect for that. Politics is action on the ground, not rinsing your enemies on Twitter. 4/
Another strong point was their narrative about democratic renewal and citizenship, on which deputy mayor of @nantesfr, @3asseh has a great track record – again, concrete work not theory. 5/
I also liked the (overall) youth and energy of the group. Many of them will be in the next or next but one round of political leaders and they are definitely preparing now for the challenges of 2030/40. 6/
Naturally, I had some things I didn’t agree with. “Altruism” was I thought quite a weak word for the third element of the trio. It has echoes of 19th century liberalism to me, and made me think of Attlee’s description of charity as “a cold loveless thing” 7/
Why not “empathy” or “justice”? I get the aim – an effective state with a strong moral core focused on justice and good public services – and I understand the need to set this up outside a statist or technocratic argument, even in France. But “altruism” is surely just part of it
It was a much more geographically mixed group than a lot of Parisian policy events, but it was still extremely Franco-français. Europe as a geographical entity got a couple of mentions, Europe as a political entity was invisible. 9/
I understand why – and of course my work is in Brussels so I think about the European level more than most – BUT these battles have to be won everywhere or they will be lost everywhere and I would have liked to see an idea for how this spreads beyond France.
There will also be a challenge to make this approach additive not subtractive. At a time of culture wars (Zemmour, a probable far-right presidential candidate) politics is a conversation about splits and differences. Is eco-demo-justice strong enough to unite
Particularly when it comes to the trade offs on climate and public services between different groups? You can see the fault lines – urban/rural, climate/industrial policy – which can be waved away for now, but not for ever.
I also – and this is perhaps the fact that I am very very old – wondered about how their narrative of democratic renewal connected with their clear desire to stay away from party politics. Traditional parties and politicians were dunked on, as usual, but
I don’t know how you avoid engaging with them if you want to get things done, or hold power. A thousand community actions is good, but even a strong associative layer will struggle if it doesn’t have a method of taking elective political power.
Maybe elective politics will go away (I had a very enjoyable debate with @ClaudiaChwalisz about this over dinner after – I suspect she is right that it’s doomed in the medium term, but I don’t want to give up on parties quite yet)
However it’s not going anywhere for bid, and I wondered what this group hoped for. I didn’t know whether it was intended as a ginger group, to put the fear into centre-left pols and get them to be more radical. It certainly wasn’t an offer to the left parties
But more of a bracing challenge. A little bit of it felt quite En Marche-y – innovating a political party out of an intersection of political views that work. As we’ve seen, though, these personalised parties are mayflies and find it hard to implant locally
It would work for a national campaign but if they want a street-by-street remaking of French politics and policy it will only be through local action and local politics.
But these are generally quibbles. The eco-demo-justice trio is a strong start. I would personally have liked to hear more about power (power/agency and climate transition are all of politics in the next ten years, I think).
But I respect and admire the effort of putting this together, and there is a lot here to like. Keep an eye on what happens next with @PEHumaine and I commend it to my Brussels friends in @PES_PSE@GreensEFA.
Plus on a personal note it was a huge pleasure to be back at an in-person political event again. That’s the sort of échelle humaine everyone can get behind.
