For at least a decade, democratic renewal has been a top priority for all the UK’s major parties yet the results are not very encouraging. The authors here suggest ways of improving citizen engagement and suggest may be its time to look outwards.
For at least a decade, democratic renewal has been a top priority for all the UK’s major parties. Since 1997 the Labour Government has set out to strengthen the foundations on which to regenerate local government. In 2001, the Local Strategic Partnership was born, with requirements for representation from key public services, the business community, and the voluntary and community sector. Both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats have also strongly signalled their desire to create a more dynamic civil society and a deeper culture of involving and engaging local people in democratic decision making.
The forthcoming White Paper on empowerment, to be launched sometime in July, is the latest step in this process. The Government hopes it will act as a springboard to empower citizens, get them more involved in local decision-making, and as a result create the basis for more accountable government and more engaged citizens.
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It is undoubtedly needed. As is well documented, only one in five Britons are satisfied with the opportunities they have to engage in local decision-making – and in practice, probably fewer than 1 per cent actually get involved. A survey commissioned by the Department of Communities and Local Government found that 6 in 10 people do not feel they are given an adequate say on how services are run, more than 9 in 10 people believe that the accountability of councils could be improved. The 2006 Power Inquiry found that, despite the efforts outlined above, citizens are rarely asked to get involved and are rarely listened to when they do.
The White Paper will lay out the basis for encouraging active citizenship and reviving local democracy, involving citizens more directly in service design and in scrutiny of service provision, and for creating more responsive and relevant civic institutions. The question is whether the White Paper can provide a sufficient stimulus for local government to turn the kind of commitment to citizen engagement that it professes into the changes in practice that are needed. The short answer is that it can, but it won’t be easy.
In a recent Demos pamphlet, Democratising Engagement, we argue that in order to really make a difference, citizen engagement needs to get beyond the bureaucratic set-up and the rhetoric, and reach beyond the immediate circles of participation into the wider reaches of the community. The White Paper will need to find the everyday places of democracy that remain hidden from official outreach or consultation. It will need to search for new and interesting ways to help citizens and politicians interact in effective, creative and meaningful ways in order to create progressive social change. And it will need to show citizens that their voices are having an influence on shaping public service provision and creating a more accountable, responsive state.
Few would disagree with such ideals, but putting them into practice will require a great deal of creative thinking, something that has been rather less available than political rhetoric. We need to both encourage more people to take part, and encourage government to engage with people on more issues – and in a more meaningful way than asking for their approval of a plan or policy that has already been designed. Government, at all levels, needs to be much braver about opening up processes of governance to citizen scrutiny, as well as about allowing citizens to have a real say on the issues that matter to them. And, more than anything, government needs to be ready to go beyond lip service and follow through on their commitments to involve the public.
The good news is that there is a lot of creative practice out there already, beyond our borders. From Brazil’s daring experiments in participatory governance, to the expansion of grassroots democracy in India, changes are afoot throughout the world. Accountability has become the watchword as governments become more transparent about public expenditure and more amenable to engaging the public in debating how public monies should be spent. The UK needs to take note and learn.
Equally important is the need to more effectively engage all our citizens. Levels of political disengagement are especially marked among youth and black and minority ethnic groups. Younger people are not only less likely to vote, with only 23 per cent expressing a propensity to vote relative to more than double (and rising) for their parents’ generation, but so unlikely to present their views to an elected representative that barely one in 30 report having done so.
Of the small fraction of the British public who are willing to get involved, the vast majority are white, middle aged, better off and better educated. And while women may get involved at the community level, it is another thing altogether when it comes to representation in local and national government. Britain lags shamefully behind many of our European neighbours in the numbers and proportion of women in political leadership roles. The culture of politics in our formal political institutions presents formidable barriers to women, and to ethnic minority men and women.
If we want to truly reinvigorate the public realm, we need to democratise citizen engagement and to open it up to much more diverse voices, experiences and possibilities. Genuine reinvigoration of the public realm means giving far more attention to questions of diversity, power and powerlessness that lie at the heart of the concept of empowerment. This calls for strategies that actively confront inequities and advance a broader agenda of social justice by enabling the most excluded to find and exercise their voices and influence the decisions that affect their lives.
Democratising Engagement shows that lessons from abroad can point the way. In South Asia, for example, measures to redress the dominance of men in political institutions have included the reservation of seats for women and marginalized social groups. In India, where training and support have been given to those who occupy these seats so that they can acquire the political skills and confidence to make use of their positions, a sea change is taking place in local democracy.
Britain spent much of the last century exporting its institutions to other parts of the world. In the twenty-first century, it is time to look at what the experience of newer democracies might offer democratic renewal in the UK. This White Paper offers that chance. Without paying more attention to issues of power, diversity and inequality, the vibrant democracy that we so badly need may still elude us.
This pamphlet is based on research funded by the UK Department for International Development as part of the Citizenship Development Research Centre (www.drc-citizenship.org) and published as Spaces for Change: The Politics of Citizen Participation in New Democratic Arenas (eds. Cornwall and Coelho, Zed Books, 2007).
