Sophia Parker (Part2) (067)
Sophia Parker, founder of Kent's Social Innovation Lab, discusses participatory democracy.
Transcript:
Q. If it agrees with what these things were doing and these things were essentially operating like a public service not for profit and providing valuable income?
A. Are you talking about the web sites here?
Q. I suppose yes well I suppose well it doesn't have to be a web site. So people are there is a opportunity to participate but government should not force people to do it. What is its role in encouraging participation what should it do?
A. I think when it comes to participation, if there is one lesson I have learned from the work I have been doing with local councils, it is that you need to have lots of different things going on at the same time. There is not one silver bullet that ticks the participation box. You need to find lots of different kind of environments, lots of different techniques, lots of different methods, lots of different approaches to engaging people and encouraging their participation. And so actually, as a local council, what you need to be thinking about is how many ways are we offering for people to participate. Do we have the kind of forums to make decisions together? Do we have the opportunities for people to co-design services and identify improvements? Are we working with those extreme users to think about innovations for the future and actually broadening the kind of range of methods, I suppose, that government currently use to engage people and encourage their participation, I think is really really important. We are not going to find the answer to this in one model of engagement and participation. So the question is much more how do you broaden the opportunities and make sure you are reaching out to as many people as possible.
Q. And if we do can get all of that exact right where are we going if all of those things are going as well as they possible can if everyone is participating in everything they want to or are able to?
A. (2.16) We will all live happily ever after. (Laughter laughter) Where are we going? I suppose we will have a form of government that really genuinely does start with people rather than existing services. We will have a form of government that is human, that listens to people and not only listens but actually engages and understands and knows what to do with what people are saying. We will have a form of government that finds people on their own terms, rather than asking them to step out of their lives and come and participate in that form of government. I mean those are some of the things. I am sure there are more.
Q. Is now an important time for this thing do you think this is are we starting to see these changes happen. You have mentioned a few sort of caters I suppose?
A. I think this is an important time. I think there is a kind of coming together of a number of factors that seem significant. First of all, we have a government that I think is committed to involving people meaningfully, even if it is still wondering about how to do that. I think the commitment is there. I think we have forms of technology which really lower the barriers to participation and some brilliant examples of new opportunities that we could only have dreamt of ten years ago. I also think socially and culturally we are in a place where who we are matters to the world around us -- matters more than ever, you know. Whether you think about climate change, the credit crunch or issues around terrorism and senses of safety, actually our relationships with those that live around us seem more important than ever and so that desire to connect seems to be a more than important part of who we are at the moment. So it is all of those factors coming together that makes me think that this is an agenda that is going to stay.
Q. Do you think there is something inevitable about much of this in that the government does need participation on some things like global warming? They can not do this on its own or even just an aging population -- they need us will this force change.
A. I think it is true that government needs us now in a way that it did not before but partly that is because we've changed our expectations of what government is there for. If you think back to kind of post war welfare state, it was very much based on a safety net. A diversity model of the state is there to help you in times of need and we now look to government to solve much more complex challenges. You know it is not just about being there when you are really, really ill. It is about good health which is just one example so actually, yes, it is true that government needs us but I think we also look to government to support us in different ways.
Q. How does this relate to the participation agenda to, party politics? Where does it fit into that whole system?
A. (5.35) Well there are two things to say about that. First of all, I think it is very striking that Brown and Cameron are, in a sense, just as noisy about this and just as committed and in some ways they are vying to be more committed than the other on participation, which I think you have to see as a huge opportunity to start a slightly different conversation about what it means to involve people in public services and government more generally. I suppose, beyond that, there is a really interesting set of questions about the relationship between representive democracy on the one hand and participative democracy, the new forms of which we are beginning to see and I do not think there is a zero-sum gain between those two things but I do think maybe we need to understand much more about how they can work together in synergy, rather than being presented in that kind of slightly zero-sum gain way.
Q. I was wondering (interruption).
A. It might have been my watch as well. Can you see me now.
Q. I am getting blinder and blinder. So it is terrible. I am normally looking at computers all the time. Months.
A. Yes.
Q. What is participative democracy? You said it.
A. I did say it. What I think I meant was some of the issues around people being able to participate in decision making, about priorities, allocation of resources and so on. That I think is what participative democracy is.
Q. And is it, what is it, an ideal or something we are experimenting with or what sort of status does it have here?
A. In the UK?
Q. Yes?
A. (7.50) I think a lot of the emphasis on participation and understanding -- the relationship between participation and democracy has come from the fact that we have seen some of the most terrifying declines in voter turnout in recent years and growing recognition that if we start to reduce democracy to simply voting and turning up at the blot box then we have lost something about what it means and I think a lot of the emphasis around participation is kind of taking us back to much more ancient ideals around self-government and the relationship between self-government and democracy which was a really important part of what democracy meant and I think we need to bring that back in. It is not about voting and although it is right to be concerned about decline in voter turnout, unless we broaden or rebroaden our conception of what democracy is then we might be in a bit of trouble.
Q. What do you think that does to party application if you know brown and come come are fighting over this and people are becoming more used to making decisions all the time or being able to to make decisions is it enough trust to every four years vote for a bundle or policies or will we start is to sea see a change in that system?
A. I think what is very interesting is alongside this emphasis on participation of each of us as individuals or members of a community, there has also been a big shift in government and this kind of agenda of localism and this agenda of devolving resources and decision making powers from central government to local government and sometimes even very local, the local local agenda around neighbourhoods, empowering neighbourhoods to make decisions about things. So I suppose in terms of what all of this means in terms of government in the future I hope it means that elected politicians, and certainly of course they have a role, I hope that this is a way of holding them to account much more, of enabling them to do that job of representing people more effectively because actually there are more channels of communication, more ways in which they can engage with the people they are supposed to be representing.
Just an example in the council I have been doing some work with. There is a cabinet system much like the national government and what you have in a cabinet system, you have back benchers as well, don't you, and one of the things we have been trying to do is imagine what it might mean to reimagine those back bencher roles as front line councilors because of course they are back benchers when you think about them in relation to the cabinet but, when you think about them in relation to the communities that they represent, they are right on the front line and imagining their roles like that I think gives you some kind of clue as to what the participation agenda means to politics in the future. It is very much more about enabling politicians to engage with the communities they represent, I think, and I think that is really important.
Q. So you think it is about strengthening the sort of directness of the how accurate the representation is?
A. I do not think it is about accuracy but I think it is about making that representation real and making that representation meaningful and both to the person doing that representation but also to the people who are being represented. I do not want to be represented by someone who I don't know. A lot of us are actually, particularly at the local level and, actually, think enabling more forums for the participation, dialogue, discussion, debate is one important part of all of us understanding the role that politics plays in our lives and that, actually, it does really matter if we have Ken or Boris as our Mayor and encouraging people to understand the relevance of that to their lives is very important.
Doesn't really make sense does it?
There is something interesting I think also about the whole -- if you look at what is happening in America at the moment and the fact that people are so engaged in debates about the next president, who is going to be the next president, who is going to be the chosen candidate and that demonstrates the power of having this much wider debate, that sense that this really matters that this really matters and -- actually I have not got anything to say on that. Sorry. God, I am getting hot here.
Q. I think we are pretty much there -- I do not know is?
A. Is there stuff we talked about before that we have not. It is just the questions you are asking are quite big.
Q. I am sort of thinking some you worked in Kent, so some specific examples of how people are getting involved in legal government and also maybe some examples of how in the future people can be more involved in central government decisions like I do not know what would would they be what decisions could people be more involved with what stage?
A. Yes, I guess it kind of goes back to what I was saying about needing to have multiple ways in which this participation happens. So you know whether you are talking about engaging people in a decision about whether to shut a local school, that might require one form of engagement but if you are trying to find ways of redesigning your cancer services, that might require a different kind of engagement and so I suppose when you are talking about what does all this mean and what might it look like in the future, in my mind's eye, what I have is an imagine of many different ways in which people can engage depending on the nature of the problem the kind of people that want to get involved and the purpose of that participation.
Q. What would that engagement be?
A. Do you want me to keep on looking at Ivo by the way? Yes.
Q. Is that online voting, voting in the post, people going to normal meetings?
A. Any of them. The whole point is that it should -- there should be multiple channels and multiple opportunities for people to be involved. We know people are increasingly online but always particularly younger people. So finding ways of engaging them so for example I think there is a really interesting piece of work in Kent using text messaging to engage young people in understanding their priorities in what they are looking for where they live. So you need to be making much smarter use of the internet and the kind of e-participation, I suppose, but equally the kind of offline things that government is doing, whether that is kind of running board meetings in the different way giving people more power over decisions that are made or whether that is bringing people into projects where actually the council is trying to understand how it might improve a particular service or indeed which services matter bringing people into those kind of projects is also important but I guess it is about having all of those different things happening to maximise the opportunities to engage but also to get the most effective forms of participation going.
Q. It is very different because that is not so exciting if government if you just want to ask people what they want it is more consultancy. I mean people have been saying that for years that doesn't sound very different is it not what is new now is people say you can be involved earlier at the really the beginnings of policy makes it is not just consultation it is actual I do not what the word would be?
A. There are not very many words. One of the problems with this is there is not quite the language to describe what makes it exciting so we fall back into the language we have already got and that can be difficult sometimes. I think there is something very, very exciting going on about finding ways of involving people not only in the kind of end product of a service to be, if you like, but much more involving them in the design of the service in the first place and even beyond that -- before that -- kind of thinking about, well, is this service the right service or have we understood the problem in the right way? So just as an example a piece of work I have been doing recently has been looking at the lives of families living in poverty and one of the things we have been very keen to do is to not base that piece of work on a set of assumptions about what life is like in poverty. So we worked with some ethnographers to really get a much richer picture of what life is like and it was only on the basis of that work that we then started to think about what are the issues and what are the possible solutions. But I think what made that piece of work very different from many pieces of work that local councils do is that we involved the families right through and in fact they are continuing to be involved as we start to develop new services that we already know are the services that they believe will make the biggest difference to their lives. It is in the councils interest to invest in those services because actually if they are going to be the services that have a high impact on the kind of outcomes these families are getting then that is a good use of council resources and also most importantly makes a very real difference to people's lives.
Q. Back to the party politician business if the participation does strengthen representation and the MPs and the councilors and everyone else doesn't that change party politics quite considerably or shift the balance a bit? If I am voting for London Mayor and or Member of Parliament I am very aware of the party they represent rather than then them representing me in my area. That is is not what most of them -- what else are they doing? But I do not know do you see that shifting the importance of the affiliation to the party? Do you see what I am saying? Why do we need them if our MPs are representing us? Why do we need to attach them to those bigger --
A. Because we don't all think the same and we need to be able to chose between ideologies. I do not know how to answer that one. God. You know, I think we don't all think the same, so simply representing us doesn't mean that it is going to be this kind of, I do not know, motherhood and apple pie world where we can agree that that even though I am a young person I want money to be spent on the old people. Of course there is still a place for ideologies in a democracy where there is more participation. I suppose what I am saying is -- yes.
Q. Okay that is fine. That is good. I think happy.
(20.50 finish)
