Collaborative citizenship
5:38pm
Tuesday, 22nd May 2007
Every programme of political reform has an implicit vision of who its citizens are, so what's ours?
Nye Bevan had the deserving poor, Thatcher had the homeowning democracy, but Labour has yet to develop a clear story of who its citizens are. So they're sometimes consumers, sometimes member of communities, sometimes people with responsibilities to the state and sometimes participants in delivering public goals.
We need to make some sense of this mess of approaches, if only because different models of citizenship rest on different kinds of solidarity and cooperation, and governments need to know which to try and build.
Traditional communities were quite good at dealing with issues like anti-social behaviour - asbos are often a direct result of the decline of traditional social bonds. But that kind of solidarity can also be parochial and exclusive. Consumerism requires only a thin veneer of solidarity - not much more than enlightened self-interest.
The alternative - as me and Catherine tried to argue to a room full of Italians last week - might be to see citizenship and solidarity as vested not in class, geography or race, but in collaborative action. We live out our citizenship by coming together with the state and others to solve problems, or improve something, or simply to be together for its won sake.
I'm not suggesting that we can solve all our problems if we just talk a bit more, but I am suggesting that even disagreeing with each other in a shared forum can build our sense of understanding and togetherness - we're at least sharing a discussion. The question is how to create regular moments of collaborative citizenship?
Nye Bevan had the deserving poor, Thatcher had the homeowning democracy, but Labour has yet to develop a clear story of who its citizens are. So they're sometimes consumers, sometimes member of communities, sometimes people with responsibilities to the state and sometimes participants in delivering public goals.
We need to make some sense of this mess of approaches, if only because different models of citizenship rest on different kinds of solidarity and cooperation, and governments need to know which to try and build.
Traditional communities were quite good at dealing with issues like anti-social behaviour - asbos are often a direct result of the decline of traditional social bonds. But that kind of solidarity can also be parochial and exclusive. Consumerism requires only a thin veneer of solidarity - not much more than enlightened self-interest.
The alternative - as me and Catherine tried to argue to a room full of Italians last week - might be to see citizenship and solidarity as vested not in class, geography or race, but in collaborative action. We live out our citizenship by coming together with the state and others to solve problems, or improve something, or simply to be together for its won sake.
I'm not suggesting that we can solve all our problems if we just talk a bit more, but I am suggesting that even disagreeing with each other in a shared forum can build our sense of understanding and togetherness - we're at least sharing a discussion. The question is how to create regular moments of collaborative citizenship?
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Comments
You seem to be standing Robert Putnam on his head here. Isn't collaborative action an outcome of certain social structures, such as churches, markets, firms, friendship networks and - one hopes - neighbourhoods? With your line of reasoning, you end up saying that collaborative action is an outcome of collaborative action, which then still leaves the question 'so where does that come from?'. And then you're back in Putnam territory (churches, markets etc).
Putnam's point seems to be more about more solidarity - in other words the idea that we tend to collaborate with people who we feel we have some powerful social bond with. But those bonds, and the forums in which they are created, are increasingly rare. If prevailing conditions don't create enough of those bonds, then we surely need to find something that does.
Giving people structures and support to come together through shared public interests seems a promising way of doing that. Isn't this what the government is doing when it devolves power to a neighbourhood in the hope that more power will lead to the emergence of more collaboration? Can't government try and create the right conditions for people to experience collaboration more frequently?
Of course, the argument I'm making is not all that different to Putnam's. He also suggests that collaboration begets collaboration, he just puts the emphasis on traditional civil society institutions, while I suspect that we can help other options to emerge.