Post #1
This is post # 1 on this new blog and on day #1 at CIVICUS, although it is actually day two of the main part of the conference. Check out CIVICUS and the World Assembly here: http://civicusassembly.org/
Overall reflections on the day:
The conference is quite interesting. There is a diversity of content and a diversity of delegates from around the world. I was a part of a discussion yesterday with two brits, a Nigerian, an Australian, and a Peruvian. This discussion was within a session with panelists from Tanzania, India, the UK, the US, and Uraguay.
Hearing their stories of the accomplishments and struggles was engaging and both uplifting and discouraging.
As ive mentioned, the conference is ethnically and culturally diverse, but what I have also found is that it is largely civil society actors and citizens, but ver few people from the other parts of society. I assume that it does, but I do wonder whether the lack of diversity on that dimension limits the potential for these conversations,
There are a few pieces I want to share in this blog and I'll break them apart because they are distinct concepts or ideas.
Public Participation
One of the most interesting speakers for me on my first day at the conference was John Gaventa. Gaventa is the new head of the Coady Institute in Nova Scotia (the Coady Inst. is co-hosting a conference with IAP2 that I am attending in late September). I suggestyou check out Coady and IAP2, they are both great organizations.
I have a hypothesis that when it comes to foreign policy development there are already enough actors creating change or that change will occur over time at a great enough pace, along two of three dimensions when it comes to bringing citizens and other actors into the policy process.
The first is the buiilding of the needed knowledge, skills and attitudes of citizens to engage in the policy process. Secondly, that the will is present for many of the right citizens to engage in foreign policy development. The third dimension- the need for venues for collaboration (places where the right people can come together to develop policy) - is heavy on activity for domestic issues, but is lacking attention on foreign affairs issues, or global development policy.
Gaventa's points increased the importance of me exploring the citizens who would be engaged in the policy development and to do more rigorous research on what type of knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) these folks need to engage. I shouldn't be making the assumption that the people engaging already have the necessary KSA.
I also realized that I wasn't making the assumption explicit that we could design a venue that helped people prepare for engagement while participating in the policy development.
Additionally, Gaventa presented research showing that there are four outcomes to public participation. What he shared is that third outcome, being that citizens are engaged in a formal process run by the government, is ineffectual without the actors having the (following two outcomes) deep awareness on the issue that they are engaging with, and the skills which they need to effectively engage. This seems quite obvious but I hadn't stated it explicitly.
My question for this is: are the citizens that will bring the most to foreign policy development (ex. Diaspora groups, Canadians who live or work abroad) already prepared to have these conversations? My hypothesis is that yes they are prepared but this needs to be torn apart and explored. Right now i'm doubtful this hypothesis is correct but i need to explore it further.
Below the radar civil society
In an earlier session during the day i had a conversation with and got the research paper of Andri Soteri Procto, from Birmingham University in the UK. We spoke about the research she has done on groups that are typically below the radar but that contribute massively to what we consider civil society. These are groups of people who come together to sew, or to provide support for one another, or are members of the same ethnic group that are new to the UK, etc.
There are two pieces of this that I found quite fascinating. The first is that these groups are tremendous contributors and are at quite a large scale. Each group is not large in itself, but the aggregate is enormous.
The second part that I found most interesting is their interaction with the rest of society, and government and civil society in particular. Andri and her colleagues mentioned that these small community groups use the community halls/centres/etc that are owned by large members of civil society. These large members rent it to these smaller groups at a low cost or for free.
The hypothesis that they are now testing, or hoping to test, is whether the dwindling financial support for larger civil society actors will impact the smaller community groups that I spoke about above. If these larger groups lose money and close down their community centres, do the small groups then lose a space to meet? What if this was the only space that they could meet? What happens to this important component of society if they no longer have the resources required - in this case the resource being as simple as a room to meet in - to contribute to society in the way that they have?
You can find the research here: www.tsrc.ac.uk/publications/tabid/500/default.aspx
As a closing note, you might also want to check out the activity reports from the day. CIVICUS volunteers have been doing the very useful work of taking notes and each and every session and publishing them online for all to see. I'll be working through these notes soon to better understand them and may post about them, but i suggest you take a look here: http://civicusassembly.org/Reports.php
The research from the UK is really interesting. I wonder if anyone has ever considered trying to measure the multiplier effect of financially supporting certain organizations.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about the impact of Oxfam's office in St. John's, a lot of it didn't accrue to Oxfam but to all those smaller community groups that were inspired by Oxfam, used its office for a meeting, asked Bill to speak at an event, borrowed things like tables or projectors, got info on an issue from Bill, etc. It would be easy (but laboursome/tedious) to measure value of things like borrowed rooms and materials, harder for shared information or speaking at an event, very hard for inspiration or community weaving. What's really interesting is that all of those values that result from Oxfam as a multiplier are not necessarily explicitly valuable to the people making revenue allocation decisions. Same with governments departments in Britain: if the local community centre is funded by a mental health branch of government, but they lend space to Amnesty International, the extra value created for Amnesty won't be measured or valued by the funder...
Anyways, just thinking aloud because I never thought about any of this before. Thanks for sharing that research.
Also, my quick thoughts on whether citizens that will bring most are are prepared: no they are not, but preparation could easily be built into the process/venue/hosting of the conversations. (Maybe that is what you meant by "we could design a venue that helped people prepare for engagement while participating in the policy development".)
I would say these groups have most of the knowledge they need, and knowledge will naturally be built as people engage with things like background reading. My guess is that certain skills (e.g. listening to other perspectives, integrative thinking, synthesizing/manipulating ideas) required for innovative policy are lacking but can either be coached in during the process by good facilitators or are not needed by participants and can be provided by people helping making the process happen.