I thought it
might be interesting to share some of the key hypothesis that form the
foundation of the venture I am building. If you have any proof or disproof of
these, please do share by adding a comment.
1. That the government of Canada will continue to have a
role to play as an actor and secondly, as a facilitator of other parts of
society on activities within foreign affairs. This sounds like an obvious
one but other actors: in some cases centralized actors who have large sums
of financial resources, or in other cases where large numbers of
individual citizens are connecting in small ways; are increasing the size
of their role on the international arena causing the government to play
decreasing roles in some areas.
2. The citizens have something to add - the belief in the
‘long-tail of policy’ on foreign policy is a very central hypothesis to
this venture.
What
is the long-tail?
The
long-tail of public policy strengthens the argument for public engagement on policy.
It suggests that there is a sub-set of people for each specific policy issue
and that these people can be harnessed to make progress on that particular
issue.
In
the image below we have ‘number of people’ on the x-axis, and amount of
collective power on the y-axis. It shows that a small number of government
officials and members of civil society organizations have significant
collective power because they are organized. In contrast the image shows the
much smaller amount of collective power other individual citizens have.
The
concept of the long-tail of public policy shows that we just need to find out
how to harness each individual in the long-tail to work together and build
something as a collective. The assumption is that these people are interested
in the particular issue and therefore want to be involved - they just haven’t
been given the opportunity to act as a collective.
This
is also where reducing transaction costs come in – we need to reduce the
transaction costs for these people to collaborate. There is a massive amount of
work being done on this, especially in the US, where many people are innovating
around how to engage people effectively online and in-person.
Using the long-tail of public policy concept I am making the assumption that
there doesn’t need to be increased attention to educating citizens to
participate in foreign policy dialogue and possibly collaboration to make this
work at present. It is assumed that there are enough citizens who know enough
and are skilled enough (persons A-G below) that we can bring those people
together and have them participate intelligently.
3. Lowering transaction costs:
The
Coasean Collapse is a predicted phenomenon that the financial and time costs
associated with people interacting and collaborating is decreasing rapidly. My
assumption is that this will be a true phenomenon built on innovation in public
participation practices and in online engagement.
4.That the methods of bringing people
together for views, deliberation or collaboration exist already. Therefore we
don’t need to create them, we just need to use them. There will need to be
evolution because foreign policy issues are unique, but based on partnership
possibilities and companies doing public engagement and public participation
work we are in a very strong place.
The central
hypothesis that lies behind all of these is that these concepts and ideas
(lowering transaction costs, that citizens have things to add, that the methods
already exist) will also apply to foreign policy. There is fairly wide-spread
agreement (or at least not strong disagreement) that these apply to domestic
policy (healthcare, roads, poverty reduction, etc), but the assertion that I am
making that this also applies to issues of foreign policy is much more strongly
contested.
Check out “Open
Government” edited by Lahtrop and Ruma for more detail on some of these
hypothesis. I specifically draw your attention to “Chapter 12: After the
collapse: open government and the future of the civil service” written by David
Eaves who speaks on both the Coasean collapse and the long-tail of policy (which is where I first read about these concepts).
I should be
clear that Eaves is not arguing that this applies to foreign policy, the application of these concepts to foreign policy is my
assertion.
