Personal And Community Empowerment: Why And How It Matters To Public Policy Leaders

Introduction

In the late 1950s, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex overly centralizing democracy and economy in the United States. The late economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his New Industrial State suggested that centralized managers, whether in the private or public sectors, value control and predictability of their environments. He suggested that to sustain broad predictability and growth, mass media and mass education were used to socialize and reinforce citizens to be consumers, thus sustaining an expanding market economy that evolved into a corporate-university-media complex.

Profit-making became synonymous with success in a modern, competitive society. The phrase “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” now includes “becoming too big to fail.” This all-inclusive, centralizing, economistic (buying and selling, producing and consuming) mind-set makes it difficult for citizens and organizations alike to shift to more sustainable living and create more requisite scale institutions where citizens would have more autonomous power.

Why do these issues matter in the public policy and the public administration context? Since the industrial revolution, public policy dynamics is carried out via primary reliance on market dynamics, hierarchical dynamics, or some combination of the two. For example, some nations prefer a heavier mix of government provision to ensure housing availability while other nations prefer the market to ensure housing through supply and demand. The commonality of both approaches is found in formal institutional dynamics. As demands for large-scale, uniform patterns of goods, services, and regulations increase, so do the proportion of social space taken up by formal market and hierarchical, agency-regulating, or service-providing activities. Over time in society, this results in an inherent, centralizing function.

Consequences of Market Centralization

One centralizing factor is the immense scale and concentration of the powers of global corporations which can stifle both democratic expression and market competition. By the year 2000, the combined sales of the world’s two hundred corporations exceeded a quarter of all countries’ measured economic activity. In six key industries, five firms control more than 50 per cent of the global market. In agriculture, the dominant few global corporations (Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Norvartis, and others like them) exercise control over multiple aspects of the production cycle—the raw materials inputs and distribution, the seeds and the chemicals, the farmers, the processes, the distributors of the retailers—amounting to extensive vertical integration. They also lobby extensively in the political realm. In the United States, for example, the government will not label GMO (genetically modified foods) so that the consumer can make choices. This corporate concentration overpowers and defies traditional market theories that envision a multitude of healthy small and medium-size enterprises competing with each other. It also impedes conditions favorable to democracy where international trade rules, for example, are set outside of representative institutions in many cases or close lobbying alliances are made to support government rule-making favorable to corporate interests and rights.

Vandana Shiva writes that “The market economy inevitably produces a major shift in the way rights are perceived. The transformation and enclosure of the commons (common resources) into commodities has two implications. It deprives weaker groups such as traditional cultures of the right to survival, such as subsistence farmers and their access to common resources such as water (200,000 farmers have committed suicide after being forced off their land by market-centered policy), indigenous seeds, and now human genes through privatized patenting for profit. It robs from nature its right to self-renewal and sustainability by eliminating the social constraints on resource use that are the basis of common property management…the survival of pastures and forests as community property, or a common good like a stable ecosystem, is only possible with local knowledge on the use of resources built into the principles. The breakdown of community…can trigger the degradation of common resources.” How can you have large-scale economy when you break down the basis of sustainable small-scale economy?

Vanishing Free Spaces: The Over-Extension of the Market

Perceptive social observers have noted that there is a vanishing “free space” for other human-centered activities with the expansion of formal market and hierarchical activities. John McKnight, for example, argues that the professionalization of human and community services diminishes the community’s need and capacity to provide mutual aid on a more informal basis. Robert Putnam documented a significant diminishment of civic activity via traditional membership in civic and nonprofit organizations in the United States in his book entitled Bowling Alone.

This loss of face-to-face community and neighborliness creates atomistic individual and family routines that are not connected or explicitly interconnected with mutual knowledge of or mutual reliance on others beyond family. McKnight thus argues that public policy makers have forgotten about community as a significant category of public policy, focusing more on individual preferences and the citizen as a consumer. Deborah Stone terms this “the market model of public interest.”

Consequences of Political Centralization

This mind-set leads public policy makers into losing awareness of the significant ties that bind human beings beyond market contacts (buying and selling, producing and consuming), leading to the loss of meaningful relationships. The need for questioning, the search for meaning itself, and learning for its own sake become irrelevant when relations are reduced to only functional connections. Functional relations, in turn, lead to the prevalence of calculative and instrumental rationality and the diminution of substantive reasoning capacity.

In many nations, government hierarchies are employed to deliver basic goods and public services. As expectations for better public services or regulation of the expanding private sector occurred, public sector budgets grew. These usually originate from the central government which house these programs in their executive branch. These programs are seen as a way to insure social cohesion, employment, and regulation as well as obtaining political support. They are rarely terminated except in financial shock.

In response to a more changeful environment, one approach is to institute more government laws and programs with corresponding compulsory taxation. The difficulty is for that most government laws and regulations are meant for the average circumstance or situation. However, each person and organization’s situations are very particular and context-dependent. Thus, centralized government intervention may be seen as inefficient and alienating (it doesn’t fit my circumstances yet I am coerced to pay). Furthermore growth in government intervention intrudes into heretofore social spaces; thus creating more complex, centralizing sources of authority for society which favors uniformity over greater diversity. While centralization of certain functions and policies may be needed and are not always bad, a continual trend toward government coupled with campaign contributions from propertied, highly organized groups can be a dangerous source of a “democratic deficit”, a feeling of undue coerciveness, and a bias toward narrowing of legitimate options rather than the expansion of such.

An example of where what is good for the average is not necessarily good for either larger public values such as democracy and liberty is the persuasive thought process which comes with government bureaucracies. With centralized government comes utilitarian thought. “The greatest good for the greatest number” is an example of calculative rationality. As government and private bureaucracies grow and centralize, this policy principle narrows the scope of individual liberty in favor of the majority’s interests and obscures the recognition of unique individual valuation and thought. Professor Raghavan Iyer writes, “There is a dangerous transition from the idea of a government of limited powers over citizens with inalienable rights to the idea of the unlimited sovereignty and the material welfare of the majority. It is an easy step from here to the perilous position reached by most democracies today, in which individual liberties are violated in the name of national security and prestige at home and abroad, in which the mute and the meek are often sacrificed at the alters of public utility and political necessity.”

Deconcentration of Political and Economic Power

Public policy strategies within different political regimes will have to strike its own balance between national planning and local authority, central control and private initiative. However, Raghavan Iyer writes that public policymakers “will have to play a vital part in creating a social climate that could give rise to non-governmental democratic bodies, powerful local communities, and a variety of autonomous centers of power. “ P. 202. Public policy criteria then must “combine to secure deconcentration of economic power, decentralization of political power, and diffusion of social power throughout the community of communities. Forces of change must be authentically related to the deepest sources of tradition…The State should be concerned more to retain a symbol of national integrity and unity, an inspirer of collective effort, than to become the authoritarian architect of uniform social patterns.

Further public policy design criteria can include creating multi-command (multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-tribal) zones which power would mainly be vested in local institutions or at the regional level. These regional zones have functional rather than emotional significance, and they remain weaker than central and local authorities.

In summary, market and political centralization is the opposite of an inclusive, local democracy.

Regenerating Political Communities: Implications of a Community-Centered Public Policy

Both government and non-governmental actors strive to strengthen their communities. While government is viewed as the ultimate guarantor of well-being since it is the most legitimate and inclusive of citizenship rights, the public sector is viewed as having a major responsibility for providing direction in the community even though there is no one organization that has a monopoly of resources or intelligence about community well-being.

In the context of community alliances, no one organization can control others. Everyone is “in charge;” consequently, in reality, no one is. A leadership style consistent with a swampy environment is usually called for. One must allow for discovery, surprise, and emergence.

Policy analysts must be open to local meanings, multiple and differing views of the situation, different definitions of what would be just, existing law and practice, and be able to initiate constructive dialogue and negotiation among parties involved to search for the public value in the situation. In short, local democracy and participation are critical to integrating different views of the situation with functional requirements that may be a consequence of the dialogue. This will require mental flexibility.

The parameters of reflective practice for public managers and public policy analysts has largely been drawn by the boundaries of formal institutional systems, sometimes including the employees, customers, and clients they serve along with elected official preferences. In order to have the requisite mental flexibility, policy makers must loosen their attachments to any particular methodologies or set of institutional definitions and allow themselves to pursue meaning outside the traditional categories of thinking

With a few notable exceptions such as Peter Berger and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, little attention has been given by policy and organizational scholars to the practical public policy challenge of developing individual, personal and community power outside legitimate corporate channels. Until recently, community development, with its various forms of capital—social, cultural, economic, and ecological—and community organization, have been extraneous to the public policy field. The need for sustainable communities and global/local ecological crisis management devolves responsibilities for leadership to all citizens, whatever their public and private roles, and calls them to a higher standard of active participation in the polis.

Global Citizen Emergence

Historically, however, there has been a shrinkage of “free spaces” for the self-determined autonomy of individuals and communities in proportion to the expanding domains of market and hierarchical activities into the social fabric at large. Men as moral agents have largely been supplanted by “customers,” “clients,” “employees,” and “stakeholders.” There is a loss of space for freely chosen, meaningful personal and community pursuits which may not hold “market promise.”

The need for sustainable communities and global/local ecological crisis management has devolved and heightened citizen responsibilities, whether in public or private roles, to a higher standard of active participation in the polis. This greater realization of interdependence with nature and with fellow men and women based on moral, mental, functional, and ecological standpoints is now awakening man to view himself as an active moral agent who can develop a critical distance from yet use social institutions for their purposes.

Citizens can act as moral agents in a political theater of participation the classical Greeks named “the polis.” Stone reminds us that the public interest or common good was derived from the polis as a participative, moral community which all citizens participate in an active pursuit of collective good. Deborah Stone expresses the test of the public interest in the polis model thusly:

“This is true even though there is always conflict within a community over what its goals should be and who its members are, even though every communal goal ultimately must be achieved through the behavior of individuals. Unlike the market which starts with individuals and assumes no goals, preferences or intentions other than those held by individuals, a model of the polis must assume both collective will and collective effort” (Stone, 1997). It is in community that there is always a fuller expression of the multi-dimensional aspects of human nature expressed within ecological and social limits.

Para-Economic Paradigm: Pursuing Personal and Community Power

The first challenge Professor Alberto Guerriero Ramos identifies in his volume The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations Toronto Press 1981 is the very capacity to conceive and engage the world differently. What is the alternative besides large-scale, centralizing capitalism as we have known it (dependent upon the logic of market expansion without end) or central government socialism (dependent upon the State with its powers of expropriation to limit market expansion)? Ramos identifies a human-centered paradigm which he terms “social systems delimitation” which points to a variety of human expression and types of social systems which support natural living beyond centralized state or market and which delimit the scope of centralized markets and governmental or business hierarchies.

Ramos called for a para-economic paradigm which strengthens the breadth and depth of human beings expressing themselves in non-prescriptive realms of personal power (phenonmony) and community power (isonomy) as deliberative public policy choices. Through using a para-economic perspective, policymakers can redraw the boundaries of reflective practice to embrace persons as moral agents in the creation and pursuit of meaning, living individually and in association with others, rather than principally as a calculating, utility maximizer within a competitive social structure of largely exogenously-determined values and narrow prescriptive roles to live in.

Empowering Communities: Size, Scale, and The Law of Requisite Adequacy

Social systems designs have built within them “the law of requisite adequacy.” As a paradigmatic model, it addresses questions such as space and temporal perspectives to meet varying qualities of human expression and is necessary for delimiting social enclaves in order to achieve their unique expressions. In particular, Ramos’ chapter demonstrates there is no absolutized, centralized, uniform paradigm for viewing these issues as some ideologists might claim. As policy designers, one must need to be aware of principles for designing an array of more human-centered, small, diverse institutions.

Is Small Beautiful?

Plato suggested the polis or political community must be face-to-face and should have 5,040 heads of family. Since then, there have been scholarly attempts to discuss the size of social settings, including No.14 in the Federalist Papers addressing the issue of size as a potentially prohibitory factor of the functioning of the principle of representation in the Union.

Policy scientists Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom in Politics, Economics, and Welfare write, “Insofar as it is attainable at all, for most people much of the ‘good life’ is found small groups. Family life, the rearing of children, love, friendship, respect, kindness, pity, neighborliness, charity, serving others: those are hardly possible except in small groups. If someone could destroy the large groups and leave these things standing, the loss of the large would be quite bearable (Ramos’ italics). But if one maintained the large groups and destroyed these values, the impoverishment and barrenness of living would be incalculable.”

Ramos poses three principles in relation to size for social systems.

• The capability of a social setting to endure and to respond effectively to the needs of its members imposes minimum and maximal limits on size.
• Size is a concrete problem to be solved through ad hoc investigation in context
• When small-scale, face-to-face interactions are fundamental to accomplishing their goals, small rather than large-scale settings are appropriate.

Community power can be gained when requisite scales of human community and association emerge as semi-autonomous, distinctive social entities. The overcentralized market and political arrangements found in many highly industrialized societies have obscured or inhibited locally-based community power from developing. The results of an exploratory action research project conducted for the Church of England evolved some definite qualitative shifts in the nature of human community (face-to-face relationships) and associations (interest collectives) based on size and scale. A related and accompanying model of an agropolitan district is illustrative of community empowerment through attending to size and scale of communities integrating urban and rural needs.

The implications for enabling community power to emerge from these different levels, especially the lower levels, give clues as to how public administration can intersect with and be embedded in small-scale community. Three questions need to be asked in preliminary form with more research needed:

1. What are the natural identifiers through which human beings self-reference communities? For Example, if one is in Los Angeles, one could envision the levels of community by descending scale as follows: South Central Los Angeles, the Crenshaw District, the Leimert Park Neighborhood. These identifiers are not formal government or planning districts. They are self-referent identifiers which connote natural human communities at different levels of scale. However, currently, they have no political authority or self-government.
2. What are the natural scales (and proper forms or approaches) by which a public manager would organize a program or administrative activities with citizens to fit properly into communities?
3. For many activities that affect different levels of scale (multi-scalar), what forums should exist for legitimate conflict resolution between different levels of scale (i.e. larger units and smaller units) which does not automatically, a priori, impose either the values of largeness or smallness on the situation?

Disaggregating the Economy

The economy involves the management and nurturing of life-enhancing resources. A just economy attends to the requisite range of diverse expressions of resource flow, use, and management which support sustainable life. Economies are thus not impersonal mechanisms and hidden-hands, but are instrumentalities to serve range human purposes and social needs guided by human intelligence and ecological limits and opportunities.

Policymakers can look at economy as a multi-level function. Vandana Shiva points out that nature’s economy is the most basic because it provides the foundation for sustenance and market economies and because it has the highest priority to and claim on natural resources since it is the generating source for all other economies. However, forces for economic growth treat the market economy as primary and nature’s economy and the subsistence economy as marginal and secondary.

Capital accumulation does lead to financial growth and speculation, but it erodes the natural resource base of all three economies. The result is a high level of ecological instability, as illustrated in the ecological crisis created by commercial forestry, commercial irrigation and dams, and commercial fishing, to name a few examples.

The solution lies in giving local communities semi-autonomy over local resources so they have the right and responsibility to regulate sustainable resource flows for themselves and other scales of social systems. Without-small scale sustainability, one cannot expect to have large-scale sustainability.

Similarly, the idea of one uniform economy may not reflect the nuances of the trading of resources at local levels. Complimentary economies reflected through community currencies, in light of the major economic meltdown now being experienced, are examples of how size and scale can be disaggregated from a centralized mind-set, and new revitalization of community power can occur at local levels.

Community currencies operate in parallel with national currencies. They reflect the more informal aspects of personal power individuals give to each other on a mutual aid basis which provides resilience at the local level for the market efficiency and risk aggregation at the levels of national and international economies.

Reallocating Public Funds through Public Policy to Support Personal and Community Empowerment

In general, public policymakers must become aware of the multicentric nature of social systems and how they can redistribute resources to support personal and community empowerment.

Changing Policy Incentives to Enhance Healthy Communities

Two broad approaches can be advanced. The first criteria for public policy is to assess the impact of proposed public policy on different types of social institutions (e.g., family, communal, neighborhood, arts and crafts, education, etc.) and make sure that policy incentives and disincentives do not contribute to harming or diminishing personal or community power in those institutions. A couple of examples would be (1) public policies that impact on family values and stability and (2) those incentives which favor more localized economies with local employment. The latter is in contrast to the destruction of communities through global incentives for trade which intervene in communities and separate the “haves” who are able to buy and eventually destroy the balanced local economy, particularly for those who become “have-nots.”

Non-Market Allocative Policies

A second criterion to create public policy resource allocations is to focus on non-market exchange allocative processes. Examples of these outputs are those delivered by households, neighborhood associations, churches, social entrepreneurs, and networks of concerned citizens who focus on environmental and other public issues. For example, the citizen who voluntarily participates in neighborhood church meetings, artistic ensembles, educational encounters, and self-help endeavors is not accountable as a resource. In many nations, a great part of the rural population, many of whom labor as “peasants,” are conventionally not considered to be productive as long as their output of their activities is not commercialized. The output of household labor is not directly transferable to the market nor computed in the “wealth of the nations,” and further adds to the cultural wisdom and heritage , assets which cannot be quantified.

Yet there are several types of resource allocation mechanisms which can assist market and non-market allocative processes:

1.Grants Economy

One resource allocation mechanism is what the economist Kenneth Boulding calls the grants economy. He estimated that in 1973 from 20 to almost 50 per cent of production in America was funded by grants rather than by exchange in its many elusive forms. Thus, in the United States, there is a dual economy of both grants sector and the market exchange sector

2. The Land Trust Model

Another type of resource allocation mechanism is the community land trust model. In this model, the community is the ultimate owner of the land, but the land can be leased long-term (99 years) if residents reside there full-time or offer it as rental property for short-term leases. In the codicils, it is agreed the land can be bought and sold or rented only within a range of percentage or on a percentage index. In this manner, a land and housing market not subject to speculative real estate market can provide family and neighborhood stability over time. This does not preclude speculative real estate. It complements it and preserves the character of neighborhoods or wild rural areas. The affluent community of Irvine, California is now using a variant of the community land trust model to provide affordable housing to a few of its residents. The land trust model is also used extensively to preserve natural land, habitat, and critical watersheds.

In addition, reversing land tax policy can discourage a “rentier” class and speculative real estate bubbles in some sectors of the market. See Henry George Progress and Poverty and current approaches.

3. The Social Capital Movement

In this model, investors assume a smaller rate of return for greater social as well as economic benefits. The Grameen Bank beginning in Bengladesh gives micro-loans for basic subsistence and economy, and derives suitable rates of return yet creates more flourishing communities in poor areas. A second variation is allowing venture capitalist or local government bonding to accrue to local sustainable agriculture or small to medium size businesses which support the integrity of a local economy.

4. Gift Economy

Another variation of the market exchange economy is the gift economy. Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s successor in India, was able to convince large landowners to gift over to communities of impoverished peasants over 2 million acres of land over a twenty year period in exchange for commitments to work the land productively. Inheritance and philanthropic foundations provide some of the functions of the gift economy in their own right.

These examples are intended to be illustrative of the creative ways in which public policy can allocate resources to non-market or social market exchange groups in order to allow for greater human flourishing while still retaining market exchange processes in its proper role. These are examples of delimiting the sphere of the market in social life or what Ramos calls social system delimitation.

5. The Sharing Economy and Creating Social Spaces

Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman in their book Sharing Cities 2015 MIT Press that the interplay between computer technologies, urban space, and cyberspace provides a variety of platforms for sharing that go beyond simply economic exchange and mobile services to the customer. Sharing public services, public spaces, and creating ecologically friendly social and physical infrastructure becomes a reflection of self-reliant citizen “homesteaders” and activists to the point of participating in remaking the city itself. This involves delimiting with public policy different types of social enclaves, including phenonomy (citizen self-created artistic and social spaces), which the young are doing in small downtowns and larger enclaves in large cities like Berlin.

6. Sub-national, regional cooperative non profit associations

For large scale goods and services who have enough scale for “bridge capital” and associated political umbrella protections against smaller corruptors and mafias, regional scale activities can coordinate with other political and economic entities, and reinvest any “profits” and/or “grants/donations” back into the community or other communities.

Conclusion

This model has emphasized the need for policymakers to move away from a uniform, market-centric understanding of social life and their attachment to a formal institutional paradigm with methodologies that reinforce this standpoint. Rather, what is suggested is that policy leadership is needed to understand the requisite adequacy and variety of social systems in a community-based paradigm that emerge through citizens engaging their situations at the level of face-to-face interaction with government as a facilitator or partner. Local democracy with relevant and inclusive participation by citizens can allow for requisite diversity for communities and in the biosphere as well, and delimit centralizing tendencies of markets and hierarchies.

Substantive reasoning about the ordering of human ends is the starting point for more discovery and engagement with citizens about their communities. Widened citizen choice about the use of time, space, and energy can then result in new forms of sharing, creating, and cooperating in an ecological world where the conscious use of resources will be necessary response-abilities for all citizens.