Relational Governance: Engaging Naturally Emergent Communities Of Scale

Thesis: There are socially constructed imaginary recurrent scales of nested groups which express different intrinsic values of human association. A new vertical balancing of powers can reflect a “recriprocal relational federalism” integrating citizen participation with a greater range of social networks and forums of association; thus creating a more citizen centered, vibrant democracy.

Introduction

Geoffrey Vickers writes, “It seems to me quite impossible that the political state on today’s scale can ever become coextensive with the social matrix within which individuals find their identity. So I can see no hope of satisfying the passionate current demand for direct individual participation in political decisions. The same difficulty seems to be beset the equally passionate urge to transfuse large-scale economic institutions with personal participation in “decision-making” Somehow accommodation must be reached, rather than identity achieved, between the political and economic institutions which sustain viable public order and the social fabric which gives life its meaning.” P. 92 Freedom in a Rocking Boat.

This dilemma is aggravated by the political bias of scale: that large scale unit’s aggregrate and obscure unique small scale units in public policymaking and administration. Illustrated by a case study, Hendrik Wagenaar writes “..the governing elite is, despite a rhetoric of collaboration and civic involvement, is often hardly willing to performatively acknowledge the legitimacy of citizens; that is, by real responsibility, or by engaging in …enacted interdependence.” P.243 The Practices of Freedom.

Citizens are not simply individuals, but are also members of communities with multiple allegiances. They have imaginary local communities which have real symbolic identification for location and identity purposes. Yet these communities are not made explicit in any systematic way in formal decision-making.  In Los Angeles, for example, where I grew up, Leimert Park is part of the Crenshaw district, which is part of a larger University Park, which is part of larger symbolic unit, which is part of South Central Los Angeles, and so on. I suspect there are missing locations representing other scales of community. None of these are officially governmental jurisdictions or legitimate forums for democratic participation.

This thought-piece proposes that these recurrent, socially constructed imaginaries of community reflect semi-autonomous, distinct modes of human living, and represent at least one criteria for the design of human settlements. They may also be a criteria for political recognition. Through making these imaginary scale communities more explicit through experimental action research and participative, democratic forums, we have a conceptual basis for reconnecting democracy with community at different levels of human scale.

The Existence of Natural Imaginary Communities as Social Matrices

The Church of England was looking for its communities. An unpublished particular form of exploratory action research was conducted many years ago through the Brunel Institute of Organization and Social Studies in England. Five distinct zones of community reflecting different scales of action for “shepherding” tasks for clergy. Similar to below, they included:

1. Households
2. Neighborhood
3. Extended District
4. Sub-Nation Region
5. Nation

One discovers that there exist a “community of communities”.  Based on scientific conjectures from both political philosophy and empirical social science (including a conversation with the late Dr. Elliott Jaques who participated in the Church of England action research study) the following are initial proposals which link the nature of community association at different levels of imaginary scale with corresponding governance values of association. (Names can be changed to fit cultural descriptions.  There are larger cultural descriptions than those represented below.)

1. Nation-State. The Nation State should be the inspirer of unity and collective effort, not the authoritarian architect of uniform social patterns. Stronger or weaker confederations or creative federalisms can assist in devolving power, while preventing an over centralizing, aggregating, over-control tendency over time.  Variety and experimentation at the local level should be encouraged.  Community of Legitimacy creating unity in diversity.
2. Sub-National Regions. These sub-national regions are where attention to multi-cultural and unique sub-national identities can be attended to through creating, wherever necessary, multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and multi-ecological commands which focus on functional administration and are reflect less particularistic, symbolic-emotional authority. Community of Integrative Identities.
3. The 100,000 person municipality or urban/rural jurisdictions provides an array of changing comprehensive services while managing their identity (unity) over time.   Politically, usually symbolized by a symbolic leader such as a Mayor.  Community of symbolic unity through enabling comprehensive services.
4. Sub-Metropolitan Scale Functional Regions. This is the horizontal, functional space where synergies can emerge from cooperative actions of complexes of middle range enterprises and interests, mobilizing timely innovations. Community of Aggregative, Coordinative Functional Interests
   • John Freedman’s idea of an agropolitan region can support the interdependence of rural, semi and peri-urban, and urban interests with insurance policies for food security and distribution.
   • Flexible, function regional planning and coordinating councils can emerge.
   • Legislative democracy (as opposed to highly driven executive branch democracies) can be regenerated.
   • Regional businesses and shopping centers
5. Districts. The largest face-to-face human scaled community (possibly around 30,000 persons).   This zone is usually defined by governmental or ecological contours, and has values of defending “community character”. This is usually the first level of full local government for systematic public service programming, local land use planning, and conflict resolution. This is the zone of community where there is a confluence of deliberative, participative democracy with representative democracy.  Distinct Community Character in Place with Citizen Mutual Recognition.
6. Neighborhood or village. This is the level of scale where small shops and a radius extends for an elementary or middle school. People know each other and can work together on improvement projects with informal social governance councils. In addition, informality enables the beginning level of “purposive sociality”.  Social intricacy and individual expression emerge through micro-levels of occupying and modifying non-privatized enclosures or public spaces for meeting a wide range of basic needs and cultural living patterns  e.g. informal livelihood opportunities, modifying games to existing architectural spaces to religious celebrations.  The informality creates the immediacy of social intricacy reflecting sub-cultural expression and representation, distinct patterns of decision-making, separate from, yet in cooperation with co-production and co-cooperation with government.  Community of Mutual Knowledge and Social Intricacy.
7. Sugar-borrowing or extended household. This is the intimate level of community where people have deep affection for each other, know the specific needs and routines of others, and where personal mutual aid can be given. Community of Intimate knowledge and Personal Aid.

These social imagineries can be seen as recurrent, socially constructed, semi-autonomous, distinct, potential spaces of vibrant human association which have the potential of regeneration.  As “ideal types”  these potential forms can be seen as having a social infrastructure (or enabling environment or enabling conditions) which can support self-organization:  socio-cultural, socio-technical, leadership-power aspects with different patterns of spatial-temporal orientations.   These imaginaries can be regenerated through action research and integrated in order to express a more human-scaled pattern of relational federalism.  These socially constructed spaces can give expression to different scale of community values while integrating with self-organizing activities.  Self-organization implies an interpenetration of diverse citizen desires which can form a unifying symbol or identification.  In addition they provide the potential for integrative processes of learning and the generation of joint fact-finding and knowledge:  the optimal integrating of physical and socio-cultural space and resources for joint activities to express manifold relations.  These imaginaries provide the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for productive “community engagement” mediated by cultural patterns and ethical leadership.  Structually, these ideal-types point to a model of governance as “multilevel coordination rather than authoritative decision-making” (Wachaus 2014, 574), a “dynamic process rather than a structure” (583(…where as Cohen (2008, 518) writes, “the state is (not)…a central and coercive power, but rather a convener, funder, catalyst, coordinator, and supervisor, and also a participant”.  p.241 Integrative Process:  Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration  Process Century Press 2015

.Moving from Aggregative Centralized Hierarchies to Disaggregated Heterarchies

As Mary Parker Follett has written in The New State and other writings, these imaginaries of communities are continually constructed through relational interactions among citizens in wider nested networks of relations.  While they may seem intuitively obvious, they are usually thought of as aggregative inclusive spaces rather than qualitatively different intrinsically valued spaces.  In other words, as one ascends in scale, a conventional hierarchical, aggregative centralizing approach assumes they are more of the same requiring some adjustments controlled by top-down decision-making.  In contrast, a heterarchy, a term introduced by James Ogilvy, means multiple or dispersed rule, a continually creating of powers rather than a single rule where one person or group is dominant.  This creating of powers involves citizens in varying groups being responsible for continual learning, modifying outcomes as they continually engage what Follett terms “the law of the situation” and thus expanding their learning capacities through representing their group with larger groups and networks to avoid particularism.  Thus, the continual engagement of interdependence between the local foundations of democracy at the neighborhood and local district organizing spaces with larger social spheres and construction of more unifying, general interests asking “what does the dynamic situation require of us?”

Toward More Citizen Self-Governance: Constituting the Relational State

Mary Parker Follett argues in The New State (1918) citizens must create a dynamic, participative democracy from a representative democracy. She suggests in her “Constructive Conflict” article that citizens and managers alike should learn to how to engage situations and integrate emergent and diverse desires and agendas into creative and encompassing decisions. In this manner of thinking and behaving, relational outcomes can be “re-constituted” in public life without excessive coercion.

Follett has a distinct view of the relationship between One and the Many, the part and the whole. She views political pluralism not as the expression of a separative, colliding of groups, but as relationally transforming and strengthening mutual understanding (not necessarily consensus) between the macro and the micro interplay of democratic dynamics. Follett argued crowd philosophy and representative government will fail because democracy is not the sum of individuals; it is a genuine union of true individuals. How is that genuine union to be attained? Through releasing the potentials of the individual through directly participating in creative group life which interweaves him/her and others into a real and deeper identification with the values of the whole. The person realizes their relationship to the larger union by expressing their unique desires fully through integrative participation with others. Thus there is no separateness but an intrinsic moral interdependence to be discovered connecting individuals and others in their joint engagement of conflict and the direct creation of their common goods. As we gain skills, experience, and maturity, we are attracted to and identify with larger concerns (and larger scales) of participating in the public good. Thus, we are not “democrats”; we continually create ourselves as “democrats”. We move our democracy from classifying and separating roles in a “talking shop” and a “doing shop” into reducing the distance to direct group participation not as an isolated individual with their own interests but through and in a concrete realization of an expanding scale and network of relationships where one discovers their true interest in mutual self-interest, and so on.  There is an emphasis on power-with rather than power-over in order to uncover as many relevant jointly impinging factors in the situation.

As Stout and Love write, “Follett notes the importance of connecting groups from the smallest to the largest social scope in what could be described as a deeply nesting, networking federalism that begins at the most local level.  ‘Community must be the foundation stone of the New State’.  From that immediate group of direct participation, “representatives from neighborhood groups meet to discuss and thereby correlate the needs of all parts of the city, of all parts of the state.”  p. 141 Integrative Process:  Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration.

Luc Hoebeke reflects Follett’s ideas in his draft ready to be published: “The Elephant and the Lion: An Enquiry Into the Roots of Democracy”:

Hoebeke writes “A system of higher order does not focus upon the sum of the systems of the lower order but upon their mutual relations. So, a system of lower order has its complete autonomy for its internal affairs, while it becomes a part of a system of higher order when its behavior impacts the relation with other systems. Family rows are best settled in the family itself, until the neighborhood is disturbed by it. Then a neighborhood committee in which one or more family members are present deliberate upon the disturbing relations with the neighborhood and in that context help the family to contain its row among the family boundaries. There are examples on community level where the same methodology has been effectively and efficiently dealt with. The usage of water and what is done to waste water in dry areas is at the base of many intercommunity contracts, defining the constraints of the usage of water for the communities without defining how they should use their water. In the fact, the confederalist spirit of the Swiss system finds its origin in water issues between valleys. Along time ago they were settled by fight until the community representations were tired of waste (which war is) and accommodated their relationship through jointly accepted regulations about what created problems between them.” Based on his analysis, he proposes new role definitions for citizens and policymakers alike in order to help clarify where their responsibilities lie inside and outside inter-scalar conflict.

Without the creation of relational systems, democracy will die for lack of realization if it is not practiced locally.

Building in Relational Systems:  Clarifying Scale to Surface Hidden Differences

Thus,  Mary Parker Follett calls us to combine wisdom, participation, and method.  She sees participation as functional relating and continually creating.  She views “the main concern of politics as modes of association.  We do not want the rule of the many of the few; we must find that method of political procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole”.  Follett argues, “Now continuous machinery for working out the principles of relation, whether it be in factor or nation or internationally, is of the very essence of freedom…Collectively to discover and follow certain principles of action makes for individual freedom.  Continuous machinery for this purpose is an essential factor in the only kind of control we can contemplate.”

A critical innovation in the “machinery of freedom” are participative, scaled forums for resolving inter-scalar conflict while avoiding extreme parochialism. Raghavan Iyer writes, “The checks and balances in the system should operate mainly between higher and lower level bodies. A higher level body should be able to restrain any lower level when needed, while at the same time lower-level bodies should be able to combine when necessary to restrain any higher level body. The judiciary should be placed outside this process.” P. 205 Parapolitics.

Robert Biller claimed that the higher and lower scale body should come to their own agreement, attempting joint-fact finding and a creative integration in Folletian terms though compromise and accommodation was always a default position. Mutual control must be co-created between scales. Biller argued that if smaller and larger community-units cannot reach a decision in a democratic forum by a predesignated time, then the decision would fall to the next highest decision body since the participants in co-governance were not response-able to arrive at a decision.

A balance of powers amongst scales would make the most sense if we employed experimental citizen participative action research for generating and re-creating natural socially imaginary communities.  As Gerald Fairtlough writes, “Heterarchy works best when the scale is right.” p. 76  The Three Ways of Getting Things Done.  In functional public policy, for example, the situation at hand may indicate that scales be distinguished to promote constructive conflict, with each scale representative group being responsibly autonomous in working toward a process of creative integration as they assume heterarchical relations with other nested networks.  For example, the City of Los Angeles asked citizens to form their own neighborhood associations to eventually be certified with minimal criteria rather than impose a detailed geographic template composed by “experts”.   Over 100 neighborhood associations were formed from citizen initiatives and “constitutional associational conventions” called in their neighborhoods.  While these resulting forums had advisory authority to the city government, they provided citizens an opportunity to interweave their desires into neighborhood priorities.  While imperfect and steadily evolving,  conflict management processes between the neighborhood representativeness and the City will need to be studied.

In sum, through direct democratic forums attending to scalar effects of proposed policies, which can evolve to approximate the minimal bases of natural communities, “a slow democracy movement” can mitigate the effects of the disruptive effects of speed.  Rather than over-delegating and projecting power solely to “experts”, technological “forces”, or market “mechanisms”, citizens should engage Follett’s “law of the situation” with motives of fostering social harmony through an integrative process of inclusive creative integration of differences.

Yuri Levin, author of “The Fractured Republic”, writes that a strengthening of local communities is not meant to pull people down from national identification, but to acknowledge that only “vibrant, near-at-hand” communities can help reduce the isolating individualism in modern societies;  thus problems that need a collective solution are best addressed by the most trusted, and thus local, institutions.