My (former) colleague Stefanie asked to give input for her presentation at an expert meeting for the Observatory on Public Service Innovation at the OECD in Paris, based on the conference Borders to Cross (October 29-31 in Amsterdam). My reply follows here:
Learning
from the experiences in BtC
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Professor
Evelien Tonkens: “There is no such thing as an immaculate civic initiative”)
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1. What
we learned during this conference is that we hardly found any example of
citizens’ initiative without any interference from governments. Most examples
show a variety of coproduction.
Moreover
not all world-problems (real big challenges) are addressed by either
government, or markets or civil society separately. If anyhow, they are tackled
jointly.
So do not
think that civil society with its own approaches can replace government.
But with
the relatively larger role of civil society and crowdsourcing in the coming
‘wiki-world’, governments and professional institutions will (have to) leave
more room for market-like innovations, produced with unplannable
serendipity. This conflicts with
the basic values and attitudes in government and politics (planning and
regulating, treating everyone equally).
How to
cope with this reality?
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The
largest difference between government and civil society is to be found in the
way they approach social problems. Citizens always start at the specific end
of the line, whereas states tend to work from the generic towards the
specific. This has implications for the way democratic values are
applied. Citizens are indeed
(sometimes) able to be inclusive, and also when asked they can be transparent
and accountable, but do not ask them to be representative...
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The first issue for further international
research concerns the
system and
would be:
How to learn politicians and government
officials to distinguish between two approaches: open up for initiatives and
citizen’s priorities in some areas (notwithstanding unequal and unpredictable,
- even not politically preferred? - results) and steering or regulating on the
basis of state principles in other areas of the social and public domain.
In the conference we have seen many promising
innovations started by civil servants. So it is not impossible. Yet the big
absentee is still politics and political parties. A general remark concerned
the urgency to get them aboard. This would focus the problem to politicians.
They do not have to fear loss of function, because the distinction as worded
above clearly is a political task.
2. The
second related issue concerns methods. Even when political decision-making has
primacy, present methods of planning and problem-solving inside bureaucratic
silo’s is clearly suboptimal. Each department (minister, alderman, director)
wants to control his own sector, whereas social problems often transcend these
silo’s and larger benefits of optimal solutions fall down in other department’s
areas than those that carry the costs. It is a challenge to overcome this
diseconomy of public means. The answer to this issue is less unexplored than
the first one, because there are good experiences available, only to be
disseminated. Yet this method also requires self-restrain from politicians and
bureaucrats for the better good.
These
methods can be called “Social Tendering” (maatschappelijk aanbesteden) or
Innovation-directed procurement (innovatiegericht inkopen). The simple idea is
to split problem-definition and solution design from outscourcing and tendering
production of the required services. Some Dutch municipalities and the national
Watermanagement-agency (Rijkswaterstaat) have good systems in limited areas
available. There the demand for further international research would be:
Can
the principles of this rational practice be extended to many other areas (beyond
procurement in the physical domain)?
One might say that in a totally different field the practice we know as
Family Conferences (Eigen Kracht Conferenties) is application of the same
principle: start defining problem and solution with direct stakeholders around
the problem-holder.
3. A
third remarkable development eminent at Borders to Cross is the upcoming of new
forms of markets. Participating in the conference was a large new group
of ‘social entrepreneurs’ (sociaal ondernemers), whose primary objective is to
solve a social problem they are committed to rather than making profits. Quite
a few projects presented in the conference consisted of (old?) new market forms
like co-operatives (Makkies, Goteo, etc).
Citizens
become producers of public goods rather than just consumers (energy,
health-care, transportation). Also in commercial activities more
institutionalized agencies are skipped by direct inter-personal exchange via
social media on the Internet. Well known examples are Ebay, Airbnb, Shared cars,
etc. This phenomenon challenges governments in another function, i.e. as
market-regulators. How to tax barters, how to control the quality of food and
hygiene by “Thuis afgehaald”? , The
movement of ‘Share-economy’ is upcoming especially in South-European countries.
A demand
for further
international research would be:
How to
make distinctions and to segregate or integrate these forms of share-economy
[ http://ouishare.net] in market regulations, allowing
specific regimes? How to technically link these regimes with the Internet,
where Share-Economy is flourishing?
