Issues for OECD concerning do-ocracy

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

Professor Evelien Tonkens: “There is no such thing as an immaculate civic initiative”)

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?

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...

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?