How engagement solves problems

The outcome of this kind of revolution can only be that people become more engaged in the decisions made about their lives, the trade-offs that have to be made and the implications of their choices.

This move would solve one of the major political problems identified by Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA, who wrote in The Times:

"Voting intentions are the only public attitudes party strategists really care about (I know, I used to be one). But a failure to engage the public more deeply creates two problems. First, it denies leaders the legitimacy to make tough choices. Second, it makes it hard for people to connect the big issues on newspaper front pages to day-to-day choices in their own lives."

While this view still sees a leading role for politicians, Tim O'Reilly has gone further in outlining the concept of  "government as platform".

"Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn't give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices."

"Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organising engine for civic action. Might DIO [Do It Ourselves] help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?"

The case for much greater individual pubic engagement is compelling, and not just from a theoretical point of view. It can work more effectively in practice than existing arrangements.

As the work of Elinor Ostrom shows, local self-regulation of common resources can work more effectively than regulation by distant national or international agencies. She wrote in a 2001 newsletter for the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change:

"Considerable progress has been achieved in the social sciences by rigorously pursuing a static analysis of relatively simple systems. Learning about the equilibrium properties of simple systems with particular characteristics has enabled social scientists to expand their capabilities to predict and explain human behaviour in unchanging environments with strong selection mechanisms. Static analysis has not, however, prepared policy analysts with the knowledge needed to design resilient governance systems in a rapidly changing, complex, and interdependent world.

"Static analysis still dominates how policy analysis is taught and applied to various aspects of global environmental change. Students of policy analysis are frequently taught an overly simplified form of 'scientific management' of natural resource systems that stresses the feasibility of designing optimal governance systems for entire regions or the globe itself."

After examining forms of environmental self-regulation, she described how polycentric government – government with many centres of authority – can outperform centralised models.

"Polycentric governance systems are frequently criticised for being too complex, redundant, and lacking a central direction when viewed from a static, simple-systems perspective. They have considerable strengths when viewed from a dynamic, complex-systems perspective, particularly one that is concerned with the vulnerability of governance systems to external shocks. Polycentric systems are the organisation of small-, medium-, and large-scale democratic units that each may exercise considerable independence to make and enforce rules within a circumscribed scope of authority for a specified geographical area. Some units may be general-purpose governments whereas others may be highly specialised. Self-organised resource governance systems within a polycentric system may be organised as special districts, non-governmental organisations, or parts of local governments. These are nested in several levels of general-purpose governments that provide civil equity as well as criminal courts. The smallest units can be viewed as parallel adaptive systems that are nested within ever-larger units that are themselves parallel adaptive systems.

"The strength of polycentric governance systems in coping with complex, dynamic biophysical systems is that each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for using a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units. Instead of being a major detriment to system performance, redundancy builds in considerable capabilities. If there is only one governance unit for a very large geographic area, the failure of that unit to respond adequately to external threats may mean a very large disaster for the entire system. If there are multiple governance units, organised at different levels for the same geographic region, the failure of one or more of these units to respond to external threats may lead to small-scale disasters that may be compensated by the successful reaction of other units in the system."

So flexibility, the devolution of authority to match local knowledge and rapid feedback through direct participation can provide policies that are both effective and responsible over the longer term, serving individual and societal interests.

This is also the answer to the question asked by David Gershon in Social Change 2.0:

"By taking a page from Thomas Jefferson's playbook, might we be able to motivate people to change because of a dream that inspires their imagination, enlivens their sense of possibility, and lifts their spirit as a human being? Or to ask this question in a more tangible way, how might we empower people to voluntarily adopt new behaviors that help them, their communities, and their organisations operate at higher levels of social value so we can realise more of our potential as a human species?"

The evidence would suggest that the devolution of power doesn't just facilitate the devolution of responsibility, but also brings that responsibility into existence in spheres where it might not already exist.

So engagement generates legitimacy, connects the global with the local and in doing so can provide renewed motivation to generate new forms of social value and public good.