DEEPENING DEMOCRACY – GLOBAL CHALLENGES

DEEPENING DEMOCRACY – GLOBAL CHALLENGES 

“The Power Report” (www.powerinquiry.org) on the state of democracy and politics in the UK was released in February 2006. The report, led by Labour MP Helena Kennedy, emphatically states that “democracy faces meltdown in Britain as the public rejects an outdated political system”. Importantly, it blows away some widely held myths of an apathetic citizenry, but rather holds that the current process of democracy does not offer citizens enough influence over decisions.

Front-page reports and editorials titled “The need to return power to the people”, and “A cause whose time has come” illustrated the chord that the report had struck. Gordon Brown is betting political capital on it, calling the report a "renewal of Britain" that is "shaped by a reinvigorated sense of community and being led by courageous local reformers.” 

Governments across the world are facing challenges. In the developing world, these challenges are of delivering services, providing infrastructure and ensuring social justice. The Power Report is one example that governments in the developed world are facing a different set of challenges- the relationship between them and their citizens. Citizen involvement in public issues is dropping off the edge of a cliff with poor voter turnout, increasing disaffection, and a reduced sense of civic responsibility. Studies in the UK have found that since the 1960s, traditional forms of community organisation (the political party, the trade union, the church) have all suffered a collapse in membership. Similarly, positive perceptions of neighbours have generally declined, and trust in other people has fallen from 56 per cent in 1959 to less than 30 per cent in 1996. As a result, serious debate is taking place about the role of government. One report states that “government has gradually been moving away from focusing just on public service improvement to the more complex challenge of how to repair the fabric of co-operative relationships on which strong communities are based. This is unfamiliar terrain, posing new questions and dilemmas that have not traditionally been at the centre of public policy debate: how can we establish the conditions on which trusting and co-operative relationships between citizens can develop? How do we nurture a greater sense of neighbourliness?” 

A positive relationship between community functioning and the quality of democratic institutions goes all the way back to Alex Tocqueville in his discovery of American democracy in the 18th-century. However, there has been a dramatic resurgence of interest in this aspect of democratic functioning over the past decade, led by political scientists like Robert Putnam, studying what is popularly termed “social capital” and its relationship to democratic institutions. While critics of Putnam deride what they call his somewhat blithe claims of linkage between the two, there is no denying that his work has triggered off extraordinary interest on the implications for governments in general, but also for the relationship between state, market and society.  

The centre of attention of this new dynamic is the local government, given its proximity to the citizen, and exposure to the emerging trend of a disconnected citizenry. Among the Power Report recommendations are a rebalancing of power towards local government and “allowing citizens a much more direct and focused say over political decisions and policies”. 

Why is all this important for India? In developing countries like ours, the relationship between the state and the citizen is much more hierarchical and feudal. Citizens as well as governments see government as a “provider” of services, in a best-case treating the citizen as a "customer"- but always outside the decision-making process. Given our enormous challenges on most public issues, and our substantial social inequity and heterogeneity, debates about deepening democracy are often seen as luxuries that we cannot afford at the moment, good only as esoteric ideas for drawing room debates. The argument goes, “Should we not be concentrating on just getting the basics right - get our cities and villages to give us good roads, water supply, public transport, and so on? Leave these fancy ideas of deepening democracy and increasing participation after we have reached an acceptable threshold, both in the quality of our services as well as in the capacity of our people.” 

This is the age-old argument of the ends and means; unfortunately, in this case we might just be misunderstanding both. What if greater participation in decision-making at the local government level created a more responsive and efficient local government, generating its resources optimally and using them efficiently? What if greater participation could ensure that problems are not escalated unnecessarily to the ivory towers of the municipal high command, but resolved locally in each neighbourhood? After all, most Indian cities do not have 100,000 different problems-they often have a hundred problems repeated a thousand times. Most importantly, what if a deepened democracy could not only improve the functioning of our local governments, but also address the issue of a disempowered citizenry that feels no sense of ownership, and hence has no shame in breaking building laws or encroaching public property?

What if the issues that the developed democracies are grappling with are also relevant to us, not in some distant future, but today?

 We missed the first copper-wire-based telecom revolution, but are doing a terrific job playing catch-up by skipping a few generations and leapfrogging into wireless. In the same way, we don’t necessarily have to go through the same iterative process in the evolution of our public institutions – we can telescope the timeline by learning from the democratic debates that other countries are having. And in this, nothing has evinced greater current interest in legislatures, city councils, public policy institutions and neighbourhood groups across many of the mature democracies in the world than decentralised, participatory forms of distributed decision-making. Are we – our governments, our citizens, our business icons and political leaders - ready to learn?

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The writer is Founder, Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org