Little Side note: What is the role of the Government in this Bottom-up Open Care project?

[mariam1313]

In response to Naomi…

Hi everyone,

Naomi and I continued the discussion on e-mail a bit and she asked me to copy my response regarding some examples of citizen participation in Georgia. Again, these are just a few examples off the top of my head - I didn’t have time to do full scale research of this topic.  but if needed, I can carve out some time to look into it more, if it’s for a specific purpose. Here it goes:

One such example that comes to mind is when the Ministry of Agriculture had public consultations during the development of the National Rural Development Strategy (I was a part of this working group from the Ministry of Justice side, this is why it comes to mind, but I am sure other examples are out there too):

http://enpard.ge/en/public-consultations-on-rural-development-national-strategy-of-georgia/

Also, Georgia is a pretty active part of the Open Government Partnership, and as evidenced in the Action Plan, “1.3 Empowering citizens to engage in the legislative process”, the Government of Georgia (GoG) has been working towards opening up the process of legislation and policy-making, to be more open to citizens.If you want, I can ask my relevant colleagues, who were involved in OGP processes to contact you with some more information.  http://www.parliament.ge/uploads/other/37/37370.pdf

Also, the Public Service Development Agency (with the support of GoG, EU and Sida) has been building Community Centers (CCs) in rural areas in Georgia, where local population can receive over 200 private and public services in one space. Additionally, these centers have conference rooms, which can be used by the local population/government/any interested person or group to host meetings and public discussions on any topic. The CCs are very active and there are lots of events in the centers organized by CSOs and local governments.

www.centri.gov.ge

Additionally, the Rustavi municipality, which is involved in our UNDP-UNV project, has an ongoing participatory budgeting project, which is a good way to involve citizens in decision-making. http://www.vng-international.nl/blog/rustavi-city-starts-involving-citizens-its-budgeting-process/

Finally, the Office of the State Minister of Georgia for Reconciliation and Civic Equality developed a Civic Equality and Integration State Strategy and Action Plan with active involvement of NGOs, like United Nations Association of Georgia, European Center for Minority issues and Public Defender’s Office. http://smr.gov.ge/FileList.aspx?ID=34

As mentioned, these are just a few good examples that come to mind.

[alberto]

The limits to participation

Thanks for chipping in, @mariam1313 !

Like you, I am interested in participation. My own work has been about ways that the Internet can enable more effective forms of participatory democracy. I even wrote a book about this. My point of departure was that participation as we inherited it from the 20th has not made a substantial impact on decision quality or societal cohesion, at least not in Italy, not even in the best cases. There are many reasons why this happens. Some of them:

• Participatory processes are designed by civil servants, with other civil servants and "usual suspect" stakeholders (like professional business and trade union representatives) in mind. In your rural development example, I see that they worked through offline meetings, convened in cities and on weekdays at 11.00 am. That choice is going to prevent the most interesting potential participants (the local entrepreneur, the teacher, the parent of small children...) from showing up. People who reliably do show up are the people paid to participate, like representatives and lobbyists... but those already have channels to talk to the government. The other option would be to convene during the evenings, but, at least in Italy, civil servants do not like this at all. The option is almost never even discussed. So, most of the collective brainpower is ruled out before the process even starts.
• The "technology of participation" (the town hall meeting) is non-scalable. This means (a) every participant will spend most of her time being talked to and (b) people will need to keep any intervention short. This means there is no time to explore issues and scenarios. This is why I like so much online forums like Edgeryders: you can participate in your own time (when you are off work, when your children are asleep...); take time to make your case; and no one is forced to be reading anyone else. We choose to engage with contributions we find interesting.
• The social contract underpinning participation is often not clear. I participate, then what? What we suggest gets implemented? What we suggest gets considered? How do I know decisions have not been made beforehands, and the decision maker ris just looking for a rubberstamp? Recent example: after an online and offline consultation with 1.8 million participants on Italian schools, number 1 request that emerged was to have teachers evaluated by independent experts, and not by their own headmasters. The government, nevertheless, decided to reject that request. Assuming the average participants spent two hours participating (very conservative assumption), that means the waste of 3.6 million hours. In European standards (1,732 productive hours in a year), that the equivalent of about 2,000 years of human work. Not cool. The social contract issue is the easiest one to fix.

I have recently been involved in contributing to Italy’s 3rd action plan under the Open Government Partnership (as an activist, unpaid). My brothers-and-sisters-in-arms and myself made these points quite forcefully, and they have been adopted by the government. Here’s to hoping for better times.

[noemi]

An optimist?

@mariam1313 thanks again for being so responsive, I can imagine a long thread like this can be somewhat confusing

For myself, the lessons - far and beyond the existance of institutional policies per se - are those which are carried by the people involved: civil servants or citizens directly involved in these processes. For example I remember the story about Rustavi’s participatory budgeting and Revaz’s enthusiasm to be involved in implementation. However, there is more to learn about the outcomes of it - for example, in Cluj where I live they ran a 3 step process starting from the neighborhood level. But it involved a lot of deliberation - as Alberto was writing above, that means showing up at neighborhood meetings (physical). They nonetheless got to testing it at the city level, but a lot of the energy got dissipated in sending in proposals to compete for online votes (>400 projects)! and ending up funding very few with little money (1000 eur per winning project - about 50 of them).  I don’t want to think of the amount that went into the administration of it, but you see where this goes. That was in 2014-2015, no news since, and more importantly, it’s unclear whether it was considered successful or not in order to move further in an upgraded version. Anyway, this is just an example…  hope Rustavi will do much better, but also that people running it are considering risks too.