Multilevel Citizenship

Author: Gabriel Chanan

To repair British society, we need an alliance between progressive policy and community activism. There are longstanding obstacles on both sides. Governments, even purportedly progressive ones, tend to think they are there to make all the decisions on behalf of people, not with them. And community activists tend to distrust governments, even progressive ones, and adopt an oppositional stance.

A major culture change is needed on both sides. Government needs to realise that the problem of improving public services is not just a matter of money and top-down reforms, but – as front-line workers frequently try to tell them – of co-production between service providers and active communities in every locality.

Citizen democracy sees people’s direct interactions with each other as the centre-point of human identity. It is here, in our families, households, neighbourhoods and workplaces that the basis of social life is formed. It is these interactions that furnish us with the sense of common destiny, responsibility to each other, joint effort on common issues. Once we lose touch with the direct level of human interaction, we lose the touchstone for managing all other levels and contexts.

This does not mean that communities have to be stable, traditional and insular. Communities have to be made and remade as our circumstances change. But if we lose that basic capacity for mutuality, we are at the mercy of remote concentrations of power.

On the community side, activists need to understand that creating the conditions for coproduction also requires our intervention to drive supportive complementary top-down action. Local activism alone cannot overcome poverty or achieve equality. All the levers of power need to be operated – progressive taxation, ample benefits, productive economy, effective public services. It is self-defeating to see the state as an enemy when you need the state to direct public services to engage in co-production with you. As activists we need to become more savvy about how policy-making works and which specific policy levers open doors for local activism and co-production.

We need to practise multilevel citizenship, meaning that we should be equally strongly concerned with direct and indirect levels of decision-making. It’s the weakness of this connection that allows the idea of active communities to be used as a fig-leaf for austerity, or to be seen by broadly progressive policy-makers as an irritant rather than a vital component in their toolkit.  

Citizen democracy needs to include all levels of decision-making, macro as well as micro, and insist on the interconnections between them. The exercise of citizen democracy at more centralised levels has to be done via representation, with the compromises that requires. Citizen democracy cannot function without the nation state, so it has to engage with it and try to change the way the nation state operates. We can’t entirely get away from ‘top down/bottom up’ tensions and the need for the more centralised levels to facilitate the more dispersed.

On this issue New Labour was more or less on the right path until it was knocked off course by the 2008 global financial crisis. One important difference, though, is that then we more or less assumed the stability of a flawed democracy that we were trying to improve. Now, we need to defend democracy itself at the same time as trying to overcome its flaws. We need to show that citizen democracy strengthens the proper exercise of the centralised organs of democracy by improving their creativity and accountability at the decentralised levels and the way they facilitate independent citizen action.

Read more about our Citizen Democracy Series here.

The publisher is Citizen Network Research. Multilevel Citizenship © Gabriel Chanan 2024.