Communities of Actors: Dealing with the Problems Communities Face

By Randall Nielsen

Communities are increasingly recognizing the challenge of dealing with issues that, by their nature, require multiple levels of complementary action by a variety of actors. Issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, crime, and the education of young people simply cannot be dealt with through institutional means alone.

It has become clear that such political issues can be dealt with only through widespread, ongoing, mutually reinforcing action. The actors need to include individuals, families, ad hoc associations (some that may only temporarily form around a particular sort of action on an issue), civic and professional organizations, and government agencies.

The challenge is to find ways to develop and use all these civic resources in ways that are reinforcing. There is more to that challenge than simply increasing civic involvement.

In fact, Kettering research has found that the challenge in public life is often not that people and organizations are inactive or disengaged. More often, it’s the contrary—there are all kinds of activities, but the actions not only fail to complement each other; they are often at odds.

Public schools, for example, do not suffer from a lack of “reform” efforts and other sorts of attention. What many communities lack are parental, civic, and school efforts that complement and support each other.

The research is, therefore, not about how to engage people. It is about how to recognize and reinforce the practices and institutions through which people engage their issues. What can increase the capacity of communities to act on the challenges they face?

The role of public deliberation

Some 20 years ago, the Kettering Foundation identified a fundamental challenge to “making democracy work as it should.”

It began by recognizing choice making as the essence of politics, and public choice as the essence—and the challenge—of democracy. While elected officials—in their offices and in their assemblies—had developed practices through which issues and the trade-offs among options could be recognized, citizens—in their homes and in their assemblies—had little access to any such practices.

Thus, citizens had few means to make collective choices and engage problems they share with others and, as a consequence, little ability to direct, monitor, and complement their representatives in public and professional offices.

This diagnosis led to experiments with what the foundation, recalling its entrepreneurial beginnings, called “political invention.” It began with a simple question: What if citizens had access to similar sorts of materials that officeholders are given to identify political challenges and the tensions among the options for action? Would the deliberate recognition of the trade-offs inherent in political issues encourage and facilitate responsible choice? Or would it have the opposite effect, as many who highlight the goal of consensus argue? Could the deliberation supported by such issue framing result in more effective acting on such issues?

Those ideas and questions were behind the invention of the issue book and its use, first in the National Issues Forums, and later by many other organizations and communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The foundation has learned a great deal about the nature of deliberative forums. Public deliberation can be an essential part of the development of a shared sense of direction on an issue. What that means in terms of the practical nature of decisions has been difficult to pin down, in part because of variance in the nature of issues. However, we have learned more about how that shared recognition can result in the political will necessary to bring what often seems to be a cacophony of activities into more harmonious concert. It can also facilitate the identification of actions that might otherwise have gone unrecognized.

This is a key element of what has come to be termed “public knowledge.” We can thus show that politics is not merely a matter of organizing or allocating existing resources; it can be a generative, creative force.

The practices of public deliberation are thus conceived not as an abstract normative ideal, but as a functional form of human interaction that makes dealing with political issues more effective. Public deliberation is not the end; it is a necessary means of making democracy work as it should.

A critical research challenge

The challenge is to understand how the outcomes of public deliberation on issues such as those typically addressed in National Issues Forums issue books can provide a context for the decisions to be made by the different actors necessary for effective engagement of such challenges.

Distinct decisions to act and the corresponding commitments—made by families, individuals, organizations, and institutions—are generally not made in the course of deliberation that occurs in public. For example, an individual from an organization or institution generally could not unilaterally commit that organization to an action. Similarly, an individual would rarely enter into a public forum and commit her family to act.

How, then, can the outcomes of public deliberation affect the ability of the variety of actors in communities to deal effectively with the problems they share?

The evidence we have suggests that given the shared sense of direction that can emerge from communitywide deliberation on an issue, citizen groups can meet further to decide what choices for action have been framed for them by the results of the public deliberation. (The choices implied will differ from group to group.) This suggests that the shared sense of direction that can emerge from public deliberation serves as a step in clarifying options for various actors to consider, rather than a “decision” in the usual sense of the term. These groups will generally include organizations with different decision-making protocols. Some may vote, some may have agreed to submit themselves to top-down management.

The resulting action is “public,” not because each action has been collectively decided on in the literal sense, but because the decisions to act are made in the context of a shared sense of direction that was “decided” through deliberative public engagement.

There is a great deal we do not understand about how the process works, and about what sorts of institutions and practices might improve it. One set of questions relates to the nature of public choice, where “choice” refers to the development of a shared sense of direction, or a “public judgment,” as Public Agenda founder Daniel Yankelovich puts it.

We know that a publicly shared sense of direction on an issue is more than the outcome of a single forum or a simple addition of multiple forums. How can the various deliberative spaces that make up a truly public deliberation connect in a way that the outcomes are seen as the legitimate public voice on an issue? What characteristics are necessary for a “shared sense of direction” to be recognized as such?

Another set of questions relates to the practical links between public deliberation, the resulting shared sense of direction, and the corresponding decisions to be made about complementary acting.

How can the results of public deliberation be taken back to the places where the potential actors make their decisions?
How does that work, and could choice work in public be structured so that it would work better?
When actors do come to a decision about the role they will play, how are those commitments to act communicated in public?
How are the commitments publicly judged?
How are the resulting actions judged?
How are the varieties of actors that have been implicated by a shared sense of direction held publicly accountable for what they then do or don’t do?

It’s good that we have a lot of work to do.

Randall Nielsen is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation.

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Communities of Actors: Dealing with the Problems Communities Face

The role of public deliberation

A critical research challenge