Self-Organizing and Community Politics
By Phil Stewart
Introduction
Communities are complex systems where one of the most important connections is networks not hierarchies, where leadership emerges from many parts of these networks, and where citizen action tends to be self-organizing, rather than top-down.
That may be why some communities are able to respond to crises and challenges through citizen action while others are not.
Some questions to consider as you read:
- What kind of relationships do you develop as you try to solve problems in your community?
- Why do you think some communities are able to overcome obstacles as they do public work, while others get stuck?
- As you work with others in your community, how are the concepts of networks, leadership, and self-organizing useful to you?
Article Text
Over the past 25 years, the Kettering Foundation has identified six practices that enable citizens to gain a significant measure of control over their lives. Because they have this benefit, they are called six democratic practices.
In shorthand, these practices include “naming” issues so that citizens can see themselves implicated in them, “framing” approaches and alternatives in ways that enable citizens to recognize the tensions among things held valuable that must be resolved to enable community action, and making choices through “public deliberation,” which enables citizens, through listening to diverse perspectives, to work through the inherent tensions in serious issues and come to some form of public judgment.
Once a community comes to judgment regarding a course of action, citizens make “covenants” with each other, most often informal and tacit, but sometimes formal and explicit, regarding actions to be taken, singly or collectively.
These covenants lead to “mutually complementary public acting” on the collectively agreed change or course of action.
In the final step of this “citizens political process,” citizens “learn” from their experience, and the cycle begins again.
All well and good as a model, but when citizens go into their own communities trying either to observe or to implement these citizen-based democratic practices they often encounter two fundamental problems. When they seek to observe real communities in action, only bits and pieces of this process as described often are visible, and most often only the formal, institutional components. Or, one may observe some elements of the process, such as some efforts at public deliberation, but little action or learning. Even more fundamentally, when citizens seek to re-create a citizens democratic process in their own communities they often find that while they know well the “elements” of this process, both they and Kettering lack a deep understanding of the conditions under which democratic practices arise and flourish.
Why is this so, and what directions might new research take to address these concerns?
Recent studies of highly complex systems provide a fruitful way to think about the conditions needed for citizens do the work that only citizens can do. Physicists, mathematicians, and economists have found that some complex systems tend to be highly self-organizing, an unexpected yet highly significant characteristic. The concept of self-organizing systems of interactions may open the way for deeper understanding of the conditions that make citizens democratic practices possible. Indeed, these insights may inform research into why some communities on the Gulf Coast, when abandoned by all levels of government following Katrina, nevertheless, organized themselves to bring about their own recovery.
Similarly, our Russian colleagues, led by professors Ekaterina Lukianova and Svetlana Chernikova of St. Petersburg University, are using insights on self-organizing to understand how remote villages in the far north of Russia, following the collapse of Soviet power in the early 1990s, apparently without any central direction or oversight, self-organized themselves along traditional, pre-Soviet and old Russian social and political lines. While our collaborators and we are at the very early stages of research, we hope to stimulate discourse and dialogue that may enrich this effort. We do this by laying out what scientists are beginning to identify as the core characteristics of self-organizing systems and by suggesting some implications these could have for democratic politics.
At the heart of self-organizing systems are networks of interaction. Networks are informal, nonstructured, and nonhierarchical. An example might be a small group of citizens in the barbershop discussing what to do about the pollutants showing up in their well water. Across town, a totally separate group deliberates over coffee on other aspects of the same issue. No one has called them together.
What pushes citizens to engage in these conversations and in other aspects of citizens politics? It is almost never extrinsic rewards, such as money, nor is it the threat of coercion. Rather, the motivation for the formation and participation in networks is intrinsic, based on self-interest and the need for social contact all humans share. Organic politics takes shape, probably everywhere, because that is the most basic way that human beings address collective needs.
There is no leader, no global controller, yet there often are multiple, overlapping connections among the multitude of informal networks that make up the community. Connections are formed among and across networks as a result of the forces of competition and collaboration, resulting in the constant negotiation of relationships. And, as various networks of citizens continue their conversations, a shared sense of purpose may arise, though there would almost never be a formal statement of goals or mission. Rather, common perspectives take shape, though they are continuously subject to change.
So, then, how does one find the “community leaders” through whom to “organize” the community? The theory of self-organizing suggests the notion of what Kettering long ago called “leaderful” communities, communities in which “leaders” emerge at the nodes of networks. These leaders are often invisible to outsiders, as well as to institutional politics, yet they are vital agents in enabling organic politics.
At the intersection between organic and institutional politics, organizations, hierarchical organizations, may tend to form. But, these often tend to be crosscutting, with many levels and sorts of weblike interactions and channels of communication. The most influential organizations in citizens politics often will not be formal, nor will they be highly visible.
Rather, they tend to be those informal networks, with changing and overlapping “membership.” Indeed, when citizen-based networks turn themselves into formal entities, they often tend to lose their roots among citizens in the heat of internal organizational demands for fundraising and the need to demonstrate “accountability” more to sources of funds than to the citizens in whose name and interest they formed in the first place.
Self-organizing systems, on the other hand, retain their vitality through “continual adaptation.” The lack of formal structures, missions, and obligations means that behaviors, actions, strategies, and processes can be revised continuously as a result of ongoing citizen interaction. The self-organizing system of politics continuously adapts to changing stimuli, needs, and opportunities.
Citizens in self-organizing systems are not, however, so changing and formless as to be unable to act. Rather, through continual, multilayered, weblike interactions, focused around issues of common concern, citizens appear to develop an implicit obligation to assist others, which can be called a covenantal reciprocity. This, in turn, may be related to the desire to assure oneself the benefits of getting assistance. Mutual reciprocity, mutual implicit undertakings appear to be a key to action in organic politics.
One may be tempted to say, democratic citizens politics, organic politics is too complex to understand, let alone attempt to create. Give me the “simplicity” of institutional politics. At least then I know who the actors are, as well as the rules of the game!
Yet, there is hope that these suggestive insights about the nature of self-organizing communities, drawn from the hard sciences, may enable us better to understand how some communities, abandoned by all official institutions following, for example, Hurricane Katrina, or as in the case of many small communities in the north of Russia left totally to fend for themselves after the fall of communism, self-organizing did arise and did bring to bear complex underlying networks of relationships and ways of acting and thus create a new capacity for restoration of not only their physical community but also its soul. Such is the challenge as we set out on this new research path.