Kettering Foundation

Taking a Look at Organic Community-Level Politics

By Derek Barker, Gina Paget, and Dorothy Battle

Kettering’s research has increasingly been concerned with democratic practices in the everyday life of communities. Citizen-based organic politics can be distinguished from formal politics in the following ways:

• organic political engagement is spontaneous, it emerges out of everyday concerns and it occurs in places not usually considered political;
• it is self-organizing, driven by a community’s collective energy, initiative, and civic skills; and
• it is self-regulating, meaning the community establishes its own practices and rules to live by.

Organic politics may be more sustainable than formal politics because it relies on the skills, capacities, and established norms of communities.

Questions:

• Please share experiences of an organic approach to politics in your community.
• How have community-based groups come together to make a difference in your community?
• What led your neighbors and friends to turn to action on community problems?

Kettering’s research has increasingly been concerned with democratic practices in the everyday life of communities. Researchers on staff and in our network have been observing the ebb and flow of ongoing decision-making and problem-solving routines in their communities. They hope to find stories of organic politics, driven by the interests, norms, and resources of the community rather than those of experts, outside organizations, and bureaucratic institutions. Our research attempts to answer the question, what kind of spontaneous, self-organizing, and self-regulating engagement in politics occurs in communities? We also hope to learn more about how this kind of politics either stops or moves forward at particular key moments. We suspect that Kettering’s findings on democracy will be more powerful if we can find examples of democratic practices moving forward in the informal networks of communities.

We are searching for examples of organic public politics that can be distinguished from formal politics in at least three ways. First, organic political engagement is spontaneous. It emerges out of everyday concerns of citizens in communities and occurs in places that are not explicitly named as “political,” such as churches and barber shops. As we have seen in the cases of ancient cultures around the world, organic politics is incorporated into the fabric of the community. Second, it is self-organizing. It is driven by the energy, initiative, and civic skills that exist throughout a community, rather than by the techniques of expert organizations or the resources of powerful bureaucracies. Third, it is self-regulating. Organic politics is regulated by norms that are implicitly stated and broadly understood. This is in contrast to formal politics, which is regulated by strict rules of order imposed by trained moderators or officials. We hope to find examples that meet these criteria, in contrast to the artificiality of well-intentioned interventions of experts and elites against the natural tendencies of communities.

Organic politics may not follow a linear, or step-by-step, plan, and it may overlap with irreconcilable conflicts or feelings of powerlessness. Researchers in our workshops have struggled to identify it because it is so much messier and chaotic than formal politics. However, we suspect that over the long run, organic politics may be more sustainable than formal politics, because it relies only upon the skills, capacities, and established norms of communities.

Two of our researchers offer preliminary reports on their observations of politics in their communities. From Yellow Springs, Ohio, Gina Paget writes:

I have participated in and observed politics as it is practiced in my southwest Ohio village for 20 years. In 2005, villagers were again concerned about development— if, how, and where the village should grow. I joined a small group of villagers, who held different and even conflicting ideas about growth and development.

The original small group’s participants changed over time in numbers, sometimes attracting over 60 and at others fewer than 10. Individuals with differing points of view came in and out of the conversations. However, the purpose remained consistent, i.e., to bring about a publicly accepted approach to the problems of development. We believed that it was critical to have an endorsement from the Village Council and other formal organizations if we were to engage broad participation in the process.

During the last two years, the focus in the village has changed from future development to an immediate crisis created by the annexation of a small farm outside the village boundaries and to a decision about investing in a new coal-fired plant for the village’s base-load energy.

Deliberative conversations about these issues have occurred at every step of the way—on the street, over the phone, on the Internet, and in self-appointed task forces, but in public meetings the discussion has rarely progressed to thoughtful consideration of our options. Commitment to work together on a problem seen as affecting everyone has developed slowly. As one person put it in an e-mail message after several community meetings, “I am concerned about the types of meetings we have had so far do not allow for the rigorous discussion that needs to happen to make good decisions. I think there are several key issues that need to be addressed: affordable housing and housing diversity, green-belt protection, energy implications, commercial development in new developments. How can we deal with this situation in a way that doesn’t continue to fractionalize the community?”

A more recent effort is a hopeful sign that we are beginning to learn from all our efforts. A group of villagers, many of whom had participated in one or all of these conversations (albeit with different concerns, loyalties, and problem-solving approaches) has organized to support a process that addresses the problems as an interconnected whole rather than as separate crises. This is understood as requiring creativity and imagination by the entire village if it is to succeed.

These experiences have left me with several questions with the primary one being the following: How does the organic, spontaneous, self-organizing, and self-regulating work of disparate groups come together in a public discourse to make a difference in the life of a community?

Dorothy Battle reports on her experiences in Cincinnati, Ohio:

I have been studying the everyday political talk of people in my community. This kind of talk is organic, or natural. There are no techniques used to guide the conversations. The conversations are prompted by shared concerns amongst a group of people who gather in a range of everyday community spaces.

A recent experience manifesting organic talk was when people in my community became concerned about matters relating to education and schooling. An individual in my community contacted me, along with several other persons, concerning a newly formed education initiative. We talked amongst ourselves, and named the issue as the lack of broad community participation in setting an agenda for education and schooling. The idea was that people in our community would be invited to determine expected outcomes for the school district and hold the school board accountable for addressing those outcomes. We contacted one of the leaders of the initiative, pointed out that without broad community participation the initiative would likely not have the systemic change the initiative claimed as its mission. We had a series of meetings with the leader and his staff to figure out ways to broaden the participation. Commitment and action regarding broadening the participation are reflected in the planning of what has come to be called community engagement.

The community engagement planning has become an issue in itself as well, in regards to whether the plan in its current form, if adopted by the initiative, will actually engage the community. This situation contributes to ongoing conversations in which the issues related to broad community participation in education and schooling are talked about in informal community settings.

The virtue of my embedded participation is that I am able to listen to, as well as create meaning with, people talking in real time in community settings about politics. My role as an embedded participant in organic community politics can serve to illustrate that people in their ordinary everyday lives engage in political talk, and at the same time, my work generates more questions. Some of the questions that arise from my work: How do people in their ordinary, everyday political talk discuss the choices to be made and address the tensions and trade-offs involved? What are the political narratives created by the everyday political talk of people in their communities? How does organic political talk contribute to substantive community change? When people talk politics in an organic manner, under what conditions does the talk turn to commitment and complementary action?

We continue to seek stories of spontaneous, self-organizing, and self-regulating political engagement in communities. Please share your experiences and help improve our understanding of communities and their role in making democracy work as it should.