05 - Participation - STRI

Home readings

• [[(W5) Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance]]

• [[(W5) A Ladder Of Citizen Participation]]

• [?] How do you use participation in innovative projects that try to break the status quo? Down to earth example: trying to build active mobility infrastructure in a car centric city. This requires to take away car capacity, parking etc. Also, benefits will not be instantaneous: To achieve true modal shift, for example, a full network of bike lanes is necessary, one corridor is not enough. This takes time. How can we use a participatory process in this context withtout it backfiring and stopping the project all together, not because it's not valid or needed, but because it's hard for people to understand what could be?

• [?] What are good communication strategies? How do we make sure that people are actually attracted to participate? I can think of examples were participatory processes were put in place but the way they were presented they seemed to call only for people interested in the topic in the first place ([[GRAB]] exposition at museum)

Lecture

Some values:

• Equality
• Money
• Justice
• Privacy
• Sustainability
• ...

On these level of abstraction, most people agree on these values. But people disagree on how we define them.

You want the ideal politician to have both power and values.

Ethics

Some theories:

• Deontology: The old deontology system just gives a list of things you're not supposed to do.
  • The most important thing is the action
• Consequentialism: The consequences that our actions have on life. Maximise the greatest benefit of the greatest number (Cost benefit analysis)
  • Maximise happiness for the greatest number
  • !! It allows for some individuals to be not happy at all
    • You are not concerned about the distribution
• Virtue ethics: Act as a good person would

Why participation

• The moral ideals behind participation, deliberation and justice
• participation as a thought experiment (social contract theory)
• Participation as a real praxis (deliberative democracy theory)

The ideal of participation and deliberation

We should start the discourse on participation asking why is good and why is bad. What are the pros and cons

Why is it bad?

• Can dampen decisive actions:
• Not effective: may delay or replace actions
• Not every body may be informed enough for the decision
• Whom to include?
  Why is it good?
• Gains support for a project
• Increases transparency
• People feel ownership
• Increases total knowledge
• Mutual justification: democracy should as much as possible to jointly decide

Participation helps answer issues in terms of:

• [[#Justice]]
• [[#Autonomy and freedom]]

Justice

There are different kinds of justice:

• [[Procedural justice]]: evaluates whether a procedure or process is more just than another.
• [[Distributive justice]]: evaluates whether a given state of affairs is more just than another

In terms of justice, participation helps to unfold a disagreement on what is just/moral.

There are 2 ways in which participation achieve justice:

• Intrinsic good: including people in decision making is a good thing in itself
• Instrumental good: including people in decision making leads to better outcome

Core modernism has a strong belief in the power of reason:

• we should be able to come to a mutual agreement using reason

Reason tells you 2 things:

• Rational: choose the means towards your ends knowing how: how do I get to what I want
• Reason/Wisdom: telling you what you should or should not do

Autonomy and freedom

The modern understanding of society has changed from status to contract.

A slow shift was found in roman law: from rights depend on who you are to equality of individuals

Western individualism

2 ways to approach the social good:

• Start with social values (what's the greater good, the common good)
  • Communitarianism
• Start with the value of the individual
  • Liberalism, human rights framework

Idea of liberal democracy is based on 2 principles:

1. Decision should be supported by majority vote
2. Protection of fundamental rights of individuals

‼️ Letting the majority decide, can be detrimental to the rights of individuals.

Linking justice and participation

We distinguish mainly to approaches:

• Social contract theory, based on John Rawls: participation as a thought experiment
• Deliberative democracy, based on [[Habermas]]: participation as a real feature of decision making

The social contract theory

Joint idea:

• Can we derive social principles of the justice of basic social structures from the starting point of (egoistic) human beings that want to interact with each other, such that this interaction is beneficial for each individual?
• Base morality on the idea of social contract

This theory is based on studies from [[Thomas Hobbes]], [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], [[Immanuel Kant]] and [[John Rawls]]

Social contract - Hobbes vs Rousseau

According to [[Thomas Hobbes]]:

• Humans are bad/dangerous by nature
  • Homo hominem lupus est
• We need strong social institutions to keep the egoists in check

While, according to [[John Rawls]]:

• Humans are good by nature
• It's society that corrupts individuals
• We need to change and improve our social institutions

[[#Rawls Original Position]]

Rawls: Original Position

The original position is a hypothetical situation, that is part of a thought experiment:

Suppose to form a new society:

• We don't know which person we would be in that society.
• Which rules would we agree upon?

Deliberative democracy

According to [[Jürgen Habermas]] there are 2 types of rationality

1. [[#Strategic rationality]]
2. [[#Moral (communicative) rationality]]

In deliberative democracy, we want to find out whether something is rationally acceptable. To do this, we need to deliberate about the question in a procedure of communicaiton.

Strategic rationality

In strategic rationality the aim is:

• Domination
• Exercise of power

Knowledge is how to achieve goals. In this sense, knowledge is instrumental, a way of manipulation of nature and others.

Moral (communicative) rationality

In moral rationality, the ideal is the rational consensus:

• Rational discussion to identify what goals you should have
• It has an impersonal and universal aspect of argumentation
• There is symmetry in relations

Participation and types of rationality

• Arnstein: a ladder of citizen participation
• Fung: Democracy Cube