Subject: ** Community and the Politics of Place ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments: As a forest supervisor, Susan Giannettino (Wasatch-Cache NF in Utah) often finds herself in the unenviable position of "decision maker." In a book review of Daniel Kemmis' COMMUNITY AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE, Giannettino gives us a glimpse of the world we have fashioned for our decision makers and a glimpse of a different world that may yet emerge where the public has a much larger (and different role) in decision making. 5 pages. Dave. -------========X========------- Eco-Watch 2/23/93 BOOK REVIEW: Community and the Politics of Place* By Daniel Kemmis Dan Kemmis is the mayor in Missoula, Montana and a former state legislator. I found his book to be both fascinating and relevant for Forest Service leaders today. His view of the historical development of governing and decision making is useful in understanding the tensions we deal with as decision makers day to day. He describes his view of the essence of survival for western communities, rural and city. And he discusses barriers--particularly the bureaucracy, of which we are part. Perhaps the message hit me hard because I strive as a decision maker to build consensus amongst local constituents; we work hard to involve people in the decision making process; to ensure our decision is their decision. But we fail more than we succeed and I have taken that as a personal failing. Kemmis has helped me see the systemic constraints and barriers that ensure failure given the system we have in place; when I apply his logic to my local examples he makes sense. So, I decided it appropriate to try and share this information...through a book report. Jeffersonian Engagement When our Constitution was written there were two prevailing philosophies. Thomas Jefferson championed an approach requiring a high level of interaction among citizens. This approach "rested squarely upon this face-to-face hands-on, approach to problem solving, with its implicit belief that people could rise above their particular interests to pursue a common good." This was a politics of engagement, requiring people be able to make others' conditions their own. This form of governing requires the common choosing, even a common willing into existence of a common world. To work effectively, there must be small, localized, units of government so that people can be engaged with one another intensively and repeatedly enough to come to know and desire the common good. The last breath of life for the Jeffersonian philosophy, argues Kemmis, was the agrarian populist movement (still alive, I would argue, in places like Montana). Kemmis notes that it was in the election of 1896, wherein Bryan was defeated by McKinley (who used money and advertising as never before), where the Jeffersonian movement suffered a defeat from which it never recovered. "Populists had built their power by teaching people new methods of cooperation, both in economics and in politics.... Populists were defeated by a system which relied on ... the highly impersonal methods of mass communication". Madisonian Federalism The opposing, and winning, philosophy was, early on, advanced by James Madison. This is the checks and balances philosophy we are familiar with. This federalism argues that it is possible--in fact preferable--to carry on the most important public tasks without any such common willing of a common world. Individuals would pursue their private ends and the structure of government would balance those pursuits so cleverly that the highest good would emerge without anyone having bothered to will its existence. This is the politics of disengagement, says Kemmis in contrast to the politics of engagement espoused by Jefferson. This philosophy was the only one that could work with extensive territory and big government; in fact, Madison argued for expansion: "Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive...or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strengths and to act in unison with each other". Given these principles, citizens need not feel any sense of responsibility for one another. Western Politics Kemmis then focuses on the West, what he calls the last of what is best in America. He says it is critical to decide how America treats the last of its relatively open country, but that our political processes as they are working today, given the federalist bureaucratic patterns defined above, are dysfunctional for at least two reasons. One, there is little incentive, in fact there is a disincentive, to citizen participation in the public process. Our political system leads to alienation of more and more people from the public process. And two, there is no incentive or mandate for local people to work together to solve local problems. The current situation is described by Kemmis as follows: The politics of the West is a battle between individualism and regulatory bureaucracy. Cooperation is a third, largely ignored, alternative. Westerners are polarized; there is nothing in the system that facilitates what is called the 'public thing,' which gathers us together and yet prevents our falling all over each other. Kemmis says, we are successful in vetoing each other's initiatives...but no one is capable or has the ability (or consensus) to create successful initiatives. The result? In all his examples, the community ends up with a less satisfactory solution than any of the residents would have chosen because everyone is fighting the initiatives of everyone else. As residents learn by experience that any major initiative will create negative results, the willingness to try anything new is steadily diminished. Take the public hearing as an example, he says. It provides an opportunity to be heard. But by whom? By those with responsibility for making the decision; i.e. the public decision maker. Unfortunately, the duty to hear does not extend beyond the decision maker; those who testify are not encumbered by any such responsibility. Their role, in our system, is to make the strongest possible case for their particular interests. The decision maker will then sort out, balance, or broker those interests and dispose of the case accordingly. Whichever side the decision makers opt for, the losing parties will either appeal to a higher decision maker or begin building political coalitions to reverse the decision. But it is doubtful their coalition will be strong enough to ensure the adoption of their own initiatives. What they will ensure is the development of opposing coalitions. So, the pendulum is pushed back and forth endlessly, but the higher public good which everyone feels must be there never emerges. This is, he says, simply the way Madisionian government works. This process replaces, supplants, direct dealings between parties in conflict. Even when we attempt to develop concensus decisions between conflicting parties, the system is still in place. The bureaucractic official still makes the decision and with the concept of checks and balances in place, that decision can always be changed by someone else. The Importance of Place In spite of this reality, Kemmis believes there is more common ground and higher common ground than the people involved in our federalist system of government and decision making ever succeed in discovering. He argues that what we do to solve problems and strategize for the future depends on who we are. And who we are is a function of how we choose to relate to each other, to the place we inhabit, and to the issues which that inhabiting raises for us. All these are questions about our ways of being public. Early in the book Kemmis notes that the Montana Constitution, in contrast to the US Constitution, speaks to the importance of place. Montana's says; "We the people of Montana, grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of its mountains, the vastness of its rolling plains, and desiring to secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty for this and future generations do ordain and establish this constitution." Kemmis says Montanans were saying that the way they felt about the place they inhabited was an important part of what they meant when they said, We the People. His experience in public life, he says, has convinced him that we cannot successfully fashion ourselves as a public until we replace that word within its republican context and within the context of the way we inhabit very particular stretches of land. He talks about the settling of the West and situations where people depended on each other in spite of their differences. If public policy and decision making can be accomplished in the concrete context of 'community' where members share values; where members are united through the fact that they fix on some object as valuable; perhaps then public life can be revitalized. He says there has to be better definition of what is "valued". And we need to refocus on the root sense of the concept of inhabitation; that is dwelling in a place in a practiced way that relies upon certain regular and trusted habits of behavior. As he moves from what was (and is) to what may be, in the public arena, he says: If public life needs to be revitalized, if its renewal depends upon more conscious and more confident ways of drawing upon the capacity of practices to make values objective and public, if those practices acquire that power from the efforts of unlike people to live well in specific places, then we need to think about specific places and the real people who now live in them, and try to imagine ways in which their efforts to live there might become more practices, more inhabitory, and therefore more public. The Way Forward So, what does Kemmis think needs to happen? He has two broad themes. One is the economics of re-inhabitation. After a discussion of national economy and global economic realities, he asks if there are ways to move economies in a more place-focused direction, consciously, through public policy. He talks about rural economic development efforts that are locally controlled, and gives some creative examples. But, he notes, as states and localities become more interested in developing their own economies, the inherent conflict between those efforts and the notion of the supremacy of the national economy is likely to grow (and he says the reality of a national economy is not very viable today). He goes on to say that the building of strong, indigenous communities requires that states and localities have the capacity and the will to keep some locally generated capital from leaving the region and to invest that capital creatively and effectively in the regional economy. Thus, he calls for more local and state power and less from the national level. He also notes that development of place-focused economies requires groups and individuals to develop new and stable patterns of cooperation. How do you achieve the latter? "What they require...is a politics which is as place-focused, as inhabitory, and finally as cooperative as the economy of place." Thus, his second theme is the politics of re-inhabitation. At the individual level this requires a revitalized sense of what might be meant by citizenship and at the community level it implies a renewed understanding of the concept of public. Citizenship implies responsibility; ownership of the problem and responsibility for the development of a solution by all the people involved in an issue. If people know they cannot turn it over to the third party to be decision maker; if they find themselves responsible for the ultimate decision, for each other, and even for their own ideologies, they are very likely to begin to think and behave differently. Such civic virtues can only become a constitutive feature of public life in one way: through practice. What holds people together long enough to discover their POWER through true application of citizenship is their common inhabiting of a single place, their common relationship to a particular space. Through practice, says Kemmis, a politics of citizens working out the problems and the possibilities of their place directly among themselves implies a revival of citizenship based on civic virtue. A politics which rests upon a mutual recognition by diverse interests that are bound to each other by their common attachment to a place also rejects the notion of a politics of 'keeping citizens apart'. Kemmis notes that the role of federal bureaucracies in the West would have to change significantly. Decentralization would have to result. Citizens working directly with each other to solve problems will need to have authority and autonomy. Kemmis also talks about the difficulty associated with the role of corporations in his desired future. National and multi-national corporations are big players in the issues of the west today. He says they must be capable of citizenship on a local level; not public relations citizenship but "a genuine and reliable responsiveness to the place, a full-fledged participation in the human project of living well in that place." Corporations might need to be nudged: the politics of inhabitation must realize its own possibilities, in part by nurturing citizenship among its corporations. A Bottom Line Bottom line, for Kemmis, is citizenship. The adversaries become the decision makers, thereby recapturing the very essence of democracy. There is less likely to be a losing side; rather, both parties acquire a stake in the stability of the chosen solution. Government, then, is far less a matter of bureaucracy, far more a matter of the direct exercise of citizen competence. As people experience what it is to be the government, government itself gains legitimacy and strength. Kemmis observes that it is the third party decision maker (his example is the Forest Service) which resembles a parent uncertain of its relationship to its children. But this is not simply 'the government's' problem, nor can the government solve it by itself. The solution must be sought on the level of citizenship. As citizenship is developed, the republic is strengthened; what becomes stronger is not the bureaucracy but democracy itself. There are major hurdles and barriers to overcome. But we must demand of ourselves an active practice of citizenship. The future is a politics that: depends less upon procedures and bureaucracies and more upon human virtues and patterns of relationship. It will be a much less centralized politics; the national presence will be substantially diminished...this can only happen when the people of the West learn to listen to each other and to work effectively on the project of inhabitation. Cooperation is central to the politics of inhabitation, and it will have to extend to cooperation between right and left, between Democrats and Republicans, even between environmentalists and corporations. Finally, this politics will not come into its own until cities and their rural surroundings learn to appreciate the common stake they have in one another's welfare. --------------------------------------- * Reviewed by Susan Giannettino, Wasatch-Cache NF (R04F19A). Community and the Politics of Place, by Daniel Kemmis, is available from the University of Oklahoma Press (1990). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Related Reading** The Power of Public Ideas, edited by Robert B. Reich, Harvard University Press, 1990. Evidence, Argument, and Persuasion in the Policy Process, by Giandomenico Majone, Yale University Press, 1989. (Related to, and pushing forward, some of the ideas in The Power of Public Ideas.) ------------------ ** These related readings are contemporary 'policy analysis' arguments for a return to the Jeffersonian engagement highlighted in Community and the Politics of Place. They are my personal favorites in policy analysis, synthesis, and governmental choice. It will be interesting to see what some of you think about these and the whole idea of shifting from federalism to more engaging, and participative, forms of government. To embrace Jeffersonian engagement (or public deliberation, as Robert Reich calls it) would transform 'public involement in decision making' into 'building public decisions.' D.Iverson