Our democracies need to be able to address today's big issues of climate, health, equity and AI. And if they can not then we might lose our democratic freedoms altogether. As waiting in the wings are authoritarian alternatives, ready for deployment when enough people think democracy has failed. That’s what we set up Involve to do; and why it’s needed today more than ever.
Freedom is not a given; it is a responsibility. We must be vigilant to ensure it is not eroded
“Once you become a minister, you realise that the levers of power don’t do as much as you expected” Michael Meacher, the then Environment Secretary, once explained to me. It was in 2000 and I’d just started working as a parliamentary environmental lobbyist.
It quickly became obvious that the job of politicians wasn’t set up for tackling tough issues such as climate change. They were too busy reacting to the media, being ‘whipped’ for an urgent vote, or caught up in endless constituency business. I remember one meeting being cancelled because of a constituency ‘dog poo’ crisis.
You might think they simply didn’t care, but that (mostly) wasn’t true, the government had been elected by a landslide on a platform with environmental protection at its heart. It was just that MPs were trapped in a system that didn’t allow them to do much about it.
They were also trapped in a system that set them adrift from the very people they were supposed to represent. The media, the fourth estate, whose job it is in a democracy to connect the governed and the government, was mostly either distracting politicians from the business of government or manufacturing division across society. And the other apparatus of connecting people and politicians like political parties, unions and common interest societies functioned like relics of a bygone age.
The bridge between the governed and the government was broken.
At the same time there was a growing movement of people not just disillusioned with democracy but actively innovating and creating new structures to give more people more power. There were citizens’ juries, community organising, the people's panel, deliberative polling, stakeholder dialogues and so much more.
What was new about this emerging field of democratic innovation is that it was driven by people who believed democracy wasn’t delivering on issues like climate and public services. It wasn’t just about making government more legitimate or trusted; it was about transforming the business of government to make it more effective.
But we didn’t know what worked. Indeed most people didn’t even agree on why we were doing it. And we didn’t function in any way like a coherent field.
So thanks to the Rowntree Trusts we started running workshops across the country asking: how should we reboot participation and democracy?
The workshops told us that we needed a new organisation to do four things: research into what works, improving practice through democratic innovation, field building and policy influence. All of which took place against the backdrop of the Iraq war which for many provided all the evidence that democracy needed a fundamental reboot.
And Involve was born. 20 years on, the need has become much more acute.
One of the first big successes of Involve was to help establish UK Government's Sciencewise program to democratise science and technology policy. To some, in 2004, it was a niche concern. Today it’s the subject of blockbuster movies, Netflix series and the latest Yuval Noah Harari book, Nexus, which has been summarised as: “Will AI kill democracy?”. To answer that question, Harari could do worse than going through the Sciencewise archives.
I remember one time walking through Bethnal Green discussing with the chair of Involve, Geoff Mulgan, why so few people cared about improving democracy. I don’t think any of us would say that now. ‘Fake news’, ‘polarisation’, ‘populism’ and the ‘polycrisis’ are mainstream concerns.
Today the public demand for democratic reform is ‘overwhelming’. 89 per cent of the UK population thinks the political system needs reform; of which 31 per cent believe the political system needs ‘completely’ reforming and 26 per cent believe it needs reforming ‘to a large extent’. These are supported by similarly big majorities globally.
This is a great opportunity for us, the democratic innovators; but also for the authoritarians. Make no mistake, the stakes are incredibly high.
The campaign for universal suffrage in the US and UK took over 100 years to become successful. I believe we’re 30 years into our generation’s great democratic struggle: to reimagine democracy to address the polycrisis. And we’re somewhere between the first two acts of at least a three act play.
Act one involved two things: a rise in the public demand for democratic systems change to force the media and politicians to take it seriously; and the maturation of the democratic innovation field with funders, practitioners and researchers now more capable of delivering impact.
Act two needs to be about getting serious. Demonstrating that participatory democracy can deliver on outcomes and not pretending otherwise. Nobel prize-winning economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen wrote that "The primary function of a government is to enhance the capabilities and welfare of its citizens."
This means that the primary purpose of democratic participation must always be to improve lives. Not to increase the legitimacy or trust of government; indeed when participation claims this without improving lives it's criticised as at best tokenistic and worst manipulation. Act two is going to be messy, the multiple crises we face are forcing us, the democracy field, to take seriously our responsibility to deliver a democratic system that works. If not, the populists are waiting in the wings with tried and tested authoritarian alternatives.
In act two we can not expect our institutions to save us, it’s up to us to save our institutions or create new ones.
It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union— and take its side.
One of the mistakes we’ve made in act one is assuming we need mandates from political leaders to build the democratic alternatives. We now know many politicians simply won’t provide this, and even when they do, we know, thanks to Involve and others, they still often ignore citizens' policies. Under these circumstances we, the democracy field, need to forge alliances and build the new ourselves, this can of course be done with politicians but doesn’t depend on them.
This is how new institutions like the global citizens’ assembly have been established. And it’s how the democracy field operates in the many places globally where they have never had a pro-democracy government.
Here in the UK it’s unclear the extent to which Starmer’s government has realised the essential role of citizen participation to deliver their missions. Even if we could afford it, which we can’t, action by the state alone is not sufficient to address the missions. Citizens are (very often) the primary agent of change in the lives of their family, community or for themselves. So it’s vital the government recognises that the only way the missions will be achieved is through democratic innovation and citizen activation.
This will require explicitly dropping outdated ideas of zero-sum power relations while also pro-actively building everyone’s power. So if the government is serious about delivering the missions, it needs to create the conditions for more powerful communities, citizens, civil servants, service providers and yes - even politicians. But politicians who see their role as building the power of others, not their own.
And to do this it needs Involve. Now more than ever.