Bottoms up for democracy

May 1st, 2009

In the past decade the ability of governments to cooperate has radically declined. Unfortunately, this decline has collided with the recognition that there are major problems that can only be addressed effectively by common international responses. This disturbing divergence of capacity from need demands our concerned attention. Beyond concern, it requires an innovative approach that rises above the clichés of conventional thinking.

Writes Paul Collier

The evidence of the decline in the ability of governments to cooperate has been too abundant to be disputable. To my mind the clearest evidence comes not from the periodic front page fracas over Iraq, but from a failure that, though costly, is usually reported only on the business pages. The collapse of the Doha Round of trade negotiations is striking evidence of a decline in cooperation because governments have been doing these rounds for fifty years

This is desperately sad – however, I would say representative of the failure of centralised, industrial mindsets and thinking. It shapes they way one perceives a problem and therefore also shapes how we act. This is also true of many organisations and companies that are struggling to find a footing in a world where flows of communication change who is in control in the fiercely fought information distribution wars.

Fortunately, while the ability of governments to cooperate has declined, the ability of citizens to cooperate has increased. The Obama campaign was a spectacular demonstration of this at the national level, but there are also examples internationally. It may be that cooperation at the level of civil society can be a substitute for that between governments in introducing common responses to global problems.

One recent example is the social movement to improve the governance of natural resource extraction. Most societies in the bottom billion probably possess natural resources that are sufficiently valuable to be transformative, yet to date they have been grossly mismanaged. Since the 1970s two huge commodity booms have gone to waste: these revenues completely dwarf aid yet receive far less attention.

And once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job.

The small NGO Global Witness ran a campaign, Publish What You Pay, which pioneered the idea of an international standard for reporting revenues. That campaign has now evolved into an international organisation, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The organisation is run by a consortium of stakeholders and sets voluntary standards that governments can adopt. Although EITI is a recent organisation, already more than 20 governments have signed up.

More generally, if citizens in each country are armed with common and pertinent information their pressure, country-by-country, can deliver the same outcome as a top-down internationally enforced inter-government rule. For the better use of natural resource wealth there is no prospect whatsoever of a top-down rule. The reason is simply that the international community has no power over the governments of resource-rich countries. Bottom-up citizen power is the only chance of harnessing the best opportunity that the bottom billion have for development.

But I would argue, that this perspective is true equally of us top billion. from scandal to scandal; banking, Jacqui Smith, cash for questions in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, corporate tax avoidance, MEP’s fraud. It seems that we need a rethink on how we get stuff done in this world.

To date, what has proved more effective than this top-down approach has been the bottom-up approach of providing common information about the problem to ordinary citizens around the globe. With astonishing speed this has changed the political landscape. First in Europe, and more recently in America

As Frantz Fannon said

A community will only evolve when a people control their own communications

And therefore they can shape their future as they collectively see fit. This particular issue about a fully informed citizenry is vital. Interestingly when we were about to pass the public libraries act in the UK many in positions of power were concerned that all this information would make the populace hard to control. We have indeed successfully weened the British public off the idea that they can meaningfully contribute to public discourse – to a point.

Hence, for the foreseeable future, the key to addressing global problems is the building of informed citizenries, country-by-country. Citizens in each country will pressure their governments into policies that are similar, simply because they share the same global information. However, while this bottom-up approach is more promising than re-engineering the architecture for inter-government cooperation, it has its own difficulties. On some emotive issues citizens are easily duped into nationalistic or romantic stances: the danger for the bottom-up approach comes from populism.

The American folly is the diversion of huge quantities of grain from food markets to biofuels, causing a large decline in global food supply. This hugely wasteful policy was sold to the American public on the spurious rationale of energy independence from Middle East oil.

Of course that is the trade-off – though on the other hand we went to war in Iraq for some other spurious reason, and I wonder whether we have had enough of others who claim to represent our interests – but in their daily actions consistently fail to be accountable. This is I would argue is less about personal corruption, rather than a systemic corruption. And one that is slowly being challenged.