New Political Structures
Around the globe we can see new political emerging. These are both structures within the current political system and parallel structures.
Working in the system
Emerging structures within the current political system
In the current political system new structures are emerging that allow more citizens to engage deeper in politics beyond voting, often in long term topics.
Michael Wernstedt found some examples for such structures:
Citizen assemblies
When an issue has become too polarized or too much of a hot potato for politicians to come up with an appropriate solution, without consulting the population, citizen assemblies have been successfully tried. In citizen assemblies, randomly selected citizens are picked to decide on an issue. To their help they get the same support from experts that elected representatives get. The advantage with this is that the selected citizens do not have to consider if the proposals will get them re-elected or not. Also, the fact that citizens are chosen randomly contributes to a much more diversified dialogue. One successfull examples of when this has been applied is when Irland decided on abortion rights. This was a politically hot potato with lots of polarizing views which made it hard to reach a political agreement. However, the Citizen assembly could come up with solutions. After the assembly, a referendum was held on the suggestions from the assembly. Other examples are that France and the United Kingdom have asked their populations how they should become climate neutral until 2050.
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Crowdsourcing political parties
Many parties have emerged that crowd source their political content directly from voters or even ask voters how they should vote in different matters. The first such party was the Five star movement in Italy, the Pirate party movement has also adopted this methodology in many countries, most successfully in Iceland.The most extreme version of this is the Flat pack democracy movement in the United Kingdom. Here people come together to elect an independent representative. The task of that representative is then, if elected, to arrange hearings around different political topics so that people can come together locally, discuss and decide how the representative should vote on the issue at hand.
Crowdsourcing political structures and tools
Taiwan has pioneered using digital tools to crowdsource information to involve more people in their politics. They have an independent digitization minister who has the responsibility to gather information from and make information available to the public. One way in which this is done is to use tools such as pol.is. Here a statement is put such as “Shall Uber be banned?”. People can then react to the statement and write an additional statement which other people can react to. All the data is then analysed using artificial intelligence. In the example above it showed that safety was the most important aspect when it came to regulating the taxi industry. This could then inform the development of policy.
working outside the system
Political Structures of the Future
In addition to the new structures within the current system, new parallel structures are emerging. It's not easy to think about 'new' political structures when both the words new and politics are being questioned. Are we really looking for new, or should we re-value what has always been there - for example in the ways our communities naturally organise? If we continue to think about politics as a power structure in relation to the state, we can only speak of improving that, maybe with more participation. Indra Adnan has been asking these questions for many years - and she found many answers:
What we have seen arising as a positive force, is a deliberate rejection of the structures that deliver on top-down authority. Instead, increasingly, the structures coming into view are to do with the self-organisation of the public space. A new political system would describe how these two - the people and the state - come into relationship.
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A good example would be the distinction between the federated structures of German party politics, which already acknowledges the need for more subsidiarity - bringing power closer to the people. And the cosmological entities scattered throughout Germany who are designing - together with their global networks - very different political units of governance themselves. How these can be successful partners is the challenge of our time.
When we began our inquiry we recognised that we are in a 30 year revolution of re-framing the public space. Due to the extreme democratising of the means of communication, people have been able to mobilise, tribalise, and explore different forms of agency without fear of failing or disrupting the mainstream. Occasionally, such as with Occupy Wall Street or Extinction Rebellion, deliberate disruption is intended but with limited results. One might say this is because, until now there is no robust infrastructure for their actions, nor clear structures in which their changes can land and take hold.
However, largely driven by the developing impoverishment of the social space - more inequality, less mental health and wellbeing, division, loss of meaning and purpose, a lack of belonging - people have been designing community spaces to get some of these needs met. In fact, as feeling itself becomes a driver of traffic in cyberspace, it becomes more clear that our spaces on the ground should seek to answer emotional as much as material need.
Over the past two years, this has been taking shape rapidly as plural forms of community agency, or citizen action networks (CANs). These are generic terms for any kind of containers of diverse forms of activity that have the dual purpose of bringing people together and becoming response-able to the multiple crises. Some have been growing since the turn of the century - Permaculture, Transition Towns, Co-operatives, Ecovillages. Others are taking shape independently, with the benefit of technology. For example Platform Co-operatives, Stronger Towns, Fearless Cities, Integral Cities - many more. Curing COVID, these fractal structures took form increasingly at the neighbourhood level such as Covic Mutual-Aid networks. At the other end of the scale, Bioregions are also self-organising for a better ecological footprint.
These structures have a number of features in common:
· fully participatory with flatter leadership structure
· Sensitive to the relationship between person,
community and planet
· fluid, experimental, creative
· relationship driven, rather than output driven
· participatory governance tools and practice
· connections with but not reliance upon the state
As we reach the end of our two year study, we are beginning to see evidence that CANs are developing the infrastructure to come together and share practice, tools and news. This would include the ability to share practice, create their own media and even initiate new economies. However it is early days to describe them as a genuinely new force in the public space, capable of incubating the will of the people, until more of this appears.
