SYSTEMIC GOVERNCANCE FOR PARTICIPATORY DESIGN AND
1.1 VIGNETTE: RECONSIDERING GOVERNANCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
“What do the words “unfolding” and “sweeping in” mean? asked my colleague apprehensively.
“It means looking inwards at emotions, values and assumptions and out- wards at the social, political, economic and environmental factors”, I replied enthusiastically, drawing on the work of West Churchman. Also it means asking questions like: What are the social, economic and environmental con- nections across the Tampa and SIEV X (carrying refugees from Australia), The Cormo Express (carrying rejected, diseased sheep to the Middle East but dumped in Eritrea)1and nameless ships exporting nuclear waste?2
“All those questions covering social, economic and environmental moral- ity and risk in the same breath and all at the same time – quite a tall order and enough to give anyone a headache. Is it possible?” asked my sensible colleague.
“It is worth trying. Understanding the connections across categories is a first step. Seeing the connections and understanding that trying to delimit areas of concern is problematic. The social, cultural, political, economic and environmental are all dimensions of one whole and that is what knowing
1 Levy, D. and Lotz, 2004, “The ethics of live sheep export trade”, Centre for Applied Philosophy and public Ethics, University of Melbourne, 3 May, accessed 6/22/2004, http://www.animalsaustralia.org/default2.asp?idL1=1274&idL2=1668
2 Spent fuel rods are sent to France from Botany Bay Sydney for reprocessing.
Plutonium transported by sea is particularly hazardous http://www.grennpeace.org/
nuclear/transport
or trying to know requires. I often think that academics and academia are disliked for good reason by people. I think the notion of the ‘boomerang effect’ (Ulrich Beck, 1992: 176) is useful for an exploration of risk, but it is also worth thinking about a way to connect the technical and practical with value dimensions or moral dimensions of challenges We need to go much further than this low road to morality by understanding the boomerang affect.3 Compassion for others should be expanded to include all sentient beings, who should be allowed to be free from pain; because that is the way we would wish to be treated as sentient beings. I suppose this sounds too idealistic and unrealistic for any self respecting meat eater or decent farmer.
I am not denying that meat eating should be a matter of choice, but surely it is necessary to be as humane as possible? Also I think that the sustainability of the planet would be served better by outlawing commercial farming that places a strain on the resources of the land.”
“Yes, we would be in a worse mess without some attempt at trying to understand ourselves and how others feel in the world. . .but the leap from human rights to including compassion for all sentient beings is quite large, as is the leap from the idealistic to the practical and pragmatic. Besides I also know how great the leap is from ethics to law! So, to change the subject what are we going to have for lunch”? asked my practical colleague.
“Fish, I am starving,” I replied. “What about sentient beings, do you ex- clude fish and on what basis? asked my colleague.
“I do not exclude fish because I am greedy, perhaps I should think about it more; besides it is hard. I need to develop my willpower.”
“What are you working on?” she continued, tactfully changing the sub- ject.
“The meaning of governance and our rights and responsibilities as citi- zens – no as people” – I corrected myself.
“Oh, that’s interesting, so what are they?”
What’s what?
“Your rights and responsibilities”?
“Oh, I drew in my breath”. I have quite a few rights including dual cit- izenship and some who are so-called asylum seekers have no citizenship rights anywhere. What can university academics do to make a difference – being a middle class academic surely comes with more responsibility?
It has been a bad year for social justice and what have we done? At least you have worked on a practical paper on law and constitutional rights.” I stopped and drew together my thoughts. “I have been trying to facilitate
3 Being careful and ethical only because we fear the payback from pollution and poverty and not because we care compassionate and caring.
1. Systemic Governcance for Participatory Design and Accountability 3 learning with graduate students from many parts of the world – Cambo- dia, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Philippines, doing visioning and governance projects for local government and an Aboriginal housing association, worked on participatory governance processes for some NGOs, discussed education with educators and wrote a paper with colleagues in the public sector4”, whilst struggling to think about democracy and what it means.
Democracy is quite inadequate if it excludes some who are non-citizens and includes those who are citizens to the extent that they are literate, em- ployed, able bodied, adult, of the dominant culture – whatever criteria of power that happens to be used in a particular context and in most instances gender also plays a vital role in life chances. Maleness has been an advan- tage, but this is changing – male suicide rates are higher in some age groups and parts of Australia.
I quickly recalled my recent visit to Alice Springs. “Where are the Abo- riginal men in Central Australia?” asked my friend Olive Veverbrants when we were talking about her book and the challenges she was experiencing when writing Chicken Hawk, named after her outspoken mother – who fought against the odds for their survival just like the resourceful bird af- ter whom she was respectfully (and affectionately) named. “I worry what will happen when the grandmothers die. They are the ones holding together the community now”.
She answered the question herself after she had sipped her coffee. “In the Northern Territory they are in jail. They are dead from diabetes, road-related deaths or the trauma associated with fighting . . .They have hanged them- selves”, I thought about what she had said, about feeling life is hopeless.
So contextual considerations and multiple combinations of variables are important. To be a citizen who is male, unemployed and dis-abled is not the same as being a citizen who is white Anglo Saxon female with a good education. To be a citizen, who wears the hijab and owns the small local shop, is not the same as being a citizen who votes conservative and owns an equally small shop.
Boundaries can be drawn to include and exclude. They need to be re- drawn in many ways, so that striving for openness can give transparent over- lays of viewpoints, each of which helps to complete a mandala of multiple dimensions. The areas of overlap and difference can teach us something about life chances in each dimension.
Boundaries can be drawn virtually (in our minds) and in the contexts in which we interact. The problem is that they are usually drawn by the powerful – whoever they may be. That is something that has worried me in
4 Presented by Stephen Marshall at the IPPA conference in 2003.
the past and today. If you are a non-citizen you have no rights. Apartheid South Africa excluded some by virtue of being black and thus not having citizenship rights.
It makes me see the connec- tion with what is happening to- day in many parts of the world.
We need to try to address so many things, because they are all part of a holistic montage to represent and understand gov- ernance that we are trying to co-create with participants. I guess we co-crate, in order to find group answers.. . .I think that re-drawing boundaries to include self, other and the environment is at the heart of good governance.
“Sorry”, I said to my friend who had an equally far away look in her eyes as we sat opposite at lunch. “I am daydreaming”.
“So am I”, said my colleague. . .“and it is about the need for a good end of year break”.
I laughed wryly. “We are lucky aren’t we? We can worry when we want to and switch off when we need a break!” We finished our lunch and I headed back to my office.
My desk was covered with the photographs I was going through earlier that I wanted to use. I found a picture of the Jozini Dam.
It reminded me of time spent in Pon- golo, South Africa in 1986/7. The dam was on the outskirts of the town, Jozini. I used to stay at the Jozini Ho- Motel once a week for a night, whilst I was living in a remote vil- lage on the Pongolan floodplain. At the time I was doing research on water and sanita- tion using the project as a vehicle for job creation. Each week I went to town to buy supplies and stopped over at the Ho-Motel for a shower and lunch – bliss! I looked out over the dam whilst I sat on the veranda drank
1. Systemic Governcance for Participatory Design and Accountability 5 my coffee and gave bits of bread to the purple lizards that sat on the wall.
The dam was large and it dominated the area. I learned that it had been built to provide water for agriculture – cotton was the main industry. It was intro- duced, in order to produce a local cash crop for the area at the height of the Apartheid era. The poverty was a result of politics, not economics or inad- equate agriculture.5 The cotton did not suit the local soil. But the dam was designed and built for cash crops by the so-called professional experts who had no local knowledge. It did not help the villagers on the flood plain. They still needed to collect water each day and they ran the risk of getting malaria from the mosquitoes near the water’s edge or Bilharzia, quite a common wa- ter borne disease. I wore gumboots for a while when I collected water and added Jick, the name for the brand of bleach to my washing water. Very un- pleasant, not to mention looking an idiot when I wore my gumboots, whilst children paddled and politely hid their laughter. Pride made me abandon the protective gear, after all I had to ‘fit in’. I was sick as a result as were many others on a fairly regular basis.
Anyway to get back to the dam, it was built in a cyclone area and it filled up with water at an alarming rate soon after Cyclone Damoina hit the area.
The sluice gates were opened and then the water coursed through the area destroying the ecosystem and livelihood of people who fished for tilapia and made use of the reeds for thatch and baskets. The birds that lived on the fish were also affected. Needless to say the cotton was washed away and people lost their lives.
The story is useful because it connects people and the environment and it shows how short sighted decisions can lead to long-term damage. Re- membering makes me think that perhaps telling stories and collecting them together is not such a waste of time. Besides being a storyteller and collector and recollector of stories helps to make sense of the world. It can perhaps also help to reconstruct the world. But who decides what narratives should be included or recognized and on what basis? Who decides how they should be told? What right have I to collect them and tell them? I am a dual citizen of Australia and South Africa. This gives me power that needs to be used to give a voice to others who struggle for rights and recognition. It also enables me to draw parallels and differences. I do not choose to be silent. All I can do is to contribute to a postcolonial world as best I can from my space and to know my place as marginal, an outsider.
“If they (others) do not like it here then they can go home” is the attitude expressed by the nationalistic Ozzie (Australian) critical of so-called out- sider. Similarly “If they haven’t stayed on in South Africa (replace any other
5 See Monica Wilson (in her contribution to the Oxford History of Southern Africa showed that so-called African peasant farmers did very well during the first stages of coloniza- tion).
context) then how can they know what it is like or what needs to be done?”
These are the attitudes that emerge from categorical thinking based on cit- izenship and nationalistic loyalty. What are the implications of overlapping loyalties that can enrich multiple meanings with multiple stakeholders?
Perhaps democracy is about Ubuntu – the South African Xhosa word for being a person through other people and through making connections within oneself, with others and with the environment. This is both spiritual and practical! The organizational contexts at local, national, regional and international level needs to be addressed as continuums. The iron law of oli- garchy (I recall from my memory of an industrial sociology seminar is based on Robert Michels idea that once an organization reaches a particular size and organizational level of complexity, it becomes hierarchical) and this has implications for breaking down a sense of democracy and its implications for organizations need to be heeded. Pam Macallister (1999) explains how organizations need to find ways to remain democratic and non-violent by being mindful of complexity. Smaller organizations or smaller teams with a focus on specific mission and an understanding of their points of inter- connection with other organizations and the wider world is vital. This is essential for respecting the viewpoints of many others and it can be lost by oversimplifying things – bureaucracies have this tendency, but networks can redress some of the problems.
The argument starts from the thesis of Capra (1982) that the world needs a paradigm shift away from the compartmentalised approach to science that divides body and mind, self and other (including all living things) and the environment. The divided self (that has flowed from divided thinking) has led to the erosion of the links that make up humanity within the web of life. Changing our attitude towards time has caused part of this erosion. The well-worn metaphor of the “watch and the industrial machine”,6are central to the perspective that time is money and that workers are means to an end, namely profit. If time is seen as intergenerational and that we are all part of one planet then the long-term wellbeing of the environment and the respon- sibility of decision makers – through joined up governance of the elected public representatives, the private sector and civil society is important to the next generation. Short-term profit and winning the next election would not be paramount if accountability measures to manage social and environmen- tal risk were to be built into the decision-making.
According to Descartes’7 fourth proposition mind and body are distinct.
Nevertheless he did acknowledge that our senses are not without limitations:
6 As I recall our discussions on the work of Braverman (1974) as young sociologists at the University of Cape Town.
7 Cited in Descartes, 1670, A Discourse on Method, translated by Vetch, 1977, pp. 85–91.
Descartes born 1618, died 1650.
1. Systemic Governcance for Participatory Design and Accountability 7
“They are only meant to serve us for practical purposes, not to give us knowl- edge. They lead us into error only because we do not accept the limitations which God has put on them. . .” (Descartes, translated by Veitch, 1977: xxi)
This is a very important point, because it is indicative that senses are not always the basis of truth seeking. By virtue of our humanity (our emotions, values, consciousness and our will) we can and do make choices that are not based on sight, sound, hearing and touch.
Nevertheless Cartesian thinking has been interpreted by Enlightenment thinkers to mean seeing the world in terms of segments not wholes, in or- der to achieve greater understanding (see Capra, 1982; Capra, 1996; Capra, F., Steindl-Rast with Matus, T., 1992). Specialisations in the sciences have compartmentalized out view of the world and undermined out systemic place within it. The splits across mind and body, self, other and the envi- ronment have led not to greater objectivity, but a loss in our understanding of the interrelatedness of life and our place within it. It has also led to our forgetting the importance of the relationship between thinking and practice and the recursive nature of all praxis.
Divided thinking in science has led to “experts” in politics, management and international relations making objective decisions by trying to treat the world as a laboratory – where the controlled experiment can lead to testing hypotheses – without understanding the complex nature of the systems of which they have little appreciation in the sense used by Vickers (1983) in Human Systems are Different. Command and control type thinking in man- agement flowed from the idea that reality could be predicted in terms of lin- ear cause and effect. Thinking and practice reflected the notion of expertise, objectivity and specialization. The compartmentalized way of conceptual- izing the world and solving problems has led to more harm than good – a world where right and wrong, good and evil are described in the simplistic terms of ethnocentric experts in public, private and academic spheres with- out seeing the flow on affects or thinking about the “boomerang affect” (see Beck, 1992, for his discussion “Risk Society”).
Longo (2004: 225) makes the point that international law should be seen in a complementary light and that:
“To attempt to subjugate international law to democratic will formation is mis- guided. (227) He goes on to argue that signing on to a UN treaty needs to be recognized as accepting the international law and applying it. He then draws comparisons with European Union and Australian federalism and argues that international law can be seen as a kind of federalism. This brings into ques- tion what the local rights are of people. He argues: “National institutions in the EU as, as in Australia, do not always fully accept the notion of supremacy of autonomous supranational law over national laws that impact upon the rights of their citizens. The recognition and protection of fundamental rights is at the core of the state’s compact with its citizens, including those members of
minority groups. Furthermore the treatment of non-citizens with dignity is a legal as well as a moral imperative. . .EU national courts have diligently rein- forced the need for an emerging EU polity to give effect to this foundational principle. . .”
But despite the fact that the EU model is useful it is argued that main- taining the balance of individualism and collectivism remain a challenge.
“The European Union is a federal body that has adopted the principle that de- cisions should always be taken at the lowest level capable of dealing with the problem. The application of this principle, known as subsidiarity, is still being tested. But if it works for Europe, it is not impossible that it might work for the world.” (Singer, 2002: 218)8
The notion of participation by all those who are to be at the receiv- ing end has also been discussed by Ashby (1956) in his work on cyber- netics. This makes good sense for democracy, research and policy making.
All life in this generation and the next should be considered when design- ing for the future (Banathy, 2000). Singer (2002) does not make a central argument for sentient beings directly,9 but he does stress that the funda- mental flaw in all narrowly market-based decisions taken by the WTO is that economic accountability needs to be expanded to include social and environmental accountability and some consideration and compassion for sentient beings. In his lecture “Ethics for One World” (July 26, 2004) he stressed that where the WTO had not made provision for animal rights, the European Union had chosen to take a stand against battery chicken farming, simply because it is cruel. Australia could benefit from learning from this model and taking a stand against live sheep trade, because it is cruel. The EU provides a useful federal type model for international trade
8 See McIntyre-Mills, 2000, Global Citizenship and Social Movements: Creating tran- scultural webs of meaning. Singer (2002: 18) refers to the work of Daniel Weinstock
“Prospects for Global Citizenship”, a paper read to the Global Justice Conference, Cen- tre for Law and Philosophy, Columbia Law School, New York, 31 March-1 April 2001.
9 Singer (1976) makes it clear in his work “Animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals” Jonathan Cape, London, that cruelty to animals is unacceptable, full stop. Similarly Susan Greenfield (2004) stressed in a public lecture as part of the Thinkers in Residence Program in Adelaide that we share 97% of our genome with a laboratory rat. Sentient beings feel pain. Unnecessary cruelty is inexcusable. Recent re- search has also shown that the facility to be cruel to animals is indicative of the facility to be cruel to human beings. In deed it is a precursor. This is one of the reasons cited for New Zealand and United Kingdom insisting on mandatory reporting of cruelty to animals. It can be a way of intervening in the prevention of other crimes against animals and people.