Citizen Governance

Leading American Communities Into the 21st Century

Richard C. Box

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781483352510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Drawing on fundamental ideas about the relationship of citizens to the public sphere, Richard C Box presents a model of `citizen governance'. Recognizing the challenges in the community governance setting, he advocates rethinking the structure of local government and the roles of citizens, elected officials and public professionals in the twenty-first century. His model shifts a large part of the responsibility for local public policy from the professional and the elected official to the citizen. Citizens take part directly in creating and implementing policy, elected officials coordinate the policy process, and public professionnals facilitate citizen discourse, offering the knowledge of public practice needed for successful `citizen gover

CHAPTER

One

Introduction: A Return to Original Values

The challenges facing those who participate in the governance of American communities seem overwhelming—cutbacks in national aid to local government, racial tension, insufficient resources for basic services, debates about the council-manager and strong-mayor systems, and many more. However, it is more the norm than the exception for local government to face challenge and turmoil in the history of community governance. The current challenges are vexing, but they also present exciting opportunities to improve public service.

This book has been written for people engaged in shaping the future of American public life in local areas, in communities in the broadest sense of the term. The focus is on cities, but the ideas are also applicable to neighborhoods, counties, and special purpose and regional districts, as well as to nonprofit organizations that interact with the public sector. The people involved include citizens, elected representatives, public service practitioners, and the academicians who study communities.

Nothing said here is startlingly new or original; the practice of community governance in America is centuries old and the accumulated body of knowledge and experience is substantial. (Notice that I have used the word governance rather than government or administration. This is intended to include the entire range of activities of citizens, elected representatives, and public professionals as they create and implement public policy in communities.) Many ideas being tried today in community governance have been tried before, to be discarded for innovations that were themselves discarded, only to appear later in different forms. So, though some of the ideas presented in this book may seem a little surprising, they are mostly extensions or adaptations of practices grounded in the history of the institution of community governance.

In this narrative, I bring together the history of the development of local government and community political life, current trends, and cutting-edge thinking about the roles of citizens, elected representatives, and public professionals. The result is a model of local government structure and policy making that emphasizes a balance between efficient, rational service provision and open, democratic processes that allow citizens to govern their communities.

The reader will not, it is hoped, find the book to be abstract or confusing in a way that makes it hard to read, or worse, irrelevant to the daily tasks of governing communities. This does not mean that the book is free of concepts that help us to understand the phenomena of daily life. Indeed, without concepts, theories, and models of reality, daily life appears to be a random series of happenings, and we become powerless to change it for the better. Concepts, theories, and models are powerful tools for shaping our behavior and the situations that surround us to conform with a vision of how things ought to be. To this end, the book aims to link theory and practice, a mutually beneficial relationship in which daily experience informs and allows for modification of theory, and theory permits daily action that is more focused and effective.

I had in mind four broad themes as I wrote the book. First, the attention Americans give to public governance is increasingly devoted to the local level, the place where people feel they can make a real difference in the conditions that affect their lives. As people turn their attention toward their communities, they return to values that come from the history of community governance. Three such values are local control of public governance rather than state or national control, small and responsive government instead of large and cumbersome government, and the public service practitioner as adviser and helper to citizens rather than as a controller of public organizations. A part of this shift in attention from national or state governmental systems to local governance includes skepticism about the idea, drawn from the private marketplace, that local residents are only consumers of public services, people who should be treated like customers. Instead, some local residents are returning to their earlier role as citizens, people who are the owners of the community and take responsibility for its governance.

(I will often use the term public service practitioner instead of professional. In general, the intent is to use practitioner when discussing full-time, career people who do public service work in communities. Professional is used when I wish to emphasize the difference in training and experience between practitioners and others who lack their in-depth knowledge of a specific area of practice.)

Second, we can use knowledge drawn from the history of community governance to improve today’s communities. There is a history of people striving to determine the future of their communities, sometimes in the face of difficult economic and political circumstances. In the early years of the nation, local governments were created for many reasons, including religious solidarity, commerce, or security. They were often governed, as were the English localities from which colonists drew much of their knowledge of local government, by wealthy and prominent citizens. The nineteenth century brought wider citizen participation in local affairs and exciting innovation as people dealt with problems of industrialization and urbanization. These problems called for changes in the form and function of government, resulting in experimentation with the strong mayor, commission, and council-manager forms of government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today’s challenges and debates over issues of governance grow from this history, and it offers us a guide as we move into the twenty-first century.

Third, an understanding of the political and economic nature of communities is valuable for those who take part in governance. The work of citizens who come together to shape community policy takes place in an environment different from that of states or the national government. Local places are influenced by economic, governmental, and social conditions beyond their control and they have limited resources to deal with many issues. Community political interaction is often face to face, and, despite the limitations of local governance, many local residents can take part in community affairs in a way that gives them the satisfaction of seeing concrete results from their efforts. In some places, community power structures are closed and uninviting to citizen participation, a legacy of the history of local control by the wealthy elite; to open new opportunities for citizen self-determination is one of the most exciting and important tasks of our time.

Fourth, successfully meeting the challenges of the future and doing the best job we can with our opportunities depends on being willing to adapt our roles to new circumstances. In the past two or three decades, trends have been developing in the roles of citizens, elected representatives, and public service practitioners that will likely shape the character of community governance in the twenty-first century. These trends represent a search for a different balance between rational, professional administration and democratic openness and public accountability. In this search, the developing shifts in roles are (1) citizens become governors of the community instead of its customers; (2) representatives coordinate the efforts of citizens instead of making their decisions for them; and (3) practitioners focus on helping citizens achieve their goals rather than on the control of public agencies.

Later in the book, I outline an approach to community governance that uses the ideas of returning to local values and the importance of knowledge of the history and the nature of communities to construct a model of the governance roles of citizens, elected representatives, and public service practitioners in the next century. Part description of changes underway, part prescription to guide our actions toward a meaningful goal, I hope the reader finds that the model, which I call Citizen Governance, provokes thought and inspires a sense of the importance of public service in American communities.

This chapter and Chapter 6 are designed so the reader can quickly grasp the basics of Citizen Governance. For greater depth of understanding, the reader may turn to Chapters 2 through 5. Let us now look more closely at the idea that greater interest in local, as compared to state or national, governance leads us back to values embedded in the history of communities.

The Three Returns to Values of the Past

Value of the Past Number 1: Local Control

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration advocated return of some national-level programs to state and local governments. This was not new; earlier administrations had made the same suggestion. As with those earlier administrations, Ronald Reagan did not succeed in making sweeping changes in the distribution of programs and services; it is difficult to alter a system of this size, given entrenched interests and concern about the effects of severing financial ties with the national government. Despite the apparent failure of national administrations to reverse the trend toward centralization of public services, during the 1980s the nation experienced the fiscal limitations we now take for granted, because there simply was not enough money to do everything we wanted to do. Along with the inefficiencies of large-scale social welfare programs and skepticism about government’s ability to administer its programs successfully, the shortage of resources led Americans to expect less from the national government and to turn toward state and local government as the focus of their problem-solving efforts.

The phenomena in evidence of this turn back to local action include greater citizen activism and participation in local affairs; resurgence of communitarian sensitivity to the responsibility of local residents for taking care of their own problems; resistance to control of the local policy process by national or state officials or local economic and political elites; citizen-generated ballot measures on tax limitation, growth, and other issues; and open public participation and decision making about the future of communities instead of leaving such decisions to a few local leaders. Greater citizen attention to community affairs demonstrates a return to a vision of citizenship characteristic of the era when Americans were creating the nation, the late 1700s. Thomas Jefferson believed in a vision of governance for America centered on small local governments, with states and the nation performing a limited number of very specific functions that were essential (like national defense) and hard to perform at the local or state levels. Jefferson’s preference reflected a fundamental American value—reliance on self and community—or, put another way, local control as contrasted with identification with large and distant places and units of government.

The basic American value of local control was displaced by large-scale governmental action in the twentieth century, action that accompanied rapid urbanization and industrialization of American society. Local government, which had been the center of governmental revenue raising and expenditure as the twentieth century began, became by the later part of the century a much smaller part of total governmental expenditures and was heavily dependent for revenue on funds raised by the national government, then distributed to states and localities in the form of intergovernmental assistance (Nice 1987, 45–9). Because of the increasing scarcity of resources, local governments came to compete fiercely with each other for the jobs and economic stimulus created by the expansion, relocation, and building of new facilities by private firms and government agencies. This led to anticipatory anxiety (Logan and Molotch 1987, 294), in which communities attempted to outbid each other by luring firms with tax breaks, land, infrastructure, training programs in public colleges, and so on, even when firms would choose a particular community without such incentives.

In the midst of this shift from local independence to dependence, there were people such as American philosopher and educator John Dewey who recognized that “the family and neighborhood, with all their deficiencies, have always been the chief agencies of nurture, the means by which dispositions are stably formed and ideas acquired which laid hold on the roots of character” (Dewey 1927/1985, 211). Dewey thought that “democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (218). He was an optimist, refusing to believe that modern urban-industrial society prevented recapturing earlier values that tended to be ignored in such a large-scale, mass society.

He wrote of the “void left by the disintegration of the family, church and neighborhood” that “there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of their consequences into the local homes of mankind” (215). He foresaw a future in which the standardized aspects of industrial–eonsumer culture could free people from worry about the basics of survival, allowing them to realize their full potential as individuals. Modern mobility, rather than being destructive of community feeling, may contribute new ideas, “preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past” (216).

In the emerging twenty-first century environment of return to the value of local control, people in communities choose the extent to which they depend on state and national agencies and the amount of time, energy, and resources they are willing to devote to economic competition with other communities. Not everyone believes that physical or economic growth is the best thing for their community, and not everyone who thinks it is believes that government should be the vehicle for promoting such growth. Where people come together to collectively decide on the future of their communities in the twenty-first century, they will be more likely to question the old certainties of economic development and physical expansion, to give weight as well to concerns about air and water quality, school capacities, social inequality, infrastructure costs and traffic congestion, and the aesthetic character of their living environment.

In many places, this renewed sense of local control has taken hold in the past decade or two, and in some areas it has become a matter of statewide concern (Gale 1992; Nelson 1992). This public sense of greater control through knowledge and participation may be taken as a given in the next century. It could significantly change the relationship between elected officials and the general public and between public professionals and both their elected superiors and the public. The process of deciding the future of the community could look less like determining what business leaders want and whether any sizeable opposition exists, and more like a community dialogue in which “citizens and administrators … join to decide what to do and to act together for the public good” (Stivers 1990, 96).

Of course, many public matters cannot be dealt with effectively at the local level. National defense, interstate relationships, and issues of national concern such as civil rights are examples of the need for national action. There are parallel examples at the state and regional levels of government as well. Also, many services are more effective if provided in larger organizations—that is, there are economies of scale.

Value of the Past Number 2: Small and Responsive Government

Small and responsive government means government shaped in response to citizen desires for lean and efficient government. This is government that only does those things citizens want done and does so in a user-friendly manner rather than as a ponderous bureaucracy. In the twentieth century, Americans have, naturally enough, come to expect many problems of society to be solved by government. I say “naturally enough” because the challenges of controlling the excesses of the capitalist system, conducting wars, dealing with economic depression, building the physical infrastructure to handle rapid population growth, and preserving the environment were met by governmental action at all levels in the twentieth century. However, in the late twentieth century it has become clear that there are limitations to governmental action, limitations of competence, resources, and public willingness to allow greater government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

The daily-use language of public management shows the evidence of this new public sense that government should be smaller, more clearly matched to public wishes, and less intrusive into private lives. Some of the terms providing this evidence are privatization of public services, public-private partnerships, entre-preneurism in public management, total quality management, customer service orientation, and reinventing government. Each of these concepts shares some of the values of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the time of the founding of the nation. These values include self-reliance, individual liberty, and government that does only those things the majority of the public wants to pay for and that the private market will not do. Not all of these management concepts or individualistic values are good or useful in all situations. They can have a negative impact on valid public objectives and may conflict with other, more collectivistic founding-era values that emphasize cooperative action, personal commitment to participate in public governance, a sense of community, and dedication to public service.

In a public-governance environment shaped by these contending values, many citizens have a different view of the role of government than Americans have had for the past several decades, and some of them wish to take part in determining the way their communities are governed. Among other things, this means that often citizens, rather than elected representatives or public service practitioners acting alone, choose which public services they want, in what quantities, and how they want them delivered. They choose whether action on particular issues should be taken by individuals or neighborhood groups without expenditure of public monies or by local government with public expenditure. So, citizens are involved in finding the answers to questions such as whether to have a full-service park and recreation system or just a few parks in crucial areas; whether fire protection is provided by full-time paid personnel, volunteers, or a mixture; whether to have a publicly owned community hospital, publicly operated refuse collection service, publicly run fleet vehicle repair and maintenance, and so on. Or, instead, will these services be operated by the private sector alone or in a contractual or mutual relationship with the public sector?

Of course, not everyone wants to be involved in solving neighborhood problems or working on questions of the size and scope of activities in their government, and many who would like to do so simply do not have the time. Even so, the return to the value of small and responsive government means that the public is less likely to passively accept the decisions of political leaders and public professionals about what government should do and how it should do it. Instead, the reality for the future may be that many citizens will choose for themselves what services ought to be offered through the collective service-delivery mechanism of government.

People are increasingly aware that government services are not free and that to decide to provide a service is to decide that each taxpayer in the jurisdiction must pay for that service. Unlike voluntary contributions to churches, health clubs, charitable o...