TOO LATE FOR THERAPY?

Or, what is to be done about the relationship between citizens and states

Geoff Mulgan

A lot is known about what makes relationships work. There needs to be trust and mutual respect, a willingness to accept differences, and a good mix of support, care and communication. Healthy relationships need constant work, and often need periodic reinvention.

Very similar considerations apply to the relationship between states and citizens, which so often appear fraught and strained to the point of breaking. By any historical standard the quality of the relationship between most democratic states and their citizens is good. They are more open, supportive and honest than ever before. We can remove bad governments; we know much more about what they do; and the quality of the services they provide has contributed to the extraordinary and unprecedented improvements in life expectancy, risks of violent crime and education achieved over the last 40 years or so.

But many citizens and commentators feel the opposite. Indeed it often looks as if we have moved from one set of unhealthy relationships – based on excessive servility and deference – to another set of unhealthy relationships marked by seething resentment and distrust, without even pausing for breath along the way. At the extreme there is anger and contempt; a view that governments and politicians are only in it for themselves; and an oddly infantilised mixture of belief that governments should be able to fix any problem and fatalism that nothing they do can ever work. The net result has been to increase the political space for a populism of denunciation, and to shrink the space for practical policy.

So what is to be done? What might a healthier relationship look like? Is it too late for therapy? Here I suggest some answers.

We need to start by disaggregating the question. The relationship between citizens and states is not singular. We relate to states in many different ways: as voters, campaigners, service users, or quiet beneficiaries of the state's capacity to provide peace or a stable economy. One dimensional views, whether romantic or cynical, can be misleading. Survey evidence confirms the public's differentiated feelings, with usually much more trust in those parts of the state which are close at hand and interacted with directly rather than observed indirectly through the media.

Each of these very different kinds of interaction then needs to be attended to as a relationship. The managerial theories that had so much influence in the last decades of the 20 century too often lost sight of this. An overly instrumental view of government squeezed out the space for affect. It was sometimes useful to think in the language of outputs and outcomes. But for the public it mattered how these were achieved too, just as in personal relationships we do not just want a spouse who will deliver a pay cheque or clean the house well.

A few years ago I argued in a series of papers that we needed to think in terms of a 'relational state'. That meant addressing what kinds of relationship citizens actually wanted, which turn out to be quite varied.

The romantics tended to assume that the ideal relationship had to much more active. An idealised view on the left and in some strands of liberalism wanted citizens to spend much of their time engaged in the uplifting work of governance. But in some cases people wanted the opposite: a more impersonal, frictionless and automated relationship with the state (paying taxes, applying for licences), that would leave them more time to get on with their lives.

In other cases, however, they did want the state to be much more human and engaged (eg with doctors, local police or politicians themselves). Indeed for many public services there is no avoiding the fact that most of the labour needed to produce better health, or better education, has to be done by citizens themselves rather than by service providers. This is even more true in an era when health services are dominated by chronic rather than acute diseases, and when ever-more education is needed to prepare for life and work.

Ethnography, conversation and deep listening can help in disentangling what is appropriate. These have become a prominent theme for the hundreds of public innovation labs that have grown up in national, regional and local governments around the world (Nesta helps link a network of them, providing newsletters, training and regular gatherings). Well known ones include Mindlab in Denmark, SITRA in Finland, the Seoul Innovation Bureau in Korea and the Laboratorio del Governo in Chile.

A high proportion of these labs emphasise citizen experience, as well as new uses of technology and data. And many aim to restore public trust.

Most of their projects focus on the practicalities of service delivery: jobs, education, taxation or transport. Reformers have found many ways to improve these everyday relationships. Websites provide ways for the public to communicate back to hospitals or police forces, and often it turns out that they want to thank or congratulate as well as complain. Officials have had to learn more conversational, and human, ways of responding. Budgets have been reshaped to give more control to the public over how funds relevant to them are spent. Personal accounts have been experimented with in many countries, particularly for social care, and are now being developed in new directions by Singapore and France in relation to training.

Citizens have also become much more active in helping states to see. Citizen generated data provides the inputs on everything from floods (Peta Jakarta in Indonesia) to corruption (Ipaidabribe in India), air quality (from China to Spain) to health.

Some of the labs are also interested in rethinking democracy itself in a more active, relational way. That does not mean perpetual referendums, a democracy of Facebook likes and binary choices. These are neither very effective at delivering good decisions or at increasing public trust. Instead platforms like DCENT, which Nesta developed with a group of European partners, aim to encourage more deliberation and discussion. They make it easier for citizens to track issues, to propose ideas, to comment, and in some cases to vote....