FYI: What We're Reading (1)
David Jacobstein
Hi all,
Another quarter comes to a close, and we have another chance for some reflection. Cooler weather is starting to come to Washington, and despite the eerie feeling of walking past uniformed soldiers on most corners in the city, it feels familiar and comforting for the routines of school and season to apply. A ton of great things have been published in the last three months, so I've once again split things into three parts - trying to have one focus on foreign aid and TWP, one on systems practice, and one on democracy. This first one and the largest is on democracy, as I’m sure it’s on everyone’s minds:
In the space of democracy the bad news has been outweighing the good for several months, so it’s nice to be able to highlight work that focuses on people who go on making a difference over time. Flor Guerzovich’s article on invisible weavers pulls out and names the phenomenon I’ve seen so many times of important outcomes happening, processes being corrected, results being delivered because a handful of dedicated and mission-driven folks kept pushing for change over time from a variety of vantage points. The article provides numerous examples of what this looks like in practice and how pivotal they have proven. It also offers guidance as to what sort of support is meaningful to these folks, and helps orient those looking for what to do in the midst of the crisis with a very simple but profound answer - throw more support to the folks who have already been walking the walk. (I would gladly write a much longer discourse on how the centrality of invisible weavers to the translation of big ideas into differentiated granular action is the root difference between the ontology and epistemology of top-down replicable strategic projects that provide limited return on investment and that of open, adaptive, relational investments that generate increasing returns over time).
For those looking for a fascinating but more academic read, I was struck by this thought-provoking article critiquing how democratic work on deliberative democracy may have missed the boat on capacity to accomplish tasks. My best shorthand is that the authors find that the paradigm within which democratic innovation is happening is too dominated by deliberative democracy or “the power of public deliberation in countering arbitrary domination and underpinning legitimate decision-making” and that this has resulted in an assumption “that democratic innovations succeed when they improve decision-making – as if decisions translate easily into practice and mobilising capacity is straightforward.
While that article focuses on the academic discourse around democratic innovation, I found an applied example to be particularly fascinating in this article on issues with AI and conceptualization of how democracy grows/recovers. In it, Hahrie Han and Henry Farrell argue that the underlying model framing the way those seeking to support AI in governance is fundamentally technocratic - it seeks to leverage AI to more efficiently gather input to shape decisions affecting large publics, and as they write, seeks to “replace the messy complexities of politics and power amongst humans with something more reasonable.” I find most valuable in their work not so much the critique of this technocratic approach, but their emphasis on what it misses - that a central aspect of a healthy democracy is that it requires “people to be socially embedded in ongoing relationships rather than temporary mini-publics. Such relationships may be less efficient in the short term, so that some optimal policies remain out of reach, but they are better over time at generating political compromises that can weather adversity. Democracy is not just challenged to solve problems better but to ensure its own stability.” In other words, the issue isn’t how to properly define today’s decision but how to enable a society full of existing relationships and power dynamics to come together to forge agreements it can live with, and then keep doing so. I think we made this mistake regularly at USAID, trying to fix all the institutions so that democracy would “deliver” for people and then they would approve of it. Bottom line: rather than solve democracy and deliver it gift-wrapped for people to marvel at, we need to imagine the challenge of the moment as restoring the pathways for people to struggle collectively and have some broad agreement on the results. It reminds me of a cogent analysis of the weakness of the Democratic Party in the US, here, a blockbuster that I wish was driving more of the discourse on democratic renewal around me.
The emeritus scholar of democracy and development, Tom Carothers, wrote a piece on democracy aid that rang all too true, sadly, regarding the various steps through which the architecture of an international democracy community has been uprooted. The review of the problems besetting the idea of democracy highlights how much the challenge facing those who value inclusive and open societies is around reaching broad audiences who are disillusioned and angry in the face of serious headwinds. I think the most innovative aspect was the discussion of potential new models of support, including ideas such as incubators, fellowships, outreach to unusual allies such as security sector, as well as how to properly integrate into other sectors. As someone who promoted cross-sectoral work for many years within USAID, I am much less concerned that such efforts will not sufficiently focus attention on corruption or human rights (they will not, to be sure, but it is not a major concern; attention to the formal aspects of democracy needs must flow from a renewal in appetite for democratic societies as places of belonging and where interests can be advanced by broad publics). There’s also good research suggesting that grassroots reforms tend to scale when they can garner support from doctors and engineers, not advocates.
Quick hits
I really enjoyed this major nytimes article on migration; it’s very interesting to imagine future competition of advanced democracies to attract migrants as their populations age;
Dan Honig and colleagues posted a video of their mission-driven framework and its application in the UK, which is worth a watch and a vital topic for innovation;
A well-written and upbeat Carnegie article on election losers in Africa reminds us that there are still signs of vitality in even newer democracies;
A very cool article about researchers who analyzed public spaces and found that people are moving through them more quickly and with less interaction with others reminds me that we can’t foster better publics if we can’t even be in public together where we are;
A fascinating and frankly scary article on sorting of economic support or polarization of investment as a possible future, indeed becoming more likely as more economic decisions are influenced by political ideologies in overt ways, with potentially drastic implications for pluralism.
I assume most of you are on Laura Adams’ excellent substack, but her latest piece on how US civic space is closing, while not a fun read, is an essential one.
Sean Mulkerne
Do you (or anyone) happen to have the migration NYT article as a gift, i.e. not behind a paywall? Thanks for sharing!
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