The Obama Administration and Collaborative Governance
I’m sitting in a great session at the ABA Dispute Resolution Section conference focused on public participation under the Obama administration. Panelists include Richard Reuben of the University of Missouri-Columbia, John Kamensky of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, James Fishkin of Stanford University, and Lisa Bingham from the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
John Kamensky detailed some of the exciting initiatives taking place in the current administration around opening up government data (such as making airport screening line times public in real time so people can find out how much time it’ll take them to get to their plane) and creating community connections (like ways for neighborhoods to connect to create, for example, baby sitter systems). He also spoke about the emergence of mobile devices as a primary channel for citizens to access these services – there’s even talk about “Citizen 2.0” as an inheritor to Web 2.0. It’s clear that DC is abuzz with this creative thinking, because the Obama administration is making it a priority – to wit, Valerie Jarrett is leading it from inside the President’s inner circle.
Next, Jim Fishkin of Stanford talked about the shortcomings of traditional polling and how Deliberative Polling can offer more useful insights, and actually help to change public opinion. He shared some anecdotes (including one regarding wind power in Texas) from his new book, When the People Speak. The Center for Deliberative Democracy is working in more than 16 countries around the world doing this cutting edge work. Here’s a clip of him talking about the shortcomings of just polling the public directly:
Lisa Blomgren Bingham brought the discussion back to the conflict resolution field. There are lots of ways government and citizens can exchange information through these new channels, and that’s where conflict resolution resides – in the exchange of information. How can we use that information through a process to help bring together different stakeholders to agree on a policy outcome?
These are not processes that many dispute resolvers are used to thinking about, but they are definitely opportunities for conflict resolution – and they may provide opportunities for us all to do exciting work.
She laid out a spectrum of stages of government processes, moving from upstream (legislative, quasi-legislative, making policy) to midstream (implementing policy) to downstream (quasi-judicial, enforcing policy, judicial). I think the spectrum is available in the online materials for the conference. Some of the upstream opportunities include AmericaSpeaks, Deliberative Polling, Consensus Conferences, Public Conversations, and Citizen Juries. Many of these approaches leverage technology. Midstream includes regulatory negotiation, participatory budgeting, or USIECR. Downstream includes mediation and facilitation in lieu of agency adjudication, advisory and binding arbitration (e.g at the FDIC or EPA), private ADR providers, or even Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
Joe Goldman from America Speaks was supposed to be on the panel, but he had to attend a working group on how to deal with the budget deficit, so Lisa spoke to how America Speaks works. If you don’t know about them, I urge you to check out their website.
She also spoke about Study Circles (now called Everyday Democracy) where people meet in small discussion groups in private homes, and regulatory negotiation.
Her final point suggested that there may be new legislation, a possible “Collaborative Governance Act,” that will help to define “public participation” in the US code, and provide greater clarity to agency personnel.
