Dilemmas of community participation

A return to community norms and cultural visions, without encouraging exclusivity and barriers, is an extremely delicate task, says the author in the concluding part of a series

From the point of view of a liberal democracy there is a dilemma in social insurance against risks and financial crunch at the community level. On the one hand, kinship groups in traditional communities often provide to their members scarce credit as well as emotional support at times of emergency need, and help in small loans for regular business or job referrals for migrating members and insure against idiosyncratic risks — these useful functions and reciprocal obligations make such group ties quite resilient (and help some ethnic business groups to succeed in conditions of scarcity of entrepreneurial opportunities and capital).

Group obligations can serve even better than market or government contracts, since the latter ultimately depend for contract enforcement on costly third-party (legal-juridical) verification and arbitration, whereas in the case of within-group arrangements breaches are more easily observable and negotiable within the group. There are many stories of how Chinese lineage-based business families negotiate billions of dollars’ worth of real estate deals in Hong Kong (or how caste-based Gujarati migrant families have captured the motel business in large parts of the US) without any formal contracts for raising money from inside those groups and police any potential breaches mainly internally.

On the other hand, for the individual members of such groups the benefits of community bonds come with a palpable cost. The price of social help and insurance is the group’s authority over individual members’ freedoms. Traditional extended families or kinship groups can be quite authoritarian in their treatment particularly of younger and female members. The latter, for example, have to accept many restrictions on their choice of work associates and marriage partners, sanctions on departures from due deference to the aged leaders, and injunctions on sharing the benefits from individual efforts and innovations.

Take the case of old age support. In traditional communities children have the social obligation to look after their parents in their old age. The community keeps a watchful eye that as the children grow up they do not stray too far out of community controls. A liberal may actually prefer the state and market alternatives (social security plus financial market products like annuities) to the community-provided support system obligating children. More generally, in such societies even when democratic, group rights often take precedence over individual rights: your freedom of expression can be restricted if some group claims offence at your expression or speech. As liberalism emphasises individual rights, these may sometimes violate community norms — in this sense ‘liberty’ and ‘fraternity’ may be in serious conflict. One can see this conflict in complex thinkers like Gandhi, who as an ardent champion of the local community was less warm to liberalism (particularly if it comes without serious limits on competition and on the individual’s autonomy of desire and needs) and egalitarianism.

Another such conflict arises in the context of two different aspects of liberal democracy — the “procedural” and the “participatory” aspects. The former has to do with due process and respect for minority rights which majoritarian communities often tend to ride roughshod over. The latter in their impatience with institutional rules and procedures are often complicit in their leaders’ illiberal undermining of the institutional insulation or independence of the judiciary, police and the civil service particularly in developing countries where these institutions are already weak. The emphasis is on winning elections through majoritarian mobilisation.

Of course, the enthusiasts for participatory politics often complain about the failures of representative democracy, as the representatives tend to come to them only at election time and meanwhile delegate vital issues to the unelected elite experts or an insulated technocracy. If both the procedural and participatory aspects of liberal democracy are to be given their due weight, one clearly has to strike a balance between the need for evidence- and knowledge-based governance indispensable in many complex situations and the need for frequent and meaningful checks ensuring accountability to the people. In poor countries even when there are vigorous local governments, one financial problem for local accountability is that many local areas are too poor to have elastic sources of revenue. So even if they have some political power it is limited by their dependence on money coming from above. Accountability is thus separated from financial responsibility. In such a context the standard presumption of the economic literature on fiscal federalism that people can ‘vote with their feet’ in the face of different bundles of tax and public expenditure in different areas does not quite apply. In any case residents of rural communities of poor countries are often face-to-face, and social norms sharply distinguish ‘outsiders’ from ‘insiders’ especially with respect to entitlement to community services.

The recent experience of community participation in developing countries has also shown only limited gains in many areas, particularly in those with entrenched inequality. Lending institutions like the World Bank have long emphasised participatory programs like Community-Driven Development in public goods projects. While several such programmes have delivered moderately successfully to the poor, it is not always clear that in the process the local institutional set-ups deficient in empowerment of the poor have measurably or durably changed. Yet there is now scattered evidence of local deliberative democracy sprouting in different parts of the world, and showing results, if not always in terms of policy outcome, at least in the process of claims to dignity and discursive demands for accountability — the evidence is not just from the town halls of rich countries or participatory budgeting in progressive Brazilian cities, but even from high-inequality low-literacy villages of India (as a recent book, Oral Democracy, by P Sanyal and V Rao shows for a fairly large sample of village assemblies in south India).

On expertise, while there are issues where local expertise or indigenous knowledge is enough, this is clearly not the case always. When someone in the village is seriously ill the community leaders may send for the traditional healers in the neighbourhood, but you may be safer in the hands of experts in the hospital in the nearby town (provided by the market or the state). On an administrative level providing for street cleaning or garbage collection may be easy to organise for the municipal authority, but for power generation and transmission, bulk supply of clean water and public sanitation or developing school curriculum or digital connectivity it will often need outside help and expertise (from the upper levels of the state and the market).

Beyond administrative accountability to the grassroots the case for community, however, ultimately depends on the salience of common cultural bonds and norms for a healthy liberal society. The cultural gulf here between the blue-collar workers and the liberal professional elite has become particularly wide in recent years. Labour organisations, instead of serving only as narrow wage-bargaining platforms or lobbies, can play a special role here in bridging this gulf. They may take an active role in the local cultural life, involving the neighbourhood community and religious organisations, as they used to do in some European and Latin American countries, and thus tamed and transcended some of the nativist passions.

A return to community norms and cultural visions, without encouraging exclusivity and barriers is, of course, an extremely delicate task. Success in this will vary from one area to another, often depending on organisations and leaders. It is often the case that dislocations due to market or technological disruptions and the consequent job-related despair and sense of insecurity for those who find it difficult to adapt and adjust to the changes make them turn to faith- or identity-based communities for solace or anchor and alternative sources of pride, which are sometimes not very inclusive. The populist demagogues in different parts of the world who have rallied communities for the cause of ‘taking back control’, apart from being rabidly exclusivist, have, however, rarely devolved power to the local communities. While fulminating against supra-national organisations and regulations, they have, if anything, centralised power at the national level. Paradoxically, in such attempts to strengthen the nation-state the right-wing populists are sometimes in the uncomfortable/unwitting company of state socialists and other anti-globalists on the left, and ideologically pitted against them are the motley bunch of anarcho-communitarians, small-is-beautiful Gandhian thinkers, and Hayekian libertarians, as well as pro-global separatists (like those in Catalonia or Scotland).

Take this larger imagined political community of the nation. Citizens may legitimately feel pride in their national autonomy and cultural history, but one has to be careful that such pride does not derive its oxygen from the majoritarian ethnicity, marginalising minorities or demonising immigrants. One can try to advocate a kind of  “civic nationalism,” which combines pride in one’s cultural distinctiveness (and maybe local soccer teams) without giving up on some shared universal humanitarian values, including tolerance for diversity (as evident sometimes in the composition of those soccer teams).

The state, the market, and the community are all robust coordination mechanisms, each important in its own context in potentially fortifying liberal democracy and each in many ways complementary with the others, but one has to remain vigilant that their excesses or dysfunctionalities do not undermine the foundations of a liberal society.

(Concluded)

(The article was first published in the international blog 3 Quarks Daily)

The author is professor of Graduate School at University of California, Berkeley. His most recent two  books are Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India; & Globalisation, Democracy and Corruption: An Indian Perspective