Reimagining policymaking as a community-wide cultural practice

Exploring paths to enliven the policymaking process with and out of community

Photo by Maryna Bohucharkska on Unsplash.

On March 15, I gave a lecture and a workshop on the theme “Reimagining Policymaking as a Community-Wide Cultural Practice” at the Practical Threefolding Conference in Viroqua, Wisconsin. The event was attended by local organic and regenerative farmers, agricultural co-op leaders, private and public school teachers, entrepreneurs, retirees, activists, writers, podcasters, and individuals from different spiritual traditions—all of whom were interested in exploring concrete ways to heal and enliven our social fabric. The event was not recorded, so I’ve shared an outline of my remarks below.

My aim with both talks was to invite people into a new, living relationship with policymaking. The activity of creating legislation with and out of community holds enormous potential to bring about a healthier and more harmonious world. But the barriers to reappraising it are enormous. The process itself is mired by a history of exclusion, shared preconceptions, and structural barriers to participation that make it difficult to relate to and reform for those who might otherwise want to become more involved.

To co-identify the essence of policymaking and its potential—an inclusive, recurring practice that empowers all community members, regardless of background, to bring forth their policy ideas and challenges—I invited participants to create a basis for perception within themselves to experience this new relationship. Through this contemplative process, we took care not to discard present realities, such as our hyper-polarized political culture or our ecological crisis, but only to live with and through them in order to experience alternatives.

I wrote my lecture to be participatory in nature, revolving around invitations, or open questions to the audience, and protocols for publicly sharing experiences to bring people into contact with the germ of a shared impulse (policymaking as a community-wide cultural practice) while simultaneously enlarging their sense of their own capacities and potential.

By the end of the weekend, one participant shared her commitment to write a new constitution and another emailed me afterwards with a proposal to waive the camping fees at National Parks for indigenous people. It’s my hope that what I’ve shared below can be taken up and improved by others, so that more people can begin to experience policymaking anew.

Finally, this talk was for a group studying Social Threefolding, a political philosophy developed by social reformer and esotericist Rudolf Steiner, whose thoughts on social life can be explored here and here. In no way does my approach apply only to threefolding efforts, however I believe it is suited to bring about many of the same “inner” capacities sought by Social Threefolders, such as more receptive, collaborative, and compassionate thoughts and actions.

I’m grateful to the event’s organizers, Seth Jordan and Robert Karp, for inviting me to participate in this conference and to the work of Liberating Structures, whose methods I recommend for drawing upon the wisdom of an entire group and generating feelings of community-ing.

Workshop Outline

Introducing Policymaking Through Experience

• Goal: To bring to the group's attention the variety of experiences people have related to policymaking.

• Invitation: “Who here has had a good / bad experience with policymaking? Who here has participated in advocating for a law? Who here has written a law? Who has no experience with the policymaking process?”

Uncovering Shared and Unique Experiences

• Goal: To bring to mind each individual's past, personal experience with policymaking, share it with others, and notice common themes and differences.

• Invitation: “What’s your experience with policymaking?” (1-2-4-All)

Becoming the Policymaking Practice You Want to See

• Goal: To help participants recognize the relationship between their past experience with policymaking and their own actions regarding policymaking, while identifying concrete steps to change one’s experience with policymaking and thus policymaking itself.

• Invitation #1: “How would you design the worst policymaking process possible? Make a list of attributes of the most inefficient, exclusionary, policymaking process.” (1-2-4-All)

• Invitation #2: “What are you exhibiting now that models the first list we just created?” (1-2-4-All)

• Invitation #3: “What is one thing you can do to change this?” (1-2-4-All)

Generating Policy Ideas for Social Threefolding

• Goal: To gain experience developing and deliberating policy ideas. Now that participants have experienced a taste of their own potential to remake policymaking, I invite them to begin sharing policy ideas and practices that would bring them closer to a reality where policymaking felt like a community-wide cultural practice. Because this group was working out of a specific policy framework (see the note re: “social threefolding” above), they were split into three groups that were each assigned a social realm—political, economic, and cultural—and spent 10 minutes in each realm, for 30 minutes total, developing ideas on post-it notes. 

• Invitation: “What policy ideas or practices would you like to see in each sphere of social life?”

Prototyping a Policy Campaign

• Goal: To learn how a traditional policy advocacy campaign is run. I invite the group to select 2-3 policy ideas and practices from their policy generation session and then walk them through the policymaking process to help them get a sense of the work involved. I shared a policymaking process developed by my friend and Democracy Policy Network co-founder Pete Davis, which I’ve used in Los Angeles, that flows from Problem and Community Identification, to Solution Elaboration, to Coalition Championing and Watchdogging. There are other policymaking frameworks one can use. Phoebe Tickell’s “Imagination Activism” is a compelling alternative that stresses vision and imaginative capacities. If I were to articulate my own policymaking process, I’d incorporate elements from both Pete’s and Phoebe’s processes through the following method: (1) Identifying the Potential Among Individuals and Community Members; (2) Surfacing Shared Barriers to Realizing Potential; (3) Co-Developing Plans to Addressing Those Barriers; and (4) Reflecting on the Process. I’ll plan to write a blog post that outlines this in more detail.

• Invitation: “Which ideas would you like to explore through a policymaking process to understand how an idea becomes a law?”

Lecture Outline

Introduction

• Goal of talk: To (re)enliven our relationship with policymaking as “a community-wide cultural practice” using the imagination

• Approach: Using a Goethean-style method to collective investigation: examining phenomenon through the use of (1) introspection, (2) imagination, and (3) reflection.

• Agenda overview

• Caveat: I’m only one person with my own limited perspective; what’s needed is a shared effort of co-investigating policymaking. This talk will not touch on the realities of organizing and coalition building. This is a work in progress and I welcome feedback.

• Definition of terms within the title of the talk:

  • Re-imagining: the activity of restoring hitherto unapprehended relationships between phenomena

  • Policymaking: the activity of developing policy, which includes legislation (the focus of this talk) as well as organizational governance policy such as articles of incorporation and bylaws

  • Community-wide: a state of maximum inclusivity along every conceivable dimension

  • Cultural: a state of representing or bringing forth the genuine perspectives and gifts of every individual

  • Practice: a recurring activity, like an artisanal craft or music practice, which one develops over time

• My biography

Experiencing Biographies

• Goal: All social activity, including policymaking, can be expressed in terms of human biographies, the ideas and actions of individuals and communities situated within living ecological systems. Any investigation into social phenomena must begin out of direct human experience. Our biographies are one way into the human experience. We can notice relationships between different ideas and actions expressed through ourselves and others, especially as we work towards building a community practice. Biographies can become the raw materials for any social activity.

• Invitation: Break into groups of three and take 15 minutes to share your story as it relates to policymaking with another person, with each person taking 5 minutes. As you’re sharing your biography, notice the stories that come through and those that don’t. As you’re listening to others, notice the significant ideas and actions in their life and begin drawing tentative relationships between them. Reflect and share (15 minutes).

Exploring the Imaginative Process and Its Barriers

• Goal: The aim of studying a social phenomenon is to experience it as it is, free of our own projections, so that we may understand its essence and experience it as an expression of collective human self-existence. To perceive this fundamental character, we first have to practice introspection to identify barriers to our imagination. In the realm of policymaking, these often include one’s political ideology, party affiliation, religious/spiritual beliefs, academic frameworks, past experience, as well as our personal fears, insecurities, and habits of thought (e.g., our tendencies to jump to conclusions or discount certain viewpoints). All have a tendency to block the imagination from perceiving what is by thrusting our own thought-content upon the observed phenomena. We are not discarding any of these attributes, we’re merely calling them to mind in order to see with and through them (transcending) to consider alternatives (the social phenomena themself). 

• Invitation: “Take one minute to contemplate the barriers or blocks to your own imagination. Then, in groups of three, take several minutes each to share your barriers with each other. Listen to notice differences and similarities.”

Perceiving Policymaking

• Goal: Here I point out that due to the time constraints, we’re going to jump straight to the results of my Goethean investigation into policymaking: the activity of developing rules, instructions, or guidelines through which human behavior is regulated. To clarify what I mean by “rules, instructions, or guidelines,” I printed out the following examples of policy language and asked individuals to stand and read them aloud. My aim is to demonstrate that policy is ultimately “words on a page” and that policymaking is the process by which humans arrive at those words and give them meaning for others.

  • “This law requires individuals to maintain minimal essential health care coverage beginning in 2014. Imposes a penalty for failure to maintain such coverage beginning in 2014, except for certain low-income individuals who cannot afford coverage, members of Indian tribes, and individuals who suffer hardship.” (2010 Affordable Care Act)

  • “All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” (1964 Civil Rights Act)

  • “Requests the President, upon the recommendation of the Attorney General, to offer pardons to those convicted of violating laws or executive orders during the internment period because they refused to accept treatment which discriminated on the basis of their Japanese ancestry.” (1988 Civil Liberties Act)

  • “There is hereby established in the Treasury of the United States a separate  fund to be known as the ‘‘Counterterrorism  Fund’’, amounts in which shall  remain available without fiscal year limitation.” (2001 Patriot Act)

  • “Prohibits any agency, department, or official of the United States or any State (the government) from substantially burdening a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability…” (1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act)

  • “Amends the Internal Revenue Code to reduce income taxes for individuals and estates and trusts for taxable years beginning after December 31, 1978. Increases the zero bracket amount to $3,400 for certain surviving spouses and married individuals filing joint returns, to $2,300 for unmarried individuals, and to $1,700 for a married individual filing a separate return.” (1978 Revenue Act)

  • “Directs the President to issue an annual proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe two minutes of silence on Veterans Day, beginning at 3:11 p.m. Atlantic standard time, in honor of the service and sacrifice of veterans throughout the history of the nation.” (2016 Veterans Day Moment of Silence Act)

Making Policymaking a Community-Wide Cultural Practice

• Goal: Here I point to three directions that I believe, if pursued, would constitute policymaking as a community-wide cultural practice. Again, I stress that this is the work of only a single individual, and that any useful social science must be done with others, collaboratively. Here are three directions:

  • Community-Wide: The development of citizens’ assemblies and other forms of deliberative democracy point towards a possible future where policy making is significantly more inclusive and community-based. The idea of regenerative, supply-chain-wide consumer-producer-trader associations also highlight this direction.

  • Cultural: Participatory institutions, such as “democracy vouchers” in Seattle or participatory budgeting and policymaking in Paris create the reality for all individuals to bring their ideas into the social realm, especially those from historically marginalized communities.

  • Practice: A recurring institutional activity, such as Portland’s charter reform commission that automatically meets every 10 years, or Iowa’s and Hawaii’s ballot question that asks voters every 10 years if they want to call a constitutional convention.

Envisioning Next Steps Through Our Biographies

• Goal: Now that we’ve gone through the imaginative process, beginning with an awareness of our biographies, we return to our biographies as vessels through which to bring about policymaking as a community-wide cultural practice.

• Invitation: “What policies and practices can you and Viroqua bring to the world?”