I thought I’d wait until you’re all back from the Christmas break before I posted about my trip to Copenhagen and it’s various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over those  two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.

I work for the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development where I’m just starting work on a new project on ’the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘.

In the coming months, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next? And we’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.

This is a shorter version of a longer blog post that I’ve posted on my own blog. I wanted to highlight one or two elements because I think they are relevant to a local government audience – but please don’t let me stop you going and reading the whole thing if you want to.

Here, I highlight some of the ‘local democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen.

City mayors talk positive

City mayors from around the world met at an event organised by the City of Copenhagen during the official talks; the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors. According to an informal email from one participant: “This looked and felt like a team! They listened to each other’s plans, they openly encouraged plagiarism and replication, they fostered support for each other in a way that was uncontrived, open and positive. They discussed technical fixes, finance and resources, education and engaging citizens: they discussed mitigation and adaptation, economic opportunity and necessity: and they recognised they need to be leaders of substantial cultural change.”.

Divide between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ solutions

One point above others stands out: the huge political and psychological distance between the key issues and solutions debated during the official negotiations at the Bella Centre (where the formal talks took place), and the belief in bottom-up locally owned and self-managed solutions that characterised many of the ‘unofficial’ side meetings for civil society at the Klimaforum space and in a variety of other meetings spaces around the city.

Indeed, with the slow pace of progress in intergovernmental talks, it has become apparent that much more emphasis will now likely be placed on local level innovation to deliver climate solutions.

Already in the UK, commentators are paying renewed attention to the groundswell of community-based activism that has sprung up over the last couple of years away from the formalities of ballot-box decision-making or the stifling bureaucratic decision-making of some town halls.

This renewed call to ‘community-based local solutions’ is both valuable in practice and laudable as prescription; the more so when it builds community ties and hence the ability to remain resilient in the face of climate change.

And yet, a note of caution must here be sounded on two grounds. First, because it was noticeable in Copenhagen that the vision of ‘bottom-up’ decision-making that was articulated in many side events was not accompanied by a seamless vision of the role of national government; or of the much-vaunted national level ‘leadership’ that became a war-cry of campaigners during Copenhagen (e.g. in statements of the ‘politicians go to fancy dinners; leaders act’ sort).

Related to this is the real-world fact that any failure of global democracy resulting from negotiating inequality between nations is necessarily also a failure of national government.

In the run-up to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments encouraged so-called ‘Type 2′ agreements to be tabled and to become a formal part of the Summit’s outcomes. These were essentially voluntary agreements or partnerships between different stakeholders to tackle different dimensions of sustainable development. But there was a backlash from some potential ‘Type 2 agreement’ signatories, who accused governments of passing the buck to non-governmental actors instead of getting on with reaching a deal themselves.

There must be a risk that the same will happen now on climate change: that governments will seek to bring citizen and business-led voluntary action into a bigger intergovernmental tent at the expense of much-needed national level leadership.

That is not in itself a bad thing, but must not become a substitute for effective action at the national and international government levels.

Second is the reality that politics is nowhere more personalised; nowhere more exposing, than at the local level. Any move formally to institutionalise a prioritisation of local level decision-making needs also be accompanied by efforts to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion in local level decision-making; to ensure that minority views are given due weight.

Localism must not become a banner under which marginalisation or ‘business as usual’ decision-making by vocal elites become entrenched in public policy.

The apparent distance between local and global level solutions – a canyon or a rift at best – was made all the deeper by the Copenhagen organisers’ unforgivable failure, over at the official Conference of the Parties at the Bella Centre on the outskirts of the city, adequately to make provision for non-governmental observers of the Conference (including this one, who lacked the stamina of some to stand in a freezing queue for 6-9 hours on the last day that non-governmental organisations without ‘secondary’ badges were allowed to exchange their pre-registration for entry badges to the venue).

Civil society and climate change

Beyond Copenhagen, there is renewed pressure on civil society around the world to make its voice heard above the non-voting views of economic interests and politicians limited by short-term political priorities or (in some countries) crude opinion poll data. This is precisely the message that is emerging from the larger non-governmental organisations: “we don’t have a real deal, and we’re not done yet”, is the essential message.

Or to put it another way, ‘we’re all eco-warriors now’. Action based on this insight will undoubtedly shape both the course of democracy, and the course of climate change, in the coming months and years. But there is also a significant tension between the Green political tendency towards political decentralisation, community activism and bottom-up change and my observations here. For sometimes only strong local, regional and national representative governments have the capacity to take on un-elected interests such as commercial pressure groups; and sometimes representative democracy is the best back-stop for fair decision-making on climate change at local level.

Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.

Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He looks like he’d fit blend in to the audience of a Slayer gig or a Biker Bar more than a sausage-on-a-stick reception at the civic centre. Even David Cameron has allowed himself to be photographed occassionally without a tie, but somehow I think that even this would be step too far for an ex-member of The Bullingdon Club….

Fetterman is 6’8″. He prefers overalls and work-boots to suits and ties, along with plenty of other signals chosen to communicate a no-nonsense non-superficial approach to problems.

He has tattoos on his arms to signal his commitment to his community (his postcode is on one arm, the dates of a couple of notable deaths that happened ‘on his watch’ appear on the other). It’s a signal of determination in an age in which politicians are seen to belong to a caste that is removed from the day-to-day life of the voters. It also signals an unwillingness to negotiate – perhaps, the acceptance of a mandate from his voters.

It should be noted at this point that very few textbooks on effective representation are very keen on politicians accepting mandates.

In an age where presentation itself has been seen to be self-defeating, one has to question if we’re simply in the kind of spiral that writers such as Douglas Rushkoff have been chronicling for some time now: A bidding war between marketeers and consumers to mask a sales pitch in peer-to-peer authenticity.

In Rushkoff’s Media Virus and Coercion, we see traditional marketing departments replaced by cool hunters – hip adults who position themselves as close to their market as they can in order to shorten the cycle between the street and the mainstream. We may absolutely distrust the big marketing campaigns now in a way that we didn’t – but there’s no evidence that the changes that have effected the marketing industry will ever hit a stable point of happy compromise in which marketeers and their customers trust each other.

This may not ultimately bode well for democracy either.

Fetterman’s politics appear to be reasonably progressive homespun populism. The presentation, though, offers yet another persona that politicians can subscribe to. And for those of us that are generally sceptical of personality politics, Fetterman offers some possible reassurance here.

In recent months, I’ve drawn up a range of personality types for politicians here:

• The judge
• The juror
• The ‘man in the white suit’
• The cleric
• The buccaneer

Fetterman offers us another couple of templates: A cynic would say that he is a ‘cool hunter’. A more charitable option would be that he is a civic social entrepreneur (his approach to climate change has more than a touch of the ‘swords into ploughshares’ about it.

Carbon Caps = Hard Hats

My big question, though, concerns the decline of party politics. We seem to be saying that we don’t want them any more. Does a one-off vote for a single individual mean that our politics is more or less participative?

I’d say it’s the latter.

I missed this at the time, but here’s an example of what happens when you spend a fortune on a commission and ask them to ignore the trees while describing the wood.

In Public Service magazine, Professor Michael Clarke offers an account of his work as chairman of a committee that looked at the city’s governance.

For some reason, the governance concerned – with low electoral turnout and a rise in political extremism – is surely effected by the role of local councillors, and the fact that a significant amount of responsibility has been removed from them?

But is this issue highlighted in the article? Stoke councillor Peter Kent Baguley says not – and does so rather well.

Time for one last look at the Conservative party’s local government green paper Shift Control. A quick canter through chapters four and five, and then some conclusions.

Chapter Four is about spending. It says a Conservative Government will:

• give local people greater control over how central government funds are spent in their area;
• phase out ring fencing, so that decisions about how councils spend their budgets are taken by councils and their
  citizens alone;

• make it easier for local government to raise money for local projects on the bond market.

The first point, about greater local control, refers to the Conservative-sponsored Sustainable Communities Act. This Act, according to the Green Paper allows “local governments to identify money spent in their area by central government agencies and then (after consultation with local people) to recommend ways in which it could be spent better by redirecting it to local priorities.”

That description of the Act is correct, in the same way that Lord of the Rings can be summarised as “Go and pop that ring down over there, Frodo”. In practice, between local people and the fulfilment of their desires are (i) the council, who have to choose which ideas to put forward; (ii) the LGA, who have to pick councils’ best ideas to recommend to Government; and (iii) the Government, starring HM Treasury as Sauron.

Now, if the Conservatives are serious about giving the SCA some zip, those obstacles may just fall away, but (as with other protestations of localism from parties in opposition) I am sceptical. I just can’t see the Treasury (or any Minister controlling it) being happy to let local authorities change central budgets, except at the extreme margins. Want to stop benefits payments or cancel a hospital build so you can try a whizzy new idea? Well, maybe we’ll let you take £20k out of the leg ulcer budget.

Chapter Five contains proposals for abolishing regional government, which are so eye-wateringly technical that I’m not even going to repeat the details. In summary, every regional-level strategy and body will be done away with (except in London), and councils will be free to do what they will, as long as they are within national planning guidance. The Regional Development Agencies will either continue or be replaced by alliances of local authorities co-operating on economic issues, depending on local wishes.

I think there’s something to be said for this approach. The regional bodies do their best, but they are big bureaucracies, not democratic institutions. Fundamentally, if we are serious about local democracy, local government should be taking the decisions that need to be taken about housing numbers, development etc. on a sensible grown-up basis. At the moment, anti-development councils jump up and down protesting about centrally imposed plans, pleasing their lobbyists, while avoiding any difficult decisions on their responsibility for the national economy. If they’re trusted with the powers, I suspect that they would use them sensibly.

To wrap up, then, what do I think of the green paper? It’s certainly not a great transformative vision for local government. “Occasionally interesting tinkering” is probably the best that could be said for it.

Good things? Some reasonable thoughts on regions, particularly the idea of local councils creating workable economic sub-regions. That’s important in the areas round London, which are very poorly served by the current regional structure. Warm words on devolving powers and releasing control, for all my scepticism about whether they will ever manage to do so.

Disappointments? The biggest is that the paper makes the same fudge as the current Government about localism. Does localism mean handing things to councils, or does it mean handing things to local people, over the heads of their elected councillors? Who can tell? Localism is a good thing, the Conservatives are in favour of it, the end. It doesn’t say much for the analysis behind the green paper that the difference between the different sorts of localism is never brought out, or even acknowledged.

Why give people referendums on council tax rates, but councils greater power over the location of housing developments? Why should the people of the twelve biggest urban authorities be forced to vote on whether they want a mayor, when the councillors of the thirteenth-biggest can introduce one or abolish one merely by putting it in a manifesto that no-one reads?

I suspect the answer is “because it seemed like a great idea at the time”, but that’s not really good enough for the likely future Government. Labour has tied itself up in knots on localism, and I expected the Conservatives to be clarifying the situation, not jumping in and knotting away themselves.

The paper is also, given its promises of referendums, astonishingly thin on building better day-to-day interactions between residents and councils. I appreciate that the Conservatives can’t be seen to be forcing councils to do things, but why not have a webcasting fund? Twitter training? Something, at least, to show that the Conservatives understand that political engagement can be built up from the local level.

Time for a look at Chapter three of the Conservative local government green paper, Shift Control.

This chapter is the section of the green paper that focuses on democracy, so there’s a lot to talk about. The chapter says that a Conservative Government would:

• provide citizens in all our large cities with the opportunity to choose whether to have an elected mayor;

• give people the power to instigate referendums on local issues;
• make the police accountable to the people they serve through directly elected commissioners, crime maps and
  quarterly beat meetings;

• put the power to judge the behaviour of councillors back in the hands of their citizens by abolishing the Standards
  Board, and repeal the rules that prevent councillors representing their constituents’ views on local issues;

• permit local authorities to devolve unlimited funding to ward councillors; and
• let local people choose the organisational structures of their local councils.

Directly elected police commissioners deserves a fuller treatment elsewhere, so I won’t discuss it here. I’d only say that the obvious problem is one of competing mandates. Standards Board issues are democratic, in the sense that elected politicians should not be subject to disbarment by unelected civil servants – leaving such issues to the judicial system is by far the better approach.

Devolution of some money to ward level – as a power not a duty – isn’t a bad idea in itself, but the green paper suggests that money will be parcelled out to councillors directly. Participatory budgeting may be relatively untried, but an opportunity to extend it has been missed here. Participatory budgeting also provides a check on process: if individual councillors have sole responsibility for spending, the possibility of ward-level slush funds can’t be ruled out.

Allowing referendums on council governance structures might be a good idea if people knew or cared what their council governance structure was. More likely to be used is the alternative proposal to allow changes based on manifesto commitments. One problem in the proposals is that any referendum would take place at the same time as local government elections. This hasn’t been thought through. If Blanktown Council holds a referendum on whether to create an elected mayor, it has to be before the election cycle or there could be a four-year wait until the proposal is implemented. Far better to have the referendum held on election day in the year before the change comes in.

It’s also not clear what would happen to those places where directly elected mayors already exist. Would a council elected on a manifesto of getting rid of them be able to do so? This is important because elected mayors are sometimes independents, and sometimes from a different party than that controlling the council. It would be unfortunate for democracy, to say the least, if an respected independent mayor could be chucked out by collusion between a local government old guard on the council.

Quite contrary to the anything-goes spirit of the above, another proposal is to force big cities to have referendums on elected mayors whether they want to or not. This is probably the weakest idea in the chapter. Caught – as the government are – between a desire for elected mayors and a reluctance to impose them, the Conservatives have come down in favour of a double fudge. Rather than letting councils be, or imposing mayors, they are going to force councils to hold a referendum (in which most if not all councillors will campaign for a no vote). Then, beyond that, they are proposing to do this on the basis of current authority boundaries. In the case of Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, at least, the boundaries are historic irrelevancies. Far better to follow the London model and have directly elected subregional leaders (call them mayors if you like) that cover strategic issues across a range of unitary authorities.

The idea of local referendums triggered by 5% of electors sounds great until the first local referendums for expelling immigrants, leaving the EU, or reintroducing hanging start coming in. There need to be several safeguards on this proposal – first, referendums should be restricted to local government issues (not just issues that affect the locality); second, there should be a participation threshold, of say 20%, for a result to be considered valid; third, the option to hold the referendum outside the normal electoral cycle should be removed: this means that referendum votes would get higher and more representative turnout.

Local decision-making should be less constrained by central government, and also more accountable to local people. We will encourage democratic innovations in local government, including pilots of the idea of elected mayors with executive powers in cities.

David Cameron’s green paper Shift Control, published yesterday? No, the 1997 Labour manifesto, and if you want a good hearty laugh, I recommend going to read the rest of the chapter on localism.

I’ll be taking a look at Shift Control from a democratic perspective over the course of a few posts, since it is the fullest Conservative policy statement we are likely to get before the election manifesto, and they are probably going to be in power in eighteen months’ time.

Before getting into the detail, it’s worth starting with a realistic assessment of what is going to happen to localism in 2010. Parties that have power at local level and not at national level are fond of pledging their support for localism. In power, their enthusiasm disappears. Like proportional representation, giving away 20% of power sounds great when you have 0%, and dreadful when you have 100%.

Perhaps the Conservatives mean to be different – let’s hope they do. But even if their intentions are pure, once in office it would take a will of iron to resist media pressure to do something when the next local government crisis happens. No recent British politician has had that iron will.

The problem lies not with the duplicity of politicians, but with a calculation of self-interest. Letting local politicians take decisions brings no credit when things go well, but media opprobrium when things go badly. Baby P was a national scandal, but in theory the voters of Haringey are the only ones who can punish the politicians responsible. In practice, of course, scandals like that influence general election voting across the country.

Telling a politician that they should localise is like giving an employee a bonus of £1 if he succeeds, and executing him if he doesn’t. Risk-aversion is guaranteed.

In the next post, I’ll look at the green paper pledges on business growth.

Elected mayors. They’re a controversial topic in local government, with many councils and councillors staunchly opposed to them. Until recently, the creation of an elected mayor needed a public referendum – most of which have been lost following opposition by councillors. Now, a simple council decree can introduce one, but if councillors are opposed, that’s not likely to happen.

What’s the next step? Probably, imposition of elected mayors by Whitehall, ignoring councils’ shrieks of displeasure. This might take place under the current Labour government or – more likely – under a new Conservative one.

David Cameron, following Michael Heseltine, has already said that he would favour elected mayors in England’s forty largest cities. This might mean the forty largest urban authorities, which would suggest mayors in every authority larger than Solihull. More radically, it might mean the forty largest identifiable cities, lumping together some authorities in former metropolitan counties. If that is the case, then every authority larger than York (150,000 or so) might find itself in line.

Research suggests that directly elected mayors bring some benefits for public recognition and hence accountability. They also (hello, H’Angus the Monkey) widen the pool of potential city leaders beyond long-serving councillors.

On the other hand, the current arrangements for elected mayors are not that well designed. Mayors sit uncomfortably on top of existing councils, often made up of disgruntled councillors whose career path to the top of their authorities has disappeared.

In such environments, where the councillor role is reduced to budgets, strategies and scrutinies, bitterness is inevitable and internal conflicts become serious public battles. Stoke and North Tyneside can testify to that.

Now, Doncaster has joined the unhappy mayoralties, with votes of no confidence in the mayor passed by the Council.

Unfortunately, this is not a House of Commons situation, and the mayor can carry on regardless (as he has done in the past). Whether or not he feels the moral pressure to resign, legally he is safe from any councillor criticism.

This makes for a very uncomfortable democratic position, with the battle of mandates, normally Whitehall v. Town Hall, now localised to Mayor’s Parlour v. Council Chamber. This isn’t edifying to the outside world, particularly when votes of confidence are accepted as resigning matters in the general run of national politics.

There isn’t an easy solution. If councils are allowed to topple mayors with votes of confidence, there’s little difference between a mayor and an indirectly elected leader. On the other hand, if mayors are allowed to stick two fingers up at the council, that promotes frivolous votes of no confidence and damages the image of local democracy. Perhaps the solution lies in votes of confidence with a supermajority – 66% or similar. Either way, the Doncaster example should show Conservatives planning their local government green paper that more thought is necessary before the mayoral model can be imposed everywhere.

I find it almost impossible to take a blog seriously when its central claim is that any British government in the recent past of forseeable future is really lurching towards totalitarianism. It is with this proviso that I offer a semi-approving link to this post.

The elected police chief – like the elected Mayor – cannot seriously be seen as a democratic step forward, can it? If one were to apply the logic that places ‘distributed moral wisdom‘ at the heart of a functioning democracy, then it is very hard to make the case for elections that foreground single individuals.

Surely, it is very hard to make the case that one vote every four years can endorse one individual’s approach to almost everything in a particular sphere? Surely this is little better than holding a plebiscite on a policy issue that most people don’t understand?

The recent London mayoral elections provides a very good case-in-point. Whatever you think of Ken Livingstone’s personal politics, he was an adornment to the Labour Party and he was a net contributor to the quality of parliamentary life while he was there. The same can be said for Boris Johnson in the context of his own party.

I’d go even further than that. Though they were /are all quite controversial figures, George Galloway, Ian Paisley, or Enoch Powell – in the context of 600+ other MPs – improve(d) the quality of the House of Commons. Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s also one of the magic ingredients of parliamentary democracy.

My argument is that this kind of distributed wisdom is the least unlikely way of getting competent and humane policymaking.

But distributed wisdom – whether it’s the type that was promoted by advocates of some versions of public choice theory, by Hayek, or the more swishy up-to-date ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ – only works if groupthink isn’t in evidence. And party groupthink is one thing you can’t – by definition – accuse these mavericks of.

So, should we be comfortable in voting for a political party that we generally favoured if it had one or two candidates that we really deplored? I would suggest that it is almost impossible to find a functioning party that doesn’t have a few problematic characters – after all, organisations tend to thrive as long as they have a diverse base.  In fact, the presence of most mavericks – whether one personally finds them acceptable or not should makes a party more attractive to one, rather than less – if our starting point is that a good democracy is the product of a distributed moral wisdom.

Now, what if the unpalatable candidate is standing for one’s favourite party in the local constituency? How do we address that one? That’s a tougher one – but I’d still vote for them secure in the knowledge that they will be emerged into a more acceptable whole. This would be very different in a contest that would hand them fairly untrammelled power as an individual.

Now, if the party I voted for started doing what The Conservative Party did in Ealing Southall (David Cameron’s Conservative Party went on the ballot paper) , I’d struggle to vote for that party – not because of their overall policies, but because it would interfere with the notion of distributed moral wisdom.

This seems to me to be the paradox of political parties. On the one hand, if they are highly centralised, they are a damaging competitor to any decent model of democracy. But if they aren’t, they could make the whole shooting match work the way that it should.

For this reason, this proposal from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) makes sense. In summary, they want to replace the Greater London Assembly with a council made up of the leaders of London’s boroughs.

Again, on the principle of distributed moral wisdom, I’d go one step further and get rid of the elected mayor as well – and just have a regional assembly made up of nominated councillors, who in turn nominate a mayor.

Perhaps this would not only be a very good idea in principle for London. It would also provide a template for regional government throughout the rest of the UK. You could sack all of those MLAs in Northern Ireland, the MSPs and the WAMs. And you could set up regional assemblies where they don’t really sit properly everywhere else.

It would mean that councillors would have more power, and people would have a reason to care about which councillors they elect. And it would allow you to establish real regional government throughout the UK – without having to have a referendum!