I have had in the past, had the occasion to present Xavier Comtesse’s model of the direct economy, but also critiquing it, as it only presents a one-sided view of use of social innovation by corporations, thereby leaving out autonomous peer production (such as Linux and Wikipedia), and how the institutional world can adapt to the latter. An approach which leaves that out, can easily become a tool for manipulation.

So I’m very happy to find a model that gives a more full spectrum model of such participation and interaction, and was developed by Sherry Arnstein, already in the sixties, time of rebirth and flowering of participative civil society movements. The graph is here.

Here’s is the commentary to understand that model:

“The bottom rungs of the ladder are (1) Manipulation and (2) Therapy. These two rungs describe levels of “non-participation” that have been contrived by some to substitute for genuine participation. Their real objective is not to enable people to participate in planning or conducting programs, but to enable powerholders to ‘educate’ or ‘cure’ the participants. Rungs 3 and 4 progress to levels of ‘tokenism’ that allow the have-nots to hear and to have a voice: (3) Informing and (4) Consultation. When they are proffered by powerholders as the total extent of participation, citizens may indeed hear and be heard. But under these conditions they lack the power to insure that their views will be heeded by the powerful. When participation is restricted to these levels, there is no follow-through, no ‘muscle,’ hence no assurance of changing the status quo. Rung (5) Placation is simply a higher level tokenism because the ground rules allow have-nots to advise, but retain for the powerholders the continued right to decide.

Further up the ladder are levels of citizen power with increasing degrees of decision-making clout. Citizens can enter into a (6) Partnership that enables them to negotiate and engage in trade-offs with traditional power holders. At the topmost rungs, (7) Delegated Power and (8) Citizen Control, have-not citizens obtain the majority of decision-making seats, or full managerial power.”

A very similar model, though much simplified, can be applied to collective decision-making on science and technology, see our entry on Scientific Democracy for more details.

You can easily spot the common ground between the 2 interpretations, above and below:

The 3 phases of scientific democracy are

– Phase 1, the ‘deficit’ model where by the public is considered to be without expert knowledge and in need of education by scientific experts

It’s assumption that the less educated people are more distrustful is in fact contradicted by sociological studies showing the exact opposite. Distrust increases with education.

– Phase 2, the ‘public debate’ model, in which the primacy of scientific expertise is tempered by the recognition of differentiated local knowledge within the public. This gives rise to public dialogue models such as citizen conferences, focus groups, etc..

– Phase 3, the co-production of knowledge model, in which the whole process of knowledge building implies an integration of experts and citizens (In phase 2, two forms of knowledge are considered separate)

Finally, for comparative purposes as to how such a hierarchy of engagement could apply to politics more generally, here is the model for a ladder of deliberation, developed by Tom Atlee. Interestingly, and that’s why his approach is important, he reverses the main logic, recognizing a logic of unfoldment starting from civil society itself, rather than starting from the institutional world.

1. Citizen dialogue and deliberation (of any and all kinds) (e.g., conversation cafes)

2. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome (i.e., whole-group statements, actions or outcomes) (e.g., deliberative polling)

3. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making (usually in an advisory role) (e.g., National Issues Forums)

4. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community (e.g., citizen deliberative councils)

5. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community and the whole process is officially institutionalized (e.g., consensus conferences)

6. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the diversity of the community and the whole process is officially institutionalized and empowered such that it drives policy-making (e.g., B.C.’s Citizens Assembly)

7. A democratic political and governance system that is grounded in 1-6 above at least as much — or more than — in the competitive lobbying, voting, litigating modes of politics.