{"id":7870,"date":"2019-03-22T02:15:09","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T02:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/?page_id=7870"},"modified":"2019-04-03T11:50:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T11:50:30","slug":"decentralising-geographies-of-political-action","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/peerproduction.net\/editsuite\/issues\/issue-13-open\/peer-reviewed-papers\/decentralising-geographies-of-political-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Decentralising geographies of political action: Civic Tech and place-based municipalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Syed Omer Husain*,\u00a0Alex Franklin**, Dirk Roep***<\/strong><\/p>\n Open as PDF<\/a><\/p>\n * Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands; Over the past few decades, governments have initiated hundreds of digital democracy experiments under the umbrella of what is called civic tech: digital tools for civic engagement and participation. These experiments are in part a response to claims of democratic deficit (Bekkers, Dijkstra & Fenger, 2007), collapsing trust in national governments (Friedman, 2016) and civic disengagement (Wike et al.<\/em>, 2016). Technology that enables citizen engagement and participation has captured a lot of attention and is referred to with many different terms. E-democracy (Chadwick, 2003), e-government (Layne & Lee, 2001), open government (Attard et al.<\/em>, 2015), crowdsourcing democracy (Bani, 2012), Govtech (Adler, Fischer & McFarlane, 2017)<\/em>, smart government and smart specialization are some of the commonly cited phrases, to name but a few (Capello & Kroll, 2016). This set of digital tools for democracy are primarily initiated by governments in an attempt to increase efficiency, transparency, accountability, and participation in political processes. Such ways of modernizing government and developing new applications has been the subject of intense study in academic research surrounding participatory and collaborative politics (Mellouli, Luna-Reyes & Zhang, 2014). To date, however, analysis suggests that the \u2018hopes and expectations\u2019 of government and other government-sponsored initiators of digital democracy, have yet to be realized (Simon et al.<\/em>, 2017:p. 4). One of the major challenges is the fact that these digital tools regularly fail to achieve a critical mass of participants.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n In contrast to the relatively high level of attention afforded to civic tech developed by big companies and governments, to date open-source civic tech co-created or developed as part of a grassroots innovation or social movement has thus far garnered much less attention. Despite the existence of copious amount of such bottom-up activity within the open-source community, evidence of any depth of academic understanding of how and why this tech is made and used, and its potential to bring about change, is lacking; at least, this is the conclusion reached following a review of academic literature published in the medium of English. By focusing specifically on this locus of activity, we seek to address this knowledge gap. In doing so, we distinguish civic tech that has been co-created and co-designed from the bottom-up by civil society, local councils and global volunteers by referring to it as \u2018place-based civic tech\u2019. The core question this article aims to address is: does creating a digital space for autonomous self-organization (i.e. place-based civic tech) enable the emergence of a parallel, self-determining and more place-based geography of politics and political action?<\/p>\n Though most studies exploring\u00a0 place-based civic tech remain outside the scope of academia, peer-reviewed research on other forms of decentralized approaches to policymaking is well established both from a grassroots and institutional perspective (Legard, 2015; Newig & Koontz, 2014). Moreover, any current deficit in the coverage of place-based civic tech from within academia, stands in marked contrast to the attention it receives from other sources. Popular media and non-academic articles, for example, widely and regularly report on the developments in this arena (Sahuguet, 2015b; Troncoso, 2018a). By situating this article at the intersection of these studies, we review the significance and implications of this grassroots approach for place-based politics and political action. Serving as a primary evidence base for informing our discussion is the case of a social movement in Spain which is integrally engaged with civic tech. The movement is collectively self-defined by its followers as \u2018radical municipalism\u2019. By combining the use of place-based civic tech (online<\/em>) and place-based organizational models for engagement (offline<\/em>) the radical municipalism movement is seemingly successfully progressing its agenda; that is, to create \u2018radically democratic\u2019 (Weareplanc, 2017) grassroots political processes which are fundamentally distinct from those of government.\u00a0 As such, we question whether radical municipalists are establishing a new place-based geography of politics and political action, but notably one which is simultaneously multi-scalar in impact and reach.<\/p>\n Critical analysis of the radical municipalist movement supports a review of the extent and ways in which creating a digital space that feeds into and feeds off \u2018offline\u2019 activities, is capable of creating a unique mode of governance in practice as well as theory. In applying the above stated core research question to this case study, we are also able to address a series of supplementary questions. Firstly, in what way(s) do the distinctive characteristics of the radical municipalist approach \u2013 namely, co-design, co-ownership, trans-local collaboration, open-source and combination of online and offline activities – decentralize politics differently or more effectively than a government-led approach? Secondly, to what extent does this approach, in both creating and using digital tools, facilitate a parallel regime of place-based politics and political transformation? And thirdly, when and to what extent might decentralization lead to a more \u2018equitable\u2019 or \u2018inclusive\u2019 system of politics?<\/p>\n The remainder of the article is structured as follows: having first provided a note on method, we then proceed to reviewing the emergence and spread of place-based civic tech. We are guided in doing so by drawing on scholarship which engages with municipalism. In particular, this includes the work of Murray Bookchin on libertarian municipalism and communalism. Having compared and contrasted this body of work with existing typologies of civic tech, we then focus in on the case of radical municipalism. We consider whether and how this place-based civic tech movement is proving effective in decentralizing, yet simultaneously also expanding the global geography of grassroots politics and political action. We conclude by directly addressing the questions outlined above and end by highlighting areas for future research.<\/p>\n Though there have been a surge of studies around the use of digital technology, an analysis of the geography of politics confirms that place-based civic tech is largely missing from academic literature. While some articles refer to municipalism and grassroots civic tech, the majority of reports are found in non-academic sources such as blogs, informal case studies, conference proceedings, hackathons, magazine articles, talks, MeetUps and documentaries. Most civic and emerging tech are such fast-paced fields that experiments precede in-depth study and writing. Therefore, it becomes essential to consult and draw from various sources which are not peer-reviewed or scholarly. Most of the non-scholarly textual sources cited in this article are from blogs and articles endorsed or written by reputable organizations and individuals in the field, classifiable in a methodological sense as expert informants.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n For this research, we used ethnographic and participatory observation techniques to explore online environments. Researching online environments has become popular amongst social science researches owing to their \u2018increasing importance in everyday life\u2019 (Kurtz et al.<\/em>, 2017:p.1), and accordingly, their importance as sources of research material (Dumova & Fiordo, 2012; Boellstorff, 2012). Furthermore, from the earliest days of the internet, this has been used for community building, collective action and social movement organization (Soon & Kluver, 2014; Harlow, 2012). In accordance, however, with the need to remain mindful of the risks associated with the incorporation of non-scholarly texts, these sources have each been individually cross-checked with others for descriptive facts and for author bias (Harricharan & Bhopal, 2014; Boellstorff, 2012).<\/p>\n Alongside observing the use of online environments by others, the insights and reflections presented in this paper are also a product of an amalgam of various other types of secondary, as well as primary data. Most notably this has included active participation in online discussion forums and slack team channels; as well as, participant observation at stakeholder events such as conferences, hackathons, MeetUps and workshops.[3]<\/a> The latter generated multiple opportunities for discussion and informal interviews with expert practitioners, government officials, open-source techies, grassroots innovators and researchers. However, owing to their briefness and often inappropriate context for audio recording, conversations are recounted non-verbatim from field notes. Field notes were taken both during and immediately following the events, and later subjected to thematic analysis and interpretation. Methods were adapted for the different contexts primarily consulting the book Participant Observation: A guide for fieldworkers<\/em> (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011:pp. 157\u2013210). <\/em>The insight and evidence obtained from these activities is used in concert with the other sources of data, to critically interpret the scholarly conceptualization of \u2018municipalism\u2019 and civic tech, as well as to develop a more nuanced understanding of the radical municipalist movement.<\/p>\n Civic tech has been used as an umbrella term to describe the range of digital tools that seek to transform the processes of democracy and initiate responsive and inclusive governance mechanisms (Gilman, 2017:p. 744). As Gilman suggests, <\/em>\u2018some definitions of civic technology include for-profit entities while excluding publicly funded projects or the role of government as an incubator and technology innovator\u2019 \u00a0(Gilman, 2017:p. 745). Though Gilman takes a deliberately \u2018narrow\u2019 definition of civic tech as \u2018technology that is explicitly leveraged to increase and deepen democratic participation\u2019, all of the examples she cites can be seen as a response by the government <\/em>to the public appealing against the problems of \u2018bad government\u2019 (Microsoft Corporate Blogs, n.d.). \u00a0By contrast, advocates and practitioners of place-based civic tech claim that it is precisely amongst the responses by civil society <\/em>to address problems of bad government that far more significant developments in civic tech are to be found.<\/p>\n One of the distinguishing features of place-based civic tech \u2013 tech co-created and co-owned by its users \u2013 is that it is commonly engaged with by a larger and more diverse population.[4]<\/a> Implicit within the movement of place-based civic tech is the notion that how, and by whom the tech is created, determines how it will be used. If platforms are created and owned by the government, the features of a platform will reflect those questions deemed most important for consultation on by the government. Contrastingly, if tech is created and \u2018owned\u2019 by citizens as part of the global open-source commons, it will reflect issues that are important to the residents of a place and global community. Furthermore, the trust afforded to a platform by the public and the way in which it is perceived, in terms of \u2018transparency, bias, privacy and accountability,\u2019[5]<\/a> may be very different in both scenarios. Public perception and usage is also seemingly influenced by the relationship between offline and online practices. \u00a0To our understanding, online discussions and complex forms of participation are meant to feed into, and feed off of, the offline processes. For instance, a debate at a neighborhood assembly is informed by, and in turn informs, a decision taken on a corresponding digital platform. The extent to which this online-offline dynamic serves as a core stimulus for fueling the take-up and impact of place-based civic tech is something which we will return to later in this article, in connection with the case study of radical municipalism.<\/p>\n Accounting for the significance of both how the tech is made and how participation is enacted within a place necessitates that due attention is also paid to the dynamic of what we call \u2018translocal\u2019 collaboration. In this article, the creation of place-based civic tech is conceptualized as (geographically) unbounded: local activists, organizations, councils and citizens collaborate with the global open-source community and other local communities to create and use civic tech. The movement of place-based civic tech is thus simultaneously global and local, where different place-based movements are united in their diverse ways of practicing participatory and collaborative democracy. Adhering to principles of open-source, they are able to share ways of working and core values, all-the-while adapting the tech and political processes to their place-specific situations. Hence, it is not enough to simply conceptualize civic tech as constituting apolitical tools (Donohue, n.d.; Knight Foundation, 2013), which only embody a political imaginary through their use. Rather, we must acknowledge that the nature of its creation is a political exercise in itself, with this in turn to some extent determining what it will be used for, why, how and by whom.[6]<\/a> Of direct relevance here is the work of Cl\u00e9ment Mabi (Mabi, 2017).<\/p>\n
\n** Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, Coventry, England;
\n*** Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands<\/p>\nIntroduction<\/h2>\n
Methodology \u2013 beyond the peer-reviewed<\/h2>\n
Place-based civic tech & conceptions of municipalism<\/h2>\n