Assembly Project

This is a quick post to point out something interesting I’ve found.

I’ve been in touch with a few organisations that are working to advance assembly democracy — decision-making through assemblies of ordinary people, whether randomly selected or not. There have been a few of these springing up in the UK, from Newcastle to Norwich and from Southport to Salisbury. But if that’s a movement, it’s a movement of scattered atoms. While it may not be viable or even desirable to unite them under a single command, right now they have the opposite problem.

Movement Ecology, a team that studies and assists social movements in the UK, has also noted the problem. Referring to a similar concept of participatory democracy, their post from just over a month ago notes:

While there are a lot of organisations in the movement, each one is largely made up of one or two people, and/or a wider group of volunteers. This means that it’s easy to get to know each other, but beyond occasional conversations, there are very few collaborations on tangible challenges, projects or campaigns. This can also result in a lack of coordination around funding opportunities for similar efforts.

Local organisations struggle to connect with the wider movement because they are either unaware, lack resources, or are stretched by requests from different national organisations.

So their recent project has been “to map the participatory democracy movement”. By “map”, the project isn’t really about geographic mapping, but seeing which organisations are involved and how they are connected. The post notes 12 key organisations. Further research is available on request.

As they put it, the movement for participatory democracy is “under-resourced and stretched”. Could it get round that if the organisations involved work together more? I’d argue that it could. If the organisations involved could talk to each other more, what would be possible?

• They could learn from each other’s experience about what works and what doesn’t.
• They could likely gain more publicity.
• They could do joint projects in the same area.
• They could provide mutual aid to each other’s projects.
• They could inspire each other and create a sense of solidarity and purpose.
• They could merge organisations or projects that are pointlessly doing the same work.

Another issue discussed in the post is the challenge of connecting local issues to national issues — finding ways for an assembly on the former to mean something about the latter. In practice, this is possible because many local issues have national implications. For example, suppose one town complains about housing being built on a nearby floodplain while another complains about housing spoiling the view of a natural beauty spot. On the face of it, these are purely local issues, but they could be taken to highlight the national issue of planning. On other hand, the North-South divide is a major national issue in the UK, but won’t likely be mentioned among local issues in a southern town.

Overall, Movement Ecology highlights an important challenge and I hope that the organisations involved will rise to it. For now, the most important thing they’ve provided is a list of the key organisations involved.