Millennium Development goals came out of the UN’s Millennium Summit in 2000.
And those set a series of high-profile benchmarks for trying to reduce poverty and improve governance
across the world. What’s happening now at the UN is sort of the
next wave of how do we build off of that progress. And also broaden out the scope so the Sustainable
Development Goals that are being negotiated now focus on issues like climate and ecological
sustainability and good governance and inclusion.
One aspect of Goal 16 involves inclusive governance, participatory mechanisms.
Mechanisms by which citizens can meaningfully influence the policymaking process.
What makes this exciting is that it goes beyond
poverty reduction to recognize that you can’t have effective pathways to economic equality
without participatory decision making.
Many times you talk about the need of more
participation, more democracy. But we never ask why. Right, why is it good?
The promise of inclusive governance and participatory decision making isn’t that citizens feel good.
It’s that policy is better.
With participatory democracy the ownership
that people in the community have over the ideas that they have, it creates a whole different
dynamic of stewardship and communities around people getting what they want and then feeling
like they’re going to protect what it is that they’ve achieved.
U.S. democracy, while better than many democracies in many respects, is still far from perfect.
I think while we talk about the United States being a beacon of democracy, the reality is
there are many groups of people that aren’t actually at the table making decisions and
participating in the democratic process: people of color, low-income people, etc.
The most interesting question is what the Sustainable Development Goals look like
in the U.S. context.
If we could engage citizens in their neighborhoods,
in planning decisions, in resource allocation decisions, it could transform public policy in this country.
Participatory budgeting is probably the forum that’s gaining the most traction.
We have been initiating a process here in
New York City where ordinary people, residents in their communities, get to decide how to
spend public money directly.
In Boston, we’ve done the nation’s first-ever
youth-focused participatory budgeting initiative. So we’re seeing park renovations, school
renovations, items that young people designed and said we really need this so that we can
move about our city and be excited. And so it really reflects what our society is going
to look like in Boston, five, ten, fifteen years from now.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the schools were having a bullying problem. And the city
manager had the idea to engage parents in solving the problem.
What he thought would be a one-time conversation with parents actually stretched over two years
and resulted in a very serious set of recommendations that the city ultimately adopted.
Now it’s become a mechanism called “Portsmouth Listens,” and they routinely take up issues
in their community.
The United States can be inspired by alternative methods of engagement.
In Brazil, in India, South Africa, and some
of these other countries, we have far more innovative democracies. They’ve created
a better system, a kind of more supportive infrastructure for engagement for democratic innovation.
For some, governments being inclusive means
posting information on a website. It means creating a 311 hotline, so that someone can
complain about a problem. There’s a range of ways in which we can
think about creating more inclusive governance and more participatory decision making, but
we’re not having that conversation. The Sustainable Development Goals gives us that opportunity.
Government succeeds when people trust their
institutions, but also when they see that the government acts with neutrality. So perceiving
that everybody stands the same or maybe similar chance of making a difference.
We’re finding that people that participate in the process start to become more active
agents of change in their communities around a variety of issues.
I think that the SDGs are an opportunity for us to set goals as a people and to say that
these are what our beliefs and our standards are, and this is the kind of world that we’re
trying to effect. Participation as a goal is an important part
of the common future that we build. And the more we can build that to be a positive force,
the further we can all go together.