Zakia Elvang was the keynote speaker at the Local Government Summit in Aalborg and Danske Kommuner follows up on the summit with an article about Zakia Elvang, who spent Friday in Aalborg. The focus is on democracy, citizen gatherings and how municipalities must reactivate the social contract with citizens if we want more people to participate in the welfare solutions of the future. Danske Kommuner writes, among other things
In Denmark, we can boast that our democracy is over 150 years old. But new worrying trends are creating a need for new democratic solutions, and citizens need to be more active. The answer to everything is all of us, says Zakia Elvang, Democracy Advisor at We Do Democracy.
We must be careful not to take democracy for granted and believe that the solutions developed over 150 years ago when Denmark introduced democracy are all still equally good.
This is according to Zakia Elvang, Partner and Democracy Advisor at We Do Democracy. She delivered this message at the Local Government Summit in Aalborg on Friday.
Because there are several signs that we need to activate and rethink democracy. Fewer and fewer citizens are members of political parties and organizations, creating echo chambers and increased polarization, distrust between citizens and politicians, a sense of pessimism among citizens and a feeling that it doesn’t matter anyway. And then there’s a tendency to create short-term and poor political solutions to difficult problems.
Democracy has become a flabby muscle that needs to be reactivated. We need to move from system solving to involving someone in problem solving very early on. And we need to move from thinking of citizens as a risk to be managed to a resource to be activated,” said Zakia Elvang.
According to the democracy advisor, the world is currently experiencing a wave of citizen things and citizen assemblies, and Zakia Elvang argued why this model is a good idea.
We believe that there are some really difficult issues that we won’t be able to solve on our own. Collective intelligence is needed. The answer to everything is all of us, said Zakia Elvang.
The difference between a traditional citizens’ meeting and a citizens’ assembly is, among other things, that a citizens’ assembly consists of a representative sample of citizens in a municipality who are elected by lot. They have a clear framework, a mandate and act as an advisory body to the local council.
When you invite people to public meetings, there is a tendency for those who attend to be either very enthusiastic or very angry and frustrated about something. But how do we activate the others? The ordinary families with children who aren’t quite so up on their toes,” said Zakia Elvang and continued:
At citizens’ assemblies, we find that some very bold and visionary policy recommendations come out of it. This is because the citizens who are involved are not eligible to vote. They can say whatever they want. At the same time, we see some very balanced recommendations that are driven by the needs of the citizens, creating some very long-term solutions.
A new quality to democracy
Both Greve and Odense have had great success in involving citizens. In Odense through the large involvement project “Velfærdens Fundament”, which was started when Odense Municipality had to renovate its schools and had set aside half a billion kroner for the purpose.
Our ambition has been to try to bring citizens into the conversation about the development of local welfare, and all areas in Odense now have a local welfare agreement. We wanted to let the local community in, and instead of asking the builders for advice when we were renovating our schools, we asked the citizens,” Odense’s mayor Peter Rahbæk Juel (S) explained about the project.
In Greve, the municipality has received 26 recommendations from a climate citizen collection, and Greve has also just launched a welfare citizen collection.
We have taken them to heart when we have created visions and strategies for the city council. We work purposefully with it, and I also find that a large part of the citizens have embraced it. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that before. Politics has become very “them and us”, but here the citizens are very aware that they must also contribute, because we cannot solve the climate challenges alone, said Mayor Pernille Beckmann (V), who is, however, excited to see what happens when the municipality tackles a more difficult agenda such as welfare.
We are under massive pressure on welfare and we have to recognize that no one is really helping us align expectations with citizens. We have to do it ourselves, so the idea is to educate citizens on how to prioritize and what we need to cut back on. They will help us figure out what welfare should be in 2024.
According to Peter Rahbæk Juel, it is healthy to keep the democratic conversation going and create a new framework for democracy.
– The value of turning towards each other should not be underestimated. We get a completely different conversation and quality into democracy, he said.
And if a municipality is to succeed, it is important to have clear ambitions and a desire to involve citizens, Zakia Elvang points out.
It’s important to realize that democracy is not a game. If there is no real intention and genuine interest in getting something out of citizens, then don’t do it. Then it creates the opposite effect and ends up creating less trust in the system. But if you can involve citizens when you have a serious problem that is very dilemmatic, you can gain a lot from opening up the conversation. Don’t wait for reports from experts or go to a think tank, they said.