Citation
Sheldrick, M, Graeff, E, Papa, M, & So, W. 2024. From Ideas to Impact: A Conversation with Michael Sheldrick, Co-founder, Global Citizen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Oct 16.
Tag: civic engagement
From Ideas to Impact book review
From Ideas to Impact: A Playbook for Influencing and Implementing Change in a Divided World by Michael Sheldrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
With 15 years of work through Global Citizen, working on change campaigns related to global poverty, Michael Sheldrick in From Ideas to Impact attempts to distill what he’s seen work in the field. What he’s seen work best to tackle extreme poverty is systemic policy change. And systemic policy change demands tenacious and resourceful changemakers, folks willing to navigate the complex and barrier-rife mazes of power that separate a well-intended idea from the impact of securing meaningful commitments to money, better institutions, or innovative governance approaches. These folks are policy entrepreneurs.
Policy entrepreneurs can excel in three different leadership approaches needed to make change: Visionary, Diplomat, and Implementer. Sheldrick defines eight steps for successful policy entrepreneurship that fit within these approaches:
Visionaries set the foundation for change—
1) Know your policy goal
2) Know which stakeholders matter and how to influence them
3) Mastering the art of timing
4) Master the art of storytelling
Diplomats catalyzes impact through pragmatism—
5) Embrace pragmatic idealism
6) Leveraging your partners’ strengths
Implementers enforces accountability and follow-through—
7) Know your endgame
8) Communicate stories of success
These steps/capacities/principles and what they represent have been outlined in other academic and popular literature on policy entrepreneurship and changemaking. What makes the framework compelling in Sheldrick’s book is the way he connects them to cases of changemaking he has a personal connection to. In separate chapters, he describes efforts to achieve equal educational access in South Africa by tackling period poverty, effort to transition Western Australia and the industrial town of Collie away from coal mining and coal-based energy production, and efforts making the costs of climate change a little more just for countries like Barbados. The stories are impressive. There is also the impressive parade of celebrities Global Citizen ushers to literal stages to draw attention to each cause.
The star power is what loses me when it gets to the book’s conclusion. Sheldrick argues that anyone can be a policy entrepreneur. The Global Citizen app certainly invites everyone to contribute to the various campaigns through self-education and micro-actions (and rewards them with raffles for exclusive merch). But I think a bit of power is actually necessary to pursue the kinds of policy entrepreneurship the book describes. The steps for successful policy entrepreneurship may be the same at different levels of impact—your organization, local community, region, nation, the globe… However, it helps a lot if you are already in a position where you are driving toward some kind of goal—leading an organization, in elected office, etc. This is not a playbook for starting from scratch. It’s a playbook for those who want to refine their skills and increase the likelihood of success tackling complex, systemic challenges.
The book doesn’t replace the experience and mentorship budding policy entrepreneurs need in order to get started on their journeys of changemaking. But it may help them understand what is required if they want to make serious inroads on challenges like global poverty and climate change. The book’s subtitle and the background context for its contemporary discussion of policymaking are the stark divisions tearing apart our societies—the lack of openmindedness and compromise in current political discourse—and the ensuing disillusionment with policy and policymakers that nurtures populism and autocracy. I loved how the book celebrated diplomatic maneuvering that helped achieve progress. We need more of those stories and more celebration of them rather than the uncompromising activists who insist we must tear down all of our imperfect institutions. If we tear down them all down—institutions like the United Nations—we won’t have places to talk, venues to explore our disagreements or build new consensuses.
Beyonce probably won’t make a surprise appearance at your next rally. But if you build power through community organizing (read Hahrie Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists) and take some of the advice in From Ideas to Impact, you might be able to chip away at the many injustices in our world through better policies and moving money toward those that need it most.
Monitorial Citizenship
Recommended Citation
Graeff, E. 2019. ‘Monitorial Citizenship.’ In Hobbs, R & Mihailidis, P, eds., International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy Education. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Link
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118978238.ieml0169
Abstract
Monitorial citizenship is a form of civic engagement in which people collect information about their surroundings or track issues of local or personal interest in order to improve their communities and pursue justice. Common activities of the monitorial citizen include collecting information, sharing stories and insights, coordinating with networks of other civic actors, and pursuing accountability for institutions and elite individuals and their perceived responsibilities. The term originates in Michael Schudson’s 1998 book The Good Citizen. Schudson proposes monitorial citizenship as a successor to the “informed citizenship” paradigm to better account for our current age of information overload, arguing “the obligation of citizens to know enough to participate intelligently in governmental affairs be understood as a monitorial obligation” (p. 310). This original concept positioned monitorial citizens as “defensive rather than proactive” (p. 311). The idea of citizens paying attention to public affairs and serving a monitorial role pre‐dates Schudson and, of course, the Internet. What is different now is that technologies like the Internet and smartphones enable the average person to be more effective at monitoring topics of interest and powerful actors in society through the construction of distributed networks and ongoing campaigns that can leverage sophisticated narrative strategies with data to hold them to account. Some contemporary scholars believe monitorial citizenship may be one answer to revitalizing civics in an age of mistrust (Zuckerman, 2014), an effort media literacy can support.
The Need for Empowerment-based Design in Civic Technology
Link
Extended Abstract
In a June 2017 post, Mark Zuckerberg introduced a change in Facebook’s mission from “make the world more open and connected” to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Facebook may not be able to give people power, but the goal of empowering people and building community is language familiar to civic engagement and participatory democracy, similar to the core idea of relational organizing—building interpersonal relationships that can be mobilized for collective action. In a February 2017 post, Zuckerberg first articulated this new thinking: “In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Companies like Facebook often claim to serve the public good through their products; however, this particular language and the depth of explanation in Zuckerberg’s posts imply a recognition of ethical responsibility and at least an intention to design for true citizen empowerment.
I believe it is fair to insist that if the creators of a technology platform seek to make claims about empowering users, they must set explicit design goals for citizen empowerment and evaluate their platform against those goals. Facebook continues to face steep challenges to providing equal access to its platform. To aim for communities that can be effective and serving the public good is an even loftier goal. How Facebook will know whether it is actually making progress on its mission remains to be seen. However, technology companies have a reputation for religiously articulating goals and measuring them empirically. In fact, one of the architects of the data science team at Facebook claims that they invented the term “data scientist” to describe this important role (Hammerbacher 2009).
Democracy that values citizen-centered governance requires citizen empowerment (sometimes called “civic agency”), and empowered citizens need certain skills, knowledge, attitudes, and habits that lead to effective civic engagement (Boyte 2009; Levinson 2012; Gibson and Levine 2003). Empowering experiences and learning opportunities can promote a virtuous cycle of reinforcing citizen empowerment and strengthening democracy. Spaces like town hall meetings, protest marches, the voting booth, and the civic education classroom traditionally represent where these experiences and opportunities take place. The emergence of networked digital media have created new, pervasive civic spaces—the networked public sphere. Whereas public spaces offline have seen a decline (Zick 2009), their online replacements, largely private spaces like Facebook, have grown to astounding size and influence with limited accountability to governments and the public.
Social media platforms like Facebook, government communication tools like We the People, and smaller civic technology platforms like SeeClickFix are increasingly the spaces through which citizens seek empowerment in the form of direct response from their government on key issues. As important actors in U.S. democracy (as well as other polities), the creators of these spaces have a responsibility to design for citizen empowerment and ensure they are advancing empowering processes and outcomes for citizens by evaluating whether their platforms are actually serving this mission. These creators of digital technology used for civic engagement should be understood as stewards of democracy with an ethical obligation to serve the public good.
The Rise of Monitorial Citizenship
Presentation Recording
Slides
http://web.media.mit.edu/~erhardt/slides/Graeff-CLS2018-Ignite-MonitorialCitizenship.pdf
Abstract
Monitorial forms of civic engagement are on the rise, sparked by high levels of mistrust in governments and politicians around the world and access to technology that makes recording, organizing, and sharing information easier. We need to ask what this means for how we conceive of citizenship, the design of our civic tools, and the future of civic learning. This presentation introduces a new definition for monitorial citizenship, surveys exemplar technologies and practices, and calls us to action to design new technology and pedagogy.
“Monitorial citizenship is a form of civic engagement in which people collect information about their surroundings or track issues of local or personal interest in order to improve their communities and pursue justice. Common activities of the monitorial citizen include collecting information, sharing stories and insights, coordinating with networks of other civic actors, and pursuing accountability for institutions and elite individuals and their perceived responsibilities.” (Graeff 2018). Technologies that support monitorial citizenship have been used for a range of civic and political work from activism to participatory governance to disaster response. Educators and youth organizers play an important role in encouraging young people to develop monitorial skills, use these tools, and launch new projects.