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A Review of “Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens inCollaborative Governance”Heather Campbell aa University of SheffieldPublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Heather Campbell (2010) A Review of “Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance”, Journalof the American Planning Association, 76:4, 513-514, DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2010.508379

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Reviews

Citizen Participation and Dispute Resolution

Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens inCollaborative GovernanceCarmen Sirianni. Brookings Institution Press, Washington,DC, 2009. 304 pages. $26.95 (paperback).

It is interesting to note that Investing in Democracy went to pressjust at the point of the election of President Barack Obama.Sirianni focuses on the perceived need to renew and reinvigorate

American democracy through collaborative problem solving betweencitizens and government. Moreover, as Sirianni was the coordinator ofthe collaborative governance cluster of the Obama Campaign’s UrbanPolicy Committee, there is a sense that the issues explored in the bookare of more than academic interest.

For a non-American like me, the United States’ style of democ-racy can appear as vital as ever. The energy and resources that citizensare prepared to invest, night and day if necessary, in holding politi-cians, corporations, and other citizens to account is striking. However,the book distinguishes between currently dominant forms of demo-cratic engagement, which are essentially individualistic, narrowlyfocused, obstructive, and divisive, and practices that Sirianni wishes tosee fostered, which are inclusive and collaborative and concern sharedinterests. In contrast to the emphasis on bottom-up citizen collabora-tion in much of the literature, his starting point is with the role oflocal, state, and federal government in facilitating civic engagement.

“Civic capacities” he argues, “do not simply bubble up fromthe wellsprings of community life, supplied by the bountiful aquifersof grand republican traditions, at least not in the complex andtransformed world in which we currently live” (p. 24). Rather,government is seen as being a crucially important actor, nurturingthe virtues of civic engagement through public investment, policydesign, and administrative practice. The objective of the book is touncover the core principles of collaborative governance and examinetheir merits through three detailed case studies.

Sirianni aims to provide a “normatively grounded and empiri-cally generated typological theory of collaborative governance” (p. 25).He distinguishes eight core principles of collaborative governance,based on a review of the rapidly expanding, although largely Ameri-can, literature on the theory and practice of civic engagement:

1) ordinary citizens should be involved in the coproduction ofpublic goods;

2) communities should be encouraged to mobilize their ownassets as part of public problem solving;

3) public administrators and professionals should share theirexpertise with citizens and so empower communities;

4) policy should promote and enable public deliberation that getsbeyond self-interests;

5) sustainable rather than divisive partnerships should be fostered;

6) government should seek strategic field building that is broadlyencompassing;

7) the culture of government should be transformed to embracecollaborative practices; and

8) accountability should be reciprocal between the actors.

These core principles provide a framework for the author’sexamination of collaborative governance initiatives in Seattle, WA,and Hampton, VA, and at the federal level by the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA). There is no suggestion that these casesshould be treated as exemplars of best practice; rather, they areindicative of what can be achieved. The rich case study material isderived from detailed empirical investigations, including interviews,field and participant observation, and documentary analysis. WhileSirianni’s normative commitment to collaborative governance isclear, the analyses highlight the very many challenges that theimplementation of such practices inevitably encounter. The Seattlecase study examines how neighborhood civic problem solvingbecame incorporated into plan-making in an effort to overcome thechallenges of a highly divisive political environment. In the secondcase, initiative was taken by the City of Hampton to find ways toengage more effectively with young people. The EPA examplefocuses on changes to the culture of a regulatory agency as it embraces more collaborative practices.

The implication of the analysis is not that any of these casestudies provide all of the answers to effective implementation ofcollaborative governance practices. Differences in emphasis are shownto be both appropriate and inevitable according to the nature of thecontext. Sirianni considers that for richer civic engagement to beachieved, a change to the culture of government is necessary. He alsostresses the importance of building relationships of trust. However,Sirianni is also aware that governance is a two-way process. Citizensmay, often rightly, criticize politicians and government officials fortheir ignorance and incompetence, but effective collaboration requirescitizens to be responsive to the overtures of policymakers.

The author does not claim that this book has anything particu-larly new or original to say about government’s role in enabling civicengagement and problem solving. Instead, it brings together currentideas and practices in a coherent and accessible manner, which willbe of value to practitioners and students of public policy. Themessage is that greater collaborative civic engagement is good in andof itself. This assumption pervades all that follows, and there is littlequestioning of the extent to which civic engagement necessarilyproduces more just or equitable outcomes.

Moreover, as I write this review, we are in throes of a Britishelection in which much debate centers on the relationship betweencitizens and, a word not found in this book, the state. The issue oflanguage is at one level trivial, but the more profound point is thatthere are many forms of democracies and many different forms ofrelationships between citizens, society, and government. Investing inDemocracy is definitely concerned with U.S. democracy at a very

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particular point in time. Whether this was a moment portentous ofthe enriching of U.S. democracy hoped for by Sirianni awaits thebrutal evaluation of history.

Heather CampbellCampbell is a professor of town and regional planning at theUniversity of Sheffield and coeditor, with Robert Upton, of thejournal Planning Theory & Practice. Her recent publications focuson planning, justice, and the public interest. She is a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute.

Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the GlobeXavier de Souza Briggs. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008.400 pages. $70, $28 (paperback).

Democracy as Problem Solving is significant for at least three reasons. First, Briggs brings Dewey’s idea ofdemocracy as public problem solving into a 21st-century

urban framework by demonstrating how conditions of complexityhave transformed the very concept of problem solving withoutabandoning the democratic intention at the core of the idea.Second, he constructively builds on both Putnam’s social capital andStone’s civic capacity to offer a revised and broadened concept ofcivic capacity as linked to problem solving. Third, he grounds thisdiscussion in six rich cases with comparisons across types of civiccapacity and national and developmental contexts.

Briggs identifies the Deweyan core as both the study of problemsolving in action and the collective capacity to problem solve. Thislinkage allows him to position this book between two necessary butinsufficient poles of democratic debate. On the one hand, deliberativetheory sets its frame too narrowly around public talk. On the other,social capital theory one-sidedly emphasizes the structure and role oftrust and interpersonal and associational networks. Both play theirparts in Briggs’s account but are secondary to the capacity to acttogether on key problems of environment, crime, education, urbanstructure, and economy.

A central premise is that collective efficacy is not a property ofplaces or network structure, but rather a collective good that can beproduced under historical conditions, even against significant odds.Further, civic capacity is produced by political actors under verydifferent conditions of both overall history and local complexity,which requires great attention to the configurational properties ofcases as both a method and means of building a substantive andgrounded theory of civic capacity. He lays out these problems in twobrief but solid chapters on democracy and managing urban growth.

Briggs then sets out to demonstrate his thesis in a complex seriesof six paired cases, each pair designed to demonstrate a particularproblem domain of civic capacity building: managing urban growth

with sustainability, restructuring the job economy, and investing inyouth and their families. Further, each of these problem domainsshares two traits. They involve cross-sector action and concerted localaction, despite being embedded in larger national and global forcesand policies.

The first case set examines the very unlikely pairing of Salt LakeCity, UT, and Mumbai, India, as they both face the problem ofsustainable growth. Briggs asks why Salt Lake City, known for itsconservative politics and local control, became a model for managingregional growth. He shows how conditions associated with sprawltransformed into problems that key civic actors both wanted to andcould tackle, particularly through the creation of an effective civicintermediary, the Envision Utah coalition. Acknowledging the centralrole of the Mormon Church and small government politics, Briggsshows how the coalition emphasized choice over control, with thecivic and private-sector grasstops driving change, and the governmentas a partner not the leader. The Mumbai case, in contrast, representsthe grassroots-to-grasstops dynamic, in which Society for the Promo-tion of Area Resources Centres (SPARC), a poor people’s nongovern-mental organization, led local civic capacity through both localeconomic self-help and data collection via a pavement census designedto document problems for local bureaucracies. SPARC challengedongoing evictions in the shadow city of Mumbai. The overalloutcome is a blended model of accountability, in which people are co-producers of change.

The second set of cases involves the civics of economic restruc-turing in Pittsburgh, PA, and the ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. Inthe Pittsburgh case, Briggs examines three perspectives on whateconomic restructuring constitutes for public concerns: a problem forgovernment decision makers, public–private partnering, or creating aneconomically innovative milieu. This case not only illustrates how anolder industrial region led by a classic business–government partner-ship is transformed through civic leadership but also the limits of civiccapacity, particularly in forming an economic milieu. São Paulo,paralleling the Mumbai case, shows how radical democratization frombelow does not equal the building of new civic capacity, even thoughgovernment plays a much more central role. In the ABC region, thechoice to strengthen industry rather than simply move to a postindus-trial development strategy is more inclusive of broad sectors of thepopulation.

The final paired set addresses the civic process of investing inchildren and youth in San Francisco, CA, and Capetown, SouthAfrica, focusing on change in the sets of arrangements affecting youngpeople. San Francisco passed America’s first children’s budget for localgovernment, which called for a complex process of mastering directdemocracy in a politically contentious, Left environment. InCapetown, civic organizers mobilized to actualize new rightsembodied in the post-apartheid constitution, as well as to coproducechange with public agencies that were widely unpopular.

Briggs concludes with six lessons for democracy. The first, andkey, is that “history is not a curse: civic capacity is producible, evenagainst the odds, and transformable” (p. 298). It is impossible toconvey the richness of this book’s content, particularly its finelydetailed and developed cases, in a brief review. It is an importantaddition to ongoing debates on social capital, regime theory, civiccapacity, civic innovation, and collaborative governance as a process ofextended social learning and extends and, to some extent, transforms

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