New Politics Project

Description

"The crisis of representative democracy and the nation state has become dramatically apparent in the past ten years, even if the political crisis has deeper roots. This has prompted the uneven emergence of a wide variety of movements and new political initiatives, inventing more truly radical forms of democracy at local, national and international levels. This has included attempts at participatory forms of municipal-level democracy; the creation of political parties open to the ideas and pressures of social movements, and the unprecedented development of global networks, converging through the World Social Forum.

The New Politics Programme seeks to provide research support for these developments, working as participants in them to generalise their wider lessons. Working together with partners in critical networks and movements in particular in Latin America, Europe, East Asia, and Southern Africa, TNI’s New Politics Programme aims to:

• Work with actors both within state institutions and in social movements to strengthen popular sovereignty, especially at a local and regional level, generalising the innovations where appropriate to a national level. This includes the development of a network of municipalities and civil society organisations working for popular sovereignty, as well as the critical analysis of the limits of ‘participatory’ institutions that serve merely to legitimate the existing order and diffuse movements for genuine change.

• Provide research support for public sector workers and managers developing positive alternatives to reform and improve public services and the social efficiency of public sector institutions. The forms of such reforms vary but share the common aim of releasing and developing the capacity of public sector staff through strong workers' organisations and democratic management.

• Work with activists in social movements and those engaged in building parties of a new kind to explore the problems and potential of rethinking political organisation, the conditions for success and the reasons for failure of experiments so far.

• Create a space for the development and debate of ‘networked politics’ which draws on innovations and metaphors from the open software community and open web communities, as well as insights from the experiences of social movements and political parties.

• Work with engaged intellectuals and activists to understand the implications of the current economic crisis for developing new political institutions."

(http://www.tni.org/page/about-new-politics-project)

History

"The TNI New Politics Programme was launched in 2002 with an international seminar held under the auspices of the 2nd World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In preparation for this seminar, TNI fellow Hilary Wainwright published a special briefing paper, Notes Towards a New Politics: New Strategies for People Power, which proposed some key ideas for debate based on the practical experiments in popular democracy of the previous three decades. The original document argued that the more successful of these experiments have produced not blueprints for ‘new politics’, but a lived experience of a new kind of bargaining power to achieve peoples' daily needs.

The main focus for the programme since 2003 has been participatory democracy, defined as a distinct and organised public sphere in which citizens can effectively articulate and negotiate their demands among each other and with state institutions, and as a complement to a revived and enriched representative democracy. A major effort was made to document and critically analyse ‘real world’ experiments with participatory democracy internationally, including a series of briefing papers and books published in English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. In this context, the programme has also become an active member of global networks such as RedFAL (launched by progressive local governments), the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (OIDP) and the Reclaim Popular Sovereignty Network (jointly co-ordinated by TNI and Brazilian partner Cidade).

In 2004, in response to the growing interest of academics and policy-makers, TNI and the Havens Centre at the University of Madison-Wisconsin set out to deepen and expand understandings of new political developments in Latin America. Both organisations co-hosted a high calibre conference on Latin American politics, to discuss the experiences of progressive parties, movements and governments of the region, the proceedings of which led to the publication of two edited volumes in Spanish (2005 and 2008) and English (2008). These books gave rise to a lively debate in academia, the media and political circles throughout Latin America, the United States and Europe. This also inspired the establishment of a permanent network of researchers on Latin American politics: the Madison Dialogue.

In 2005, the programme’s focus on participatory democracy also began to shift from policy research to active support for policy implementation. At the request of the provincial government of Paysandú, in Uruguay, TNI organised in 2005 a regional conference around the theme of ‘Building Citizenship: Participatory Budgeting Experiences in the Southern Cone’, with the participation of researchers and government officials from across the region. In the immediate aftermath of the conference the provincial government launched its own pilot programme of participatory budgeting, with technical support from TNI’s New Politics programme.

In 2006, the programme launched a new project, Rural New Politics, which until December 2008 promoted a combined research, exchange, education and advocacy agenda. Rural New Politics engaged with the local and national networks of rural social organisations that are directly involved in struggles for rights-based democratic development, as well as the transnational advocacy groups and networks that assist them, such as Via Campesina.

Another major component of the programme, the Networked Politics project, was launched in 2007 as a collaborative initiative aimed at ‘rethinking political organisation in an era of movements and networks.’ The project is co-organised by TNI and the Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques (IGOP, a research centre of the Autonomous University of Barcelona), Transform! Italia and Euromovements. During the past two years, Networked Politics, has organised a series of international seminars and produced a series of publications on new forms of political organisation, the implications of feminism for rethinking political organisation, new forms of labour organisation in response to the impact of globalisation, and the open software movement and the nature of global governance of the internet, including its relevance for networks such as the World Social Forum.

Since 2008, the programme has also been very active in the promotion of progressive public sector reform. Hilary Wainwright has been working with British public sector workers’ union UNISON and the International Centre for Participation Studies (ICPS) at Bradford University to systematise the experience of the successful campaign for an ‘in-house’ bid for control of Newcastle Council’s Information and Communications Technology infrastructure and services. At the same time, Daniel Chavez is currently leading an international team of researchers providing advice to the recently nationalised telecommunications company of Venezuela, CANTV, supporting its transformation into a new kind of efficient and socially-driven public enterprise. Both processes rely on the assumption that public services can be transformed by strengthening democratic involvement of workers as well as users.

Moreover, since 2008 Daniel Chavez is also a member of the Municipal Services Project (MSP), a global initiative that links academic research units, progressive think tanks and social movements, promoting alternatives to privatisation and the corporate take-over of public services." (http://www.tni.org/page/about-new-politics-project)