Task Democracy
Context
Task Democracy offers a concrete governance design that resonates with commons-based peer coordination: voluntary contribution, task-based rather than ideological affiliation, mutual dependency among stakeholder groups, equal voice across sectors, open-access tooling, and scalability from local districts to transnational assemblies. Its historical example of Dutch water management shows how a task-division “storm system” can persist across centuries and adapt to slow existential crises.
The author, Peter Bootsma, explains:
"This paper explores the system inertia in liberal democracies, occurring while managing sustainability transitions. A root cause of this inertia is found in the competitive method of liberal democracy, which forces political parties in a race to the bottom, compromising their vision. Their collective avoidance creates a blind spot in public debate, which in turn amplifies avoidance and prevents shared transition leadership. As this problem is systemic, rather than resulting from ideologies, a systemic solution is needed.
For inspiration, the medieval governance model of the Dutch water authorities is reviewed. This model combines a top-level collegial board with democratic representation of task groups. It proved effective in a slow-but-existential crisis.
Can a modernised version of this model help to accelerate sustainable development? A design for a new democratic institution is presented: a negotiation platform, to be implemented as a transition chamber or product council. It facilitates voluntary collaboration and task division between five societal sectors, including public administration as a linking pin to current governance. The purpose of this approach is to create conditions for shared transition leadership.
The task democracy model is new and largely untested. However, simulations and small-scale implementations indicate the model is welcomed by all five task groups and creates collaborative group dynamics.
In answering some political philosophy questions it is argued that task democracy may be considered instrumental to liberalism, that task democracy is non-ideal rather than ideal theory, and that a transition chamber or product council itself has no authority and thus avoids legitimacy issues.
In sum, task democracy is in a different category than many current attempts to fix liberal democracy, like referenda and citizen councils. This category of task division based models urgently needs more research, collaboration and experiment."
The Article
* Conference lecture: Task democracy: politics for the common good. By Peter A.J. Bootsma. Economy for the Common Good congress, June 3-4-5 2024, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands
"This paper argues that urgent sustainability transitions, towards an economy for the common good, require an upgrade of the liberal democratic political system. It presents an upgrade design and first findings from experiments.
Transitions are needed to prevent dangerous climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity degradation, extreme inequality and large-scale injustice. Liberal democracies, however, have not responded timely and effectively. Briefly analysing the competitive nature of liberal democracy leads to the intermediate conclusion that ideological competition is a ‘fair-weather system’, fundamentally unable to turn the tide.
To explore options for democracies to innovate out of gridlocks, the history of political decision making during slow existential crises may provide clues. An example is found in the governance system of the Dutch water authorities, dating back to the 13th century. This system originally built on task division rather than competition, and is a proven effective and robust ‘storm system’.
To explore its possible value in the present, a democratic institute is designed that may be added to a liberal democratic parliament as a ‘transition chamber’. Its purpose would be to coordinate voluntary transition efforts from all of society and to create shared transition leadership for sustainability transitions.
Observations from field experiments are reported and some questions from political philosophy are discussed. More research is needed, which may be considered urgent."
The Concept
(See: [1])
This is synthesis from DeepSeek based on the text:
Task Democracy is a governance and coordination model proposed for sustainability transitions towards an economy for the common good. It argues that liberal democratic political systems need an upgrade to respond effectively to slow existential crises such as climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and extreme inequality. The model suggests adding a democratic institute—such as a transition chamber or product council—to existing liberal democratic parliaments. Its purpose is to coordinate voluntary transition efforts across society and to create shared transition leadership.
The model is based on sectoral task division rather than ideological competition. It defines five societal task groups:
- Science — networks of academic disciplines and knowledge fields. Tasks include measuring capitals and trends, explaining history, predicting futures, identifying development pathways, and conducting fundamental and applied research.
- Citizens — grouped on non-ideological dimensions such as area or age. Tasks include adjusting lifestyles, supporting each other, raising children with sustainability values, and voting.
- Government — public administrators of government institutes. Tasks include encouraging sustainability, taxing or forbidding unsustainability, ensuring level playing fields, and acting as a launching customer.
- Businesses — associations of self-employed, SMEs, multinationals, industry branches, and business parks. Tasks include investing and innovating for sustainability impact, and initiating supply chain action.
- Non-profits — networks of health care, education, housing, sports, culture, NGOs, and life-view organisations. Tasks include inspiring people, qualifying students, building and connecting communities, and inclusion.
These tasks are treated as distinct, indispensable, and untransferable. The resulting mutual dependency elevates the need to collaborate above the interest to compete. The government task group acts as a linking pin with the existing liberal democratic parliament. The design also accepts overlapping membership: scientists, public administrators, entrepreneurs, and non-profit executives are all citizens as well.
Characteristics
The process model is cyclic and consists of three main steps:
Agenda — democratic prioritisation of sustainability issues to set a joint transition agenda. This may involve asking each task group what they want on the agenda, plenary deliberation, and sorting issues by voting.
Campaign — co-creating sustainability campaigns to address top agenda issues. Campaigns consist of voluntary, mutually adjusted, and synchronised contributions from the five task groups. After co-creating a draft campaign plan, task group representatives may ask their constituency for amendments and approval on behalf of all of society, until a final plan can be kicked off.
Evaluation — scientific measuring of ecological, social, and economic capitals, as well as campaign impacts. This may be carried out by the science task group.
In each step, negotiation and decision-making are needed. The platform may produce joint requests or peer pressure toward task groups and their institutes, but it is not an authority in itself and cannot overrule the internal decision-making of its participants. Because the platform represents all of society in a given territory, consensus decision-making is considered impractical. Following parliamentary practice, the platform decides by majority vote. In the voting procedure, task groups have equal voting weight—an arrangement justified by their mutual dependence and de facto veto power.
A development path is considered essential for experimentation and implementation. It begins with a first mover and ends in a consolidated new institute. The steps include: initiative, survey, opinion leaders, task groups, simulation, and institute. Open-access implementation tools have been developed by the Noorden Duurzaam association, including an online voting system, a campaign canvas, a product council startup method, and various templates such as a product council manifesto and district-level documents.
The design is intended to be scale-independent and suitable for state, province, and municipality levels. Within municipalities, it may be applied in village councils and city district councils. International assemblies such as the EU Parliament and the UN General Assembly may explore similar implementations. For circular economy, the concept may be implemented as multi-level product councils. The intended outcome is a flow of society-wide sustainability transition campaigns and networks of transition centres.
Governance
Cited from Peter Bootsma et al. :
"Mutual dependency, collaboration and task division were more important.
Eventually, this resulted in democratic water authorities with boards consisting of actor sections having fixed seats, representing interest groups, or better: task groups. Elections were held within each sector. This coordination system is still in operation and has survived power shifts, turmoil and wars. Surprisingly, this type of democracy has no name. The water authorities in The Netherlands are referred to as ‘functional democracies’ but only to indicate they serve a specific public function, i.e., water management. The Noorden Duurzaam association reverse engineered and reconstructed this system to find out whether it is up to the existential threats of the 21st century, and named it ‘task democracy’.
The redesigned theory of task democracy consists of a sector model, a process model and a maturity model (Bootsma, 2022). The actor model holds five societal sectors collectively responsible for sustainable development: science, citizens, government, businesses and societal provisions. They each have indispensable, unique and non-transferable transition tasks. They coordinate their efforts in a task democratic board, council or chamber of parliament.
...
Mutual dependency, in-transferability of tasks and thus lack of internal competition create equality between the actor groups. Only joint effort will yield results. To strengthen and secure this basis for solidarity and collaboration, the five actor groups must have equal rights in a task democratic board or assembly. Therefore, even when the groups would have unequal numbers of representatives, the groups have equal voting power. Any other ratio would create continuous debate and would be detrimental to solidarity, ownership and willingness to participate and contribute.
A task democratic parliament or board has, according to a cyclic process model, three main tasks. The first is prioritising sustainability issues by voting, to set an agenda. Second is developing and realising society-wide campaigns, in which each sector mobilises its members and in which sectors compensate each other rather than compromise the shared objective. Third is collecting data to be able to adjust and provide input for agenda setting and campaign design.
Task democracy may be applied small scale in for instance foundations, cooperatives and district councils. On a larger scale, it may be used as a design pattern for an additional permanent chamber of the municipal or province council or national parliament. This would create a new duality: ideological democratic chambers focusing on here and now matters; task democratic chambers preparing campaigns for elsewhere and later."
Example
The Medieval Storm Management System in the Netherlands
The governance model of Dutch water authorities, dating back to the 13th century, illustrates a historical task-division system that functioned as a “storm system” during a slow existential crisis. In the Netherlands today, 21 regional water authorities prevent flooding, keep inland water levels on target, and operate sewage treatment plants. Their general boards consist of three groups: inhabitants, farmers, and nature reserve managers. Each group has a fixed number of seats. Inhabitant representatives are chosen through elections, while the other representatives are appointed by the elected boards of their respective organisations.
This hybrid model of group elections for quality seats has its roots in the 13th century, along with the population growth, economic growth, and urbanisation of that time. Intensified land use resulted in a slow crisis of large-scale subsidence, worsened by devastating North Sea storm floods. Left unattended, this crisis would eventually become existential, as accounts of land loss indicate. A societal transition was needed: from artificial hills and unrestricted peat extraction to regulation and water management by embankments, polders, locks, and pumping stations. The investments and operational costs of these projects had to be carried by landowners, villages, and emerging cities. They could either pay taxes or provide labour for construction and maintenance.
Coordinating all this and settling the inevitable conflicts required an authority. At first, these authorities were bottom-up initiatives representing all landowners and organising skill-based task division between societal groups. This bottom-up task division has survived wars and revolutions and, so far, even political debates.
Even today, societal task division is a widely used complement of liberal democracy. In the Netherlands, issues requiring societal task division—such as labour market regulation, energy transition, and pension reforms—are negotiated in corporatist advisory councils and in “societal agreements” involving government and societal partners like industry, workers, and NGOs. A major difference between these agreements and liberal democratic parliaments is the relation between represented groups. While ideological groups in parliaments may want to do without some of their competitors, societal partners need each other badly, especially in crises. They have no interest in a competition model that could result in dominance of one group over another, or removal of any group.
In conclusion, the original governance model of Dutch water management authorities is based on sectoral task division rather than ideological competition. The model is hybrid, combining a top-level collegial board with democratic representation of task groups. It has been successful in containing a slow-but-existential crisis and can still be recognised in water authorities, advisory councils, and societal agreements.
Discussion
Towards a new framework: “Task democracy” for regional circular economy
Peter Bootsma et al. :
In this section, we customise the theory of task democracy for use in circular economy transitions, with fast proliferation in mind. That may well turn out to be overly ambitious, but since urgencies make rapid change important, the fast track is worth exploring.
The circular economy framework we want to construct from the task democracy theory needs to be, following the criteria set above, integrative, scalable, diplomatic and intuitive. We discuss these requirements separately.
Integration of bottom-up and top-down efforts in the task democracy theory can be established, among other factors, during the collective design of transition campaigns. To illustrate this, we present a brainstorm canvas, see Figure 1. The brainstorm of a task democratic campaign design team, consisting of participants from five sectors, starts with an objective (top left corner), shared values (centre) and a territorial domain (top right corner). Then, in three steps the campaign is designed. At first, actors are written down outside the coloured circle. Second, their possible bottom-up campaign contributions are written down inside the circle. Third, arrows are drawn to indicate supportive relations between contributions. Working this way, the team sees synergy emerging, in a process that creates ownership. Following the brainstorm, the campaign design is cleaned up and presented by sector representatives to their constituency, to get feedback and support. Once the design has stabilised the campaign can be kicked off. At Noorden Duurzaam, this process was developed for circularity projects in the first place. We include it in the framework as it is.
Scalability in circular product chain coordination needs special attention, as in a globalised economy, larger geographical scales often include more sections of product chains. For instance: on a local scale, often retail and consumers are found; on a regional scale, logistics and recycling may be added; on a larger scale wholesale and manufacturing can come into play; globally often mineral resources join in. A framework for the coordination of circularity can therefore not require all chain sections to be present or active at all levels. In customising the task democracy model, this means that filling in the five-sector model is not circumstantial, not conceptual.
In a municipality, for instance, a product chain may involve:
(1) local experts,
(2) a local consumer group,
(3) the municipality,
(4) a product family committee of the local business network,
(5) the collective of local education.
We used the term diplomacy to indicate reconciliation of the ideological and sectoral dimensions
in organising transitions. While this is a central matter in the all-encompassing concept of
sustainable development, it is slightly less complex in a circular economy, which has sectoral
division lines by nature, just like task democracy. Customising task democracy for a circular
economy is therefore pretty straightforward. On the other hand, sectoral agreements may, as we
saw, have trouble getting accepted in politics. Here, the added value of task democracy is that it
transforms product chains from business centred phenomena to society-wide phenomena, through
an actor model that guarantees equal influence to science, citizens, administration, businesses and
societal provisions. Solid democracy brings organised product chains on par with parliaments and
governments of their scale, where tax money is converted into transition budgets and where
legislation comes from.
From the ingredients we have seen so far, a new and hopefully intuitive framework for a circular economy can be constructed. The framework is presented below in the shape of a manifesto, a set of statements that may be squeezed into a one-page table for overview and easy access. The set is structured as a narrative and starts with challenges, objectives and values, runs through actors and organisation, and arrives via process and methods at practical aspects of institutionalising."
More information
- In Dutch: Taakdemocratie. Vereniging Noorden Duurzaam. https://www.noordenduurzaam.nl/taakdemocratie
* Article / Conferene presentation: Proliferating circularity efforts. Coordinating Multi-Value Creation in Multi-Actor Contexts. By Niels Faber, Peter A.J. Bootsma and Bartjan Pennink. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Business, 2022. [2]