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."