[governance] Parminder's exchange with Bertrand

[Milton L Mueller]

>Parminder:
>I agree with Milton's doubts whether the MS framework contributes anything new
>(in a positive sense) for organising our political systems. What does the term
>stakeholder groups bring in beyond what we already know as 'interest groups',
>a basic and a widely used concept  of  representative democracy. Unless those
>arguing for MS-ism as the basic new governance form clearly articulate a
>response to this question, it is difficult to go any further in this discussion.



To repeat myself, I do see a value in the MS concept as a transitional principle that opens up and slightly democratizes inter-governmental organizations. Other than that, you are exactly correct, in a fundamental political science sense, that we are dealing with interest groups. And that raises some very important issues, which i superficially discuss below.

>Bertrand (in response to Milton):
>Do you actually mean a sort of "personal sovereignty" principle, that would enable individuals to gather in >numerous human groupings, including nations, but also business and non-profit entities ?



My answer: Yes, exactly, and the quotation from Kofi Annan cited was a good expression of my view, which sparked such a negative reaction, about governance institutions being servants of the individual rather than the other way around.

>Parminder:
>This brings me to the gorilla-in-the-room question of MS-ism - the role
> and legitimacy of big business in political structures.



As I will try to explain below, I don't think this question is restricted to MS-ism advocates. It is a question that permeates discussions about the validity and legitimacy of all democratic, open forms of government.

>It is important to discuss how, at a theoretical level, organization
>into a business unit is very different from political interest based
>collectives - governments, or non-gov bodies. Again, this is a
>principal issue that needs to be clarified by Ms-ists. The conflation
>of 'interests' and structures of business organization - especially of
>the trans-global share capital based kind - with human organisations
>and collectives with shared 'lifeworld' (a world that subjects may
>experience together) based interests  is very problematic, and
>requires clarification.



As a realist and student of historical processes, I cannot accept the implied rigid distinction between economic and political humanity, or between a nice, human collective lifeworld and an impersonal, evil, inherently exploitative economic world. It's all part of humanity. Most obviously, the ability to share, organize and pool wealth to produce the things humans want and need is an inescapable part of society. The corporation is a form of collective organization; share capital is a way of broadening and - yes - democratizing the ownership and benefits of economic production. Labor unions are also a form of collective economic organization. Given too much power, both a corp or a union can become abusive and gain harmful forms of economic restraint on the rest of us. The problem is that once you set up a form of government that is representative of the interests, desires and visions of the people you also allow them to organize in ways that further or defend their economic (as well as social, political, cultural, etc.) interests. I don't see any way to detach the two.



Go back to your specific example of Microsoft and its participation in Indian ICT education programs. I don't know the specifics so forgive any factual errors. OK, so sure, it would be relatively easy (well, not easy in practice, but easy in theory) to identify and avoid some simple forms of corruption: Microsoft pays local board of ed administrator a bribe, suddenly the schools all go Windows and lock themselves into a specific vendor's product. Obviously we don't want to allow that. But how would you feasibly and productively lock anything or anyone associated with _all_ corporations in the ICT industry from a public dialogue of that sort? sooner or later the school district is going to purchase some products. public monies are going to be allocated and spent. Expertise which is concentrated in business (for a good reason - the expertise is valuable) will ahve to be tapped. The people - both in the government and outside the government, both in corporations and as final consumers - all have some kind of an "economic" interest in that money, not just corporations. The government bureaucrat may have an "interest" in expanding his share of the public budget; the competitor of Microsoft may have an interest and benefit economically from excluding MS; an individual or end user might have an economic interest in receiving some of that money whether they need it more than someone else or not.



If you could "assume away" economic interest and restrict political dialogue to some Olympian grotto where philosopher-kings considered all options in a disinterested way, well, we wouldn't be talking about this species.



Democracy would be all too easy if this problem didn't exist. I guess you have to trust the ability of people to make sense of things in an open environment.



There's an interesting book about this problem I read back when I started considering these issues. It's called The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925.  Elisabeth Clemens.





Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:
Milton,

Do you actually mean a sort of "personal sovereignty" principle, that would enable individuals to gather in numerous human groupings, including nations, but also business and non-profit entities ? so that the unifying governance unit becomes stakeholders of various sizes but with equal status instead of three (or four) separate and siloed stakeholder groups ?

B.

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu<mailto:mueller at syr.edu>> wrote:

________________________________________
From: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond [ocl at gih.com<mailto:ocl at gih.com>]

> - governments: law and order
> - business: economy and money
>- civil society: conscience
>
>Any social ecosystem requires all three to work. Take one out and either
>the system will fail, tear itself apart, or reach an untenable extreme.
>That's why I believe in multi-stakeholderism.

Nice formulation, Olivier. But suppose we called it "popular sovereignty" and "individual rights" instead of "multistakeholderism" -  would that not allow individuals, in various aggregations, to produce the appropriate mix of law, order, economy and conscience? Is not the division into three estates (with millions of individuals overlapping and participating in two or more at the same time) artificial?

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